Daily Mail readers are revolting. Also, they're very unhappy about the BBC's decision to appoint Aaqil Ahmed as Head of Religious Programming - apparently one of the most prestigious religious roles in the country after the Queen, Archbishops and Jade Goody. You see, Ahmed is one of "Teh Ev1l Muzlimzz!!!", and the reaction to him is neatly summed up by Mail hack Stephen Glover's whiney little headline: "Why can't the BBC understand that we are STILL a Christian country?"

Private Eye have given us further insight into the way that the BBC "managed" their coverage of the Large Hadron Collider. It seems that the state of Auntie's science reporting is even worse than the pessimists among us imagined, with CERN employees left bemused by the bizarre requests of BBC representatives.

Well I'm back after three weeks off writing, you know, science. It's nice to see from the stats that a core audience have remained loyal enough to keep reading while I've been away - so I'd like to give a shout out to Stuart "Core Audience" Walton. Anyway, I'll be blogging properly later on a variety of subjects, but on seeing the BBC News website this morning I felt obliged to comment.

The story in question is under the headline "Chocolate 'may cut diabetes risk'". When I clicked the link, I assumed this would be a report on a recent study that linked chocolate with cutting the risk of diabetes.

Erm, no.

"Hospital superbug deaths rise 72% in just one year, killing 6,500", screams the Daily Mail, while the BBC leads with "Dramatic rise in C. diff deaths". So it'd be reasonable to assume that C. difficile deaths are rising then? Erm...

Reading the BBC's account, alarm bells started ringing in my head at about paragraph 2, where it states that "between 2005 and 2006 the number of death certificates which mentioned the infection rose by 72% to 6,480, most of which were elderly people.". So immediately it turns out we're dealing with 18 month-old data.