Daily catch-up: Superbugs, men's day, old Labour plots and another view of old London
Threats can be sudden, such as terrorism or a flu pandemic, or slow such as antimicrobial resistance and climate change
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Your support makes all the difference."I'm telling you Bert it wasn't there yesterday." Photograph of old London from London Life, complete with Tardis and a trolleybus.
• Antibiotic-resistant superbugs pose a global threat after breaking through last line of defence: it looks like an alarmist headline (on Independent online yesterday), but this is a serious problem (New Scientist report here), and Dame Sally Davies, the Government's Chief Medical Office, should be praised for raising awareness of it. She spoke at the Strand Group at King's College, London, on Tuesday about the challenge of dealing with uncertain threats such as terrorism, a flu pandemic or the slow scares such as antimicrobial resistance and climate change.
• This made me stop and think yesterday: my colleague Mary Dejevsky in The Independent on a Paris jihadi as long ago as 1995.
• Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Yardley, on yesterday's International Men's Day:
I am ... still dubious about the need for an international men's day in and of itself. For me it is up there with needing a white history month, or able body action day. Men are celebrated, elevated and awarded every day of the week on every day of the year. Being a man is its own reward. You hit the jackpot when you are born a boy child. Yes within your group things are tough for all sorts of reasons. None of them are because you are a man. You might be a poor man, a sick man, a marginalised minority ethnic man. Brother, I'm with you. I'll carry your banner, sing your song of freedom, I'll even carry your coats and make the sandwiches.
• I mentioned Dan Hodges's book about the 2015 election, One Minute To Ten, the other day. It is a bit like Primary Colors written as non-fiction, and it does contain one or two actual news stories. One is that Gordon Brown phoned MPs during the Labour leadership election in 2010 to urge them to "get behind" Ed Miliband as their second preference (after Ed Balls) rather than David. This was, says Hodges, because David refused to do a deal with Balls to guarantee him the job of shadow chancellor. That last bit we knew, but, if Brown was involved in canvassing, that is news to me.
The other is an account of a meeting in a woman's flat in south London to plot Ed Miliband's removal as leader "less than a year before the election". From the context, we assume the woman, described only as "The Hostess", was an MP. It is a bit of a let-down, as the plotters talk about Alan Johnson as a replacement leader and one of them points out that he had said he wasn't interested. Tantalising, but how irrelevant it all seems now.
• And finally, thanks to Moose Allain for this:
“Where did you get that from?”
“A distant relative – my father.”
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