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...From the Middle East, where peace threatened to break out, to Switzerland, where the national obsession with neatness created jobs for mountain cleaners, the world once again fell prey to an array of hoaxers, fibbers and tellers of tall tales - all excused by a strange yearly tradition of mysterious origin. Here are a few of the bogus news items that have appeared on our radar...
...health epidemics in years past (scabies /wait-just-kidding-it's-not-scabies outbreak of October 2007). In December of 1994, Harvard experienced a norovirus outbreak similar to that of Babson's and around 150 people were treated by UHS for vomiting and diarrhea. Rosenthal says that the origin of the virus outbreak of 1994 was most likely a dining hall employee working the salad bar. "One of the reasons we have Purell dispensers in the dining halls is because good hand washing can prevent the spread of this," he said...
...more serious condition. Or consider that nearly every patient who has a big hip or knee operation will run a fever for a while afterward. No one really knows why. But if a computer picks up the temperature elevation, it could prompt doctors to record a "fever of unknown origin" - a diagnosis that often triggers a bigger payment. EMR can inject more higher-paying codes into our patient contact, squeezing that much more money out of it, and quite innocently too. It is, after all, a computer forcing these choices. (See the most common hospital mishaps...
...depends substantially on U.S. handouts. It is also, as Hooper points out, "in the heart of the Arabic-speaking world" - literally and symbolically. It has direct links with the Middle East's most problematic places: the West Bank (more than half of Jordan's population is of Palestinian origin), Israel, Iraq and Syria. It has also struggled with terrorism; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was Jordanian...
...founding principles and universal values of the nation was central to some of the ugliest episodes in the country's history. The French constitution proudly declares the country "an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic [that] assures equality before the law for all its citizens, without distinction of origin, of race, or religion". That gender- and color-blindness, national ideology holds, protects minority populations by ignoring the differences that divide them into often mutually hostile groups in societies like the U.S. and U.K. Indeed, few words are uttered in France with the same disdain as communitarisme: the proud identification with...