Yes, I take about ten different placebos each morning... a multiple vitamin, vitamin C, Vitamin D, ... etc.

Over-the-Counter Placebo
03 JUN 2008 – A new drug is arriving in the US that promises safe relief from everything from a wide range of childhood (and adult) conditions. It is called Obecalp – placebo backwards. Obecalp fills a previously empty market niche: you cannot normally buy placebo medication at the pharmacy, but many parents wish to help their children for imagined ailments without giving them real drugs as placebo. The pills look and taste like actual medicine but just contain dextrose. Since there is no active ingredient and they do not treat any particular condition it can be marketed as a dietary supplement.

Experts are somewhat divided over marketing placebo to minors. One issue is the deception involved, which has led the the AMA to come down negatively on placebo. But given that parents often believe (based on quite a lot of evidence) that placebo does work, that parents regularly lie to their children and that the alternative may be them instead giving ibuprofen or antibiotics rather than something guaranteed innocuous, the deception issue may be outweighed by concerns of overprescription. The real problem may be that parents are bad at acting as if it was a real medication. Yet studies have found that even when patients know they are getting placebo they get better. [emphasis added]

Another reason to avoid placebo pills is that they condition children to see pills as a relief, perhaps making them more vulnerable to future overmedication or quackery. Yet giving other kinds of placebos like herbal teas may have the same effect. What most crying kids really need is a "kiss it and make it better" concern from their parents. Yet today's kids may actually consider being given a pill a similar symbol of affection. Ms. Buettner, the creator of Obecalp, claims that "as a parent you'll know when Obecalp is necessary." Leaving the non-medical interventions in the hands of parents seems to be a better choice than asking the medical professions to deal with them.

On September 30 2000, two days after Ariel Sharon, then the leader of Israel’s opposition Likud Party, went for a walk on Temple Mount, Palestinians mounted a demonstration at Gaza’s Netzarim Junction. A 55-second piece of video footage of that demonstration, transmitted that day by the French TV station France 2, was to cause unprecedented violence in the Middle East and throughout the world.

The footage, with a voice-over by France 2’s Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, showed what was said to be the killing of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura by Israeli marksmen. Viewers saw the child crouching in terror behind his father, Jamal, as they sheltered next to a barrel under what Enderlin said was Israeli gunfire, and then slumping to the ground as Enderlin pronounced that he was dead.

That image of the boy screaming in terror before being killed was uniquely incendiary. It portrayed the Israelis as diabolically gunning down a child in cold blood, even as he cowered for his life. It ignited the Arab and Muslim world with apparent proof that the Israelis were deliberately killing their children, inciting a murderous frenzy.

Al-Dura became a poster boy for the Palestinian and Islamist war against Israel and the West. The day after the France 2 broadcast, the second intifada erupted in its full fury; according to the 2001 Mitchell report, the two events were directly connected. Twelve days later, a mob of Palestinians shouting, ‘Revenge for the blood of Mohammed al-Dura’ lynched two Israeli army reservists and dragged their mutilated bodies through the streets of Ramallah.

When al-Qaeda decapitated the journalist Daniel Pearl, the video of this atrocity was punctuated with references to al-Dura. After September 11 2001, Osama bin Laden said: ‘Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura.’ Several Arab countries issued postage stamps with his picture. On Palestinian Authority TV and in its school books, al-Dura’s example is used to encourage other children to emulate his spirit of ’sacrifice’.

But we now know that this whole fiesta of violence and incitement was based on a lie. For whatever people think they saw in those 55 seconds, it was not the death of that boy. He was not killed by Israeli bullets; he was not killed at all. At the end of France 2’s famous footage, he was still alive and unharmed. The whole thing was staged, a fantastic piece of play-acting, an elaborate fabrication designed to blacken Israel’s name, and incite the Arab and Muslim mobs to mass murder.

To understand the al-Dura affair, it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can't own up to a mistake.

The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that the Wintertons have decided to move out after being barred from claiming any more in Additional Cost Allowance (ACA) for living there. Instead, they will move into a rented flat in Westminster which will cost the taxpayer thousands of pounds a year in ACA.

Lady Winterton, the MP for Congleton, Cheshire, has written to John
Lyon, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, informing him that the
family trust, which owns their previous home on behalf of their
children, would now rent it out to a new tenant "at the current market
rate, as now".

Addendum: The criteria for who should qualify for the ACA do, indeed, seem to open the door for some questionable activities (see this); but given the criteria, the buy-rent decision and the wealth of the MPs should not cloud the issue. Opportunity costs are still important.

Cuba is to abolish its system of equal pay for all and allow workers and managers to earn performance bonuses, a senior official has announced. [emphasis in the original as a sub-headline]

Vice-Minister for Labour Carlos Mateu said the current system - in
place since the communist revolution in 1959 - was no longer
"convenient".

He said wage differentiation should improve production and services. ...

The minister pointed out that the current wage system sapped
employees' incentives to excel since everyone earned the same
regardless of performance.

"It's harmful to give a worker less than he deserves, it's also
harmful to give him what he doesn't deserve," the newspaper article
said.