July 7, 2004

Firm whose washing machine cooked worker fined £325,000 This case, which I blogged at the time, has finally been nailed down. To recap, Paul Clegg ventured into a 40ft long industrial washing machine to clear it of sheets tangled in the workings. He was overcome by heat inside the thing, but although people outside knew…

Back in May, I asked readers to contact me if you saw any signs of a flood of Eastern European migrants after their failure to arrive. Despite, I’m sure, your best efforts to locate them I had concluded that somehow they must have been mislaid, all 2 million of ’em, by the tabs, Tories and…

The BBC achieved a small triumph last night when it managed to follow a repeated Yes, Minister episode from 1981 concerning a hospital with no patients with a Newsnight special on the difficulty of measuring public-sector productivity and the temptation for politicians to exploit this by using dodgy figures. This is something the Ranter touches…

It is reported that Microsoft has patented technology for networking mobile electronic devices through the user’s skin. Gear like PDAs, phones etc would communicate by using the skin’s electrical conductivity. Further applications could supposedly include producing power for such devices from your movements, rather like a self-winding watch, and even displaying information on the skin.…