A serial burgular was recently convicted of his crimes in a court in New Zealand and was sentenced by the judge to serve 20 months in a state prison. The burgular instantly lodged an appeal against the sentence. To the judges surprise, the defendant was demanding that his sentence should be increased by four months to a full two years. The question that leaps to mind of course is why would the burgular do this? A pang of conscience? A man so wracked with guilt that he felt he...

In Britain two years ago there was a landmark ruling that a woman who was suffering from the advanced stages motor neurone disease had been refused the right for someone to help her to die, specifically her husband. She is paralysed from the neck down, but is cogent and responsible. Assisted suicide is illegal in Europe. Holland is the exception where doctors only are allowed to carry out this 'service'. But in Britian, doctors have been killing patients for years. When a ...

With news out today that the WMD team in Iraq has been instructed to change its focus on finding WMDs to establishing Saddams intent to produce them, some stories are emerging on the hard streets of occupied Iraq: 'The Bush administration yesterday vowed to stay the course in Iraq despite the attacks in Fallujah that ended with jubilant Iraqis dragging the charred bodies of Americans through the streets. Until yesterday, Washington's explanation of the continuing violence in Iraq...

The Water Wars.   The world is made up of 70% of water.   Curiously enough, so is the human body.   But only 3% of the worlds water is fresh, and much of that is caught up in the poles, the glaciers and the ice-sheets in places such as Greenland .   Of all the worlds water, only 1% of it is fresh and available to human beings.   20% of people, or 1.1 billion human beings have no access to fresh water. &n...

In 411 BC the Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote a play known as Lysistrata, a comedy of sexual politics.   In the play, the women of Greece band together to form a rebellion.   They are fed up at their men continually going away from the marital bed and fighting interminable wars among one another in the Peloponnesian war.   Their agenda is a simple one, they withdraw conjugal rights for their husbands until peace is signed. Driven to distract...

In a recent posting, I commented on the arrest of a woman in Florida for bearing her breasts in public. To me it seemed ridiculous that while men were allowed to wander around with their torso exposed, women however were not. The replies were interesting, one of the most pertinent being, look, if every woman or man had the figures of Hollywood idols, there'd be little objection to torso nudity. However, most people do not possess these figures, and bare flesh can be quit revoltng, es...

Dear all, Here's a nice little conspiracy for you, concerning the allegations of corruption in the oil for food program. Now it's a little complicated so bear with me. "The major part of the transactions where graft, misuse [and] kickbacks were involved by-passed United Nations officials," he told the BBC Today programme. He said these transactions were extremely complex, and negotiated between the Iraqi government and suppliers' ( Hans von Sponeck) The essence of it is that...

Dear all, This week, hundreds of Vietnam veterans will make their way to the small town of Dien Bien Phu to remember their fallen comrades. Dien Bien Phu was the site of a seminal battle, a battle that was to signal the end of the French empire the world over. It was fought between the Viet Minh and the French, and recieves little attention despite its enormous significance. The Viet Minh were lead by Ho Chi Minh, who was later to inflict such terrible damage on the American occup...