Chekhov believed every tiny detail was vital – just one reason that, a century and a half after his birth, we're still struggling to keep up

"I'm crazy about Chekhov", Woody Allen once remarked. "I never knew anyone that wasn't." Today, on Chekhov's 150th birthday, that statement rings more true than ever. Much has been written about the enduringly modern quality of Chekhov's work, and with good reason. He is one of the most frequently cited influences of contemporary writers, and it is possible to argue that echoes of his brevity, impressionism, and disregard for traditional plot resonate through the majority of modern literary fiction and drama.

Homeopathy sceptics have staged a mass "overdose" of homeopathic remedies, in a bid to prove they have no effect.
Protesters ate whole bottles of tablets at branches of Boots in places such as Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London, Leicester, Edinburgh and Birmingham.
They have asked the pharmacy chain to stop selling the remedies, which they call "scientifically absurd".

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SILVER SPRING, MD—Frustrated by continued demands from viewers for more awesome and extreme programming, Science Channel president Clark Bunting told reporters Tuesday that his cable network was "completely incapable" of watering down science any further than it already had.

n medicine, “untoward incident inquiries” tend to look for systems failures, rather than one individual to blame.
It’s certainly clear that Andrew Wakefield and his co-defendants failed to meet the high standards required of doctors in research. The GMC have found he was “misleading” “dishonest” and “irresponsible” in the way he described where the children in the 1998 paper came from, by implying that they were routine clinic referrals. As the GMC have also found, these children were subjected to a programme of unpleasant and invasive tests which were not performed in their own clinical interest, but rather for research purposes, and these tests were conducted without ethics committee approval.

The Republicans' shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US.

Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters

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