The advertisement sought a “regional anaesthetist fellow” to fill a one-year post at the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University NHS Trust, Merseyside.

But under the job description section of the advert, posted on the local NHS job website, a hospital employee had inserted the phrase “the usual rubbish about equal opportunities etc…”.

The gaffe, which was in reference to the NHS' equal opportunities policy, was “swiftly” deleted after hospital chiefs were made aware of the damaging comment. An investigation was under way on Monday.

It is understood it was first spotted by a doctor, who has not been named, after they clicked on the advert with a view to applying for the position.

It was later replaced with the new web page that contained phrase “we are committed to promoting equality and diversity”.

The hospital confirmed on Monday night that an internal inquiry had been launched after the advert was published last Thursday, the date applications closed.
Officials would not say if anyone had yet be identified but added the advert had been uploaded internally.
The advert did not disclose a salary, but the hospital it would have be “negotiable” to candidate awarded the “senior post”.
According to the advert, applicants would be required to work with 37 consultants, 21 registrars and almost a dozen “senior house officers”.
The successful candidate to the post, which had “education approval” from the Royal College of Anaesthetists, would also be expected to help establish a teaching programme and workshops for junior doctors.
Cllr Paula Keaveney, from Liverpool Council, said: “They need to look at the process because if something like this gets through without being checked properly, what else could get through?”
A hospital spokeswoman admitted the advert was unacceptable and “in no way reflects” the wider equal opportunities views of the trust.
“The Trust is conscious of its duty to promote equality and is a Stonewall Diversity Champion employer,” she said in reference to Britain's “good practice employers' forum”.
"The Trust will be conducting an investigation into this incident to ensure that this cannot happen again.” She said the trust was “fully committed” to equal opportunities.
She declined to say if anyone had been identified as the investigation was “still ongoing”. She said that a "small number of applicants" had applied for the position.
Andrew Hough @'The Telegraph'

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Policing London: Law and not Orde

It is hard to know if Bernard Hogan-Howe, who was appointed yesterday as the new Metropolitan police commissioner, deserves more congratulations or commiserations. The true answer must be a bit of both. Mr Hogan-Howe is a proven police leader who has risen to the most important job in British policing. But he has done it at a time when the force, in London as elsewhere, faces funding and staffing cuts, is struggling to recover from the phone hacking furore and the riots, and has become a plaything in a constitutional spat between a Conservative home secretary and London mayor, both of whom think the new man must also be their man. As the third Met commissioner to hold the office in less than three years, Mr Hogan-Howe will be uncomfortably aware that what goes up can come down too.
It certainly does not help that, between them, Theresa May and Boris Johnson contrived to overlook the claims of the best qualified candidate for the commissioner's job. Sir Hugh Orde, former Northern Ireland police chief and head of the chiefs' association Acpo, had the strongest CV in the field, as well as the strongest policing profile. He also got the backing of two official panels, one comprising civil servants and police experts and the other members of the Metropolitan police authority, both of which decided he was the best candidate for the job. But the home secretary and the mayor each decided they knew better.
The reason for this is not hard to find, since Sir Hugh had been outspokenly clear that he would have been an independent chief, abiding by the traditional principle that the police and not the politicians take the operational decisions. If nothing else, it is a historic irony that the Conservatives – who spent decades denouncing Labour for seeking to politicise the police – have now taken a succession of Met management decisions whose political character far exceeds anything that Labour home secretaries or mayors have ever attempted. This places Mr Hogan-Howe in an unenviable position. Through no fault of his own, he will be labelled the Tories' placeman. No Met commissioner in modern times has come to the job with less authority or legitimacy.
All this makes the new commissioner's job even more difficult than it would have been anyway — and with the Olympics less than 11 months away. The Conservatives have blundered into the delicate and antiquated architecture of British police governance in a deplorably foolish way. The shambles they have created in London policing is a grim precedent for the politicised system they want to introduce elsewhere. Mr Hogan-Howe has our best wishes, but he has been handed a poisoned chalice.
@'The Guardian'

The Journalist and the Spies

On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form. Shafiq called some colleagues, and together they pulled out the body. Occasionally, farmers and water buffalo drown in the canal, float downstream, and get stuck in the grates, but never a man in a suit. “Even his tie and shoes were still on,” Shafiq told me. He called the police, and by the next day they had determined the man’s identity: Syed Saleem Shahzad, a journalist known for his exposés of the Pakistani military. Shahzad had not shown up the previous afternoon for a television interview that was to be taped in Islamabad, a hundred miles to the northwest. His disappearance was being reported on the morning news, his image flashed on television screens across the country. Meanwhile, the zamindar—feudal lord—of a village twenty miles upstream from the dam called the police about a white Toyota Corolla that had been abandoned by the canal, in the shade of a banyan tree. The police discovered that the car belonged to Shahzad. Its doors were locked, and there was no trace of blood.
The previous afternoon, Shahzad had left his apartment, in the placid F-8/4 neighborhood of Islamabad, and driven toward Dunya studios, about five miles away. It was five-thirty; the television interview was scheduled for six. According to a local journalist who talked to a source in one of Pakistan’s cell-phone companies, Shahzad’s phone went dead twelve minutes later. His route passed through some of the country’s most secure neighborhoods, and no one had reported seeing anything suspicious. Some Pakistanis speculated that Shahzad might even have known the people who took him away.

It was a particularly anxious time in Pakistan. Four weeks earlier, American commandos had flown, undetected, into Abbottabad, a military town northwest of Islamabad, and killed Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani Army, which for more than sixty years has portrayed itself as the country’s guardian and guide, was deeply embarrassed: either it had helped to hide bin Laden or it had failed to realize that he was there. Certainly it hadn’t known that the Americans were coming.

Less than three weeks after the Abbottabad raid, the Army was humiliated a second time. A group of militants, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests, breached one of the country’s most secure bases, the Pakistan Naval Air Station-Mehran, outside Karachi, and blew up two P-3C Orion surveillance planes that had been bought from the United States. At least ten Pakistanis affiliated with the base died. The components of several nuclear warheads were believed to be housed nearby, and the implication was clear: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was not safe. In barracks across the country, military officers questioned the competence of Pakistan’s two most powerful men, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the chief of the Army staff, and General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I. Some officers even demanded that the Generals resign. Ordinary Pakistanis, meanwhile, publicly disparaged the one institution that, until then, had seemed to function...