Drug prices in the UK and the US

Britain’s medicine prices are among the lowest in the world, thanks to the NHS’s buying powe and the tough value-for-money tests imposed by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. This is a major bone of contention. US prices are 2.5 times higher than ours, and Donald Trump thinks that Americans are “subsidising” low …

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Long live the fair sex

Last autumn 1,070 women won undergraduate places at Oxford University, compared with 1,025 men. The news provoked a snippy article in the New York Times complaining both about how slow Oxford (“the oldest university in the English-speaking world” as they sniffily termed it) had been getting to more than parity of the genders, and about …

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A distasteful aspect of organized religion

An eight-year-old Hindu boy is being held in protective custody after becoming the youngest person ever to be charged with blasphemy in Pakistan. The child’s “family is in hiding” and many other members of the Hindu community in the deeply conservative Rahim Yar Khan district of Punjab “have fled their homes” amid an outbreak of violence …

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