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“They are hoping we will all die off so they won’t have to pay us compensation.”

Peter Fletcher, veteran of Britain’s 1950s nuclear weapons tests, in hospital with cancer (Sunday Mirror, London, 6 October)

“We assume what happened is a very rare circumstance.”

Epidemiologist Barna Tugwell of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, discussing 40 cases, five of them fatal, in which people received organs tainted with hepatitis C (The New York Times, 4 October)

“All the fancy computerised biometric systems in the world won’t tell you if the person holding the card is a would-be terrorist.”

Privacy…

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