Wildlife......

We read that orangutans will be extinct in the wild soon........that poachers in Africa continue to kill Rhinos and sell their horn to be used in Chinese aphrodisiacs...that soon there will be no jaguars in the Brazilian jungles.... desperately sad...yet..........Britain was a forested country some three hundred or so years ago. There were wolves and bears and wild boar.....all gone...along with the forest. the land is now cultivated and there is no room for larger wild creatures who threaten or compete with us. What right do we have to lecture the developing world ? How can we tell them not to exploit the timber or clear the forests to grow crops to sell or destroy animals that attack their livestock?
In fact, if the West wants wildlife preserved...then it has to be paid for........How about a system where in any given area, we had an official count/census of wildlife and agreed to pay a bounty to each local person based on the number of animals counted...? For example...if there were 6 orangutans in a district one year and then 8 the next...the west would pay... say...10 dollars to everyone who lived in the area...... obviously numbers/scale etc would need checking/negotiating... but the principle of paying local people to protect and enhance their local wildlife would surely make the people on the spot guard it...take care of it..report poachers etc......??? Faced with appalling poverty...we really cannot expect people to stop trying to exploit wildlife in any way they can...we must simply make it more profitable alive than dead.

Thankyou Ken Clarke...

Probably not a hope in hell of leading the British Conservative Party....but a big thankyou for telling it like it is...

Some might say that what the US does, the US is responsible for. That is true but the British government cannot evade its responsibilities in this matter. It refuses to say whether British citizens or residents have been the subject of extraordinary rendition. It will not comment on claims that British territory has been used by the US for this purpose. It does not deny having received intelligence from people who have been tortured.

I never thought I would live in a society where the British government has refused to deny that captured people may be flown out of British airports to some third country where they can be tortured. What kind of country have we become if we permit such outrages?

and

I am frankly astonished that US politicians who were quick to lecture the British in the past about miscarriages of justice and alleged brutality by the security forces in Northern Ireland, seem unable to understand the damage to Western credibility done by the scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. Dubious interrogation techniques might produce information quickly but the effects on public opinion of this approach in the long term far outweigh the short-term benefits. You do not defend the rule of law successfully by breaking it. It is not just that the innocent are unfairly treated, just as important, the guilty go free.

Our mistakes in Northern Ireland gave Irish Republicans a propaganda bonanza that they were quick to exploit - not least when fundraising in the United States. I fear that we are doing the same today. Some of the tactics used in both the United States and in the UK have already alienated a significant section of moderate Muslim opinion.

Exactly...