For personal reasons I won't be posting much over the next month or so, but I will try to note briefly any interesting points from the UK press.

Last year in a post on The future of the birth rate I gave reasons from evolutionary theory to expect birth rates in western countries to rise again from their current artificially low levels. So I was pleased to see this week that official statistics for births in England and Wales in 2003 were up by 4.3% on the previous year. This reverses a downward trend and is a large one-year change. Based on 2003 fertility patterns the Total Fertility Rate has increased from 1.65 to 1.73. Obviously a single year doesn't make a trend, but it's a start.

On a completely different subject, it has now been proved that photographs published in the Daily Mirror, appearing to show British troops in Iraq abusing Iraqi prisoners, were faked, probably by part-time soldiers trying to sell their story to the (strongly anti-war) Mirror. The conclusive proof (among many other persuasive points) was that the photos showed army equipment of a kind not used in Iraq. The Mirror's editor, Piers Morgan, still attempted to defend the photos on the basis that they 'represented real events', but his Board of Directors took a different view, and yesterday he was fired, and escorted from the building without even time to collect his jacket.