Van Halen performs Jump

British DJ Steve Penk put on the Van Halen hit Jump (3:48 video) after the M60 was shut down while police attempted to talk down a suicidal woman.

The Daily Mail reports that mental heath charities were not amused. The intended suicide did jump from the 30’ highway overpass, but sustained only minor injuries. Penk remains unrepentant.

Senior advocate of the European Court of Justice Paolo Mengozzi denounced British suspension of welfare benefits to wives of persons believed to be affiliated with al Qaeda or the Taliban in a 26-page written opinion which declared welfare support to be a human right. A final ruling is expected in a few months.

Terrorist spouses had previous appeals for restoration of income support, child benefit and housing assistance rejected in Britain and subsequently appealed to the European Court of Justice, whose decisions are binding on Britain’s Parliament and courts.

Daily Mail:

Ministers have halted benefit payouts made to the families of suspected terrorists to prevent the money falling into the hands of banned groups. ...

Whitehall officials have refused to name the families involved in the test cases – but all three of the husbands are foreign nationals on the United Nations list of international terror suspects.

They have been linked by security officials to Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban

The payouts to their wives include income support, child benefit and housing assistance worth ‘several hundred’ pounds a week.

The Swinford Tollbridge, crosses the Thames half a mile from Eynsham in Oxfordshire, was built in 1769, and has its own act of Parliament allowing its owner to collect tolls, and banning the construction of competing bridges for three miles up and downstream of its location.

It is believed that George III additionally granted a tax exemption on all its toll revenues.

It is used by four million vehicles annually, and charges a toll of of 5p per car and 50p per truck producing (tax-free!) revenues of 190000 pounds (US$320000).

It sold today at auction for 1.08 million pounds ($1.66 million).

The fly in the ointment is the existence of considerable agitation on the part of the unruly peasantry seeking the abolition of the toll.

Swinford Tollbridge web-site

William A. Jacobsen notes that we have five times the population, so…. would our death rate produced by service rationing limits and delays really be merely linear, or would it be exponential?

Another day, another exposé by a British newspaper about the failure of nationalized health care. This time, it’s the left-wing The Guardian reflecting on how delays in cancer care cause 10,000 unnecessary deaths each year compared to other European countries:

Up to 10,000 people die needlessly of cancer every year because their condition is diagnosed too late, according to research by the government’s director of cancer services. The figure is twice the previous estimate for preventable deaths….

Richards found that “late diagnosis was almost certainly a major contributor to poor survival in England for all three cancers”, but also identified low rates of surgical intervention being received by cancer patients as another key reason for poor survival rates.

Research by academics at Durham University led by Prof Greg Rubin has identified five types of delay in NHS cancer care: “patient delay”, “doctor delay”, “delay in primary care [at GPs’ surgeries]”, “system delay” and “delay in secondary care [at hospitals]”....

Since Britain’s population is less than one-fifth that of the U.S., the equivalent number of unnecessary deaths in the U.S. would exceed 50,000. The U.S. has cancer survival rates which exceed even the better European countries, so that number may be higher.

Keep that in mind the next time you hear Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) and others throw around fictitious numbers about how many people die in the U.S. from lack of insurance. And this week as Harry Reid and the Democrats tout how Reid’s plan will save families in the “non-group” market $500 on private insurance.

Arms of the Duke of Northumberland

A New Zealand representative of the Percy family is attempting to claim the earldom and estates of the ancient Percy family of Northumberland on the basis of a supposititious descent from a male-line overlooked at the time of the death of Josceline the 7th Earl in 1670.

No male heir was discovered at that time, and the Percy estates went to his only daughter, Lady Elizabeth, who married three times, becoming by her last marriage Duchess of Somerset.

Her granddaughter, also an Elizabeth, married Sir Hugh Smithson in 1740, causing him to inherit the Earldom of Northumberland upon her father’s death. Smithson obligingly changed his name to Percy, and received the extinct title of Duke of Northumberland via a third creation in 1766.

Kevin Percy of Napier, New Zealand believes that the commonality of the personal name Thomas, Edward, and Francis between his own (formerly) Pursey family and that of Thomas Percy, great grandson of the 4th earl of Northumberland and one of the principals of the Gunpowder Plot suggests the identity of his own ancestry with one of the cadet lines of the famous Percys of Northumberland.

All of this is explained at a web-page devoted to the Percy family of New Zealand and its genealogical theories.

Mr. Percy hopes that DNA testing of exhumed Percy bodies will be able to prove his own descent from the Gunpowder Plotter and confirm his own theories making him rightful heir to the Percy family titles and estates.

As the Dominion Post (Wellington, N.Z.) reports, were he to be successful, the rewards would be awfully good.

A Napier antiques dealer has claimed that his family are the rightful heirs to one of Britain’s most famous dynasties, which owns the castle used in the Harry Potter movies.

Kevin Percy, 74, believes his family was cheated out of inheriting the Earl of Northumberland’s massive estate, now conservatively valued at $685m.

He has started a bold bid asking British authorities, including the Queen, to exhume the bodies of two suspected relatives for DNA tests, which he says would prove or disprove his claim. The two men died in 1560 and 1716.

His bid targets one of Britain’s most celebrated noble families, which dominated the Middle Ages. The earldom owns nearly 50,000 hectares of land in Britain.

Alnwick Castle

A recent ACT ON C02 1:00 television commercial depicting a father reading a bedtime story to a little girl featuring a doggie drowning as the result of Anthropogenic climate change provoked a good deal of criticism.

The best kind of criticism, of course, is mockery.

1:10 video

Hat tip to the Barrister.

The third time is enemy action, asserts the old Intelligence Community saying.

The Mirror:

A British nuclear expert taking part in disarmament talks with Iran has died in mysterious circumstances at a UN building in Austria.

Timothy Hampton, 47, plunged to his death from the 17th floor and was found in a stairwell just hours before high-level discussions were due to resume in Vienna.

Investigators said they have not ruled out murder or suicide, but local sources said no suicide note was found.

Police are also investigating the death of another Brit who fell from the same building four months ago.

The third such incident will be very hard to take for just another accident.

Daily Mail illustration

Evidence of the former existence smaller stone circle by the Avon River at the end of an avenue leading to Stonehenge has given support to a new theory of the entire site constituting an enormous funerary complex. I had not been aware that Stonehenge was surrounded by an enormous prehistoric cemetery.

The Guardian:

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of what they believe was a second Stonehenge located a little more than a mile away from the world-famous prehistoric monument.

The new find on the west bank of the river Avon has been called “Bluestonehenge”, after the colour of the 25 Welsh stones of which it was once made up.

Excavations at the site have suggested there was once a stone circle 10 metres in diameter and surrounded by a henge – a ditch with an external bank, according to the project director, Professor Mike Parker Pearson, of the University of Sheffield.

The stones at the site were removed thousands of years ago but the sizes of the holes in which they stood indicate that this was a circle of bluestones, brought from the Preseli mountains of Wales, 150 miles away.

The standing stones marked the end of the avenue that leads from the river Avon to Stonehenge, a 1¾-mile long processional route constructed at the end of the Stone Age.

CNN:

Neolithic peoples would have come down river by boat and literally stepped off into Bluestonehenge, Pollard said. They may have congregated at certain times of the year, including the winter solstice, and carried remains of the dead from Bluestonehenge down an almost two-mile funeral processional route to a cemetery at Stonehenge to bury them.

“It could be that Bluestonehenge was where the dead began their final journey to Stonehenge,” said Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield who co-directed the project with Pollard.

“Not many people know that Stonehenge was Britain’s largest burial ground at that time,” he said. “Maybe the blue stone circle is where people were cremated before their ashes were buried at Stonehenge itself.”

Daily Mail illustration

Metal detecting is a popular working man’s hobby here in the United States as well, but Americans can expect to find some coins or possibly Civil War relics. In Britain, there is a lot more history, and a lot older and more valuable treasure lying right in the fields.

The Daily Mail has terrific coverage of a spectacular new find.

The largest haul of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found has been discovered by a metal detector enthusiast on farmland in Staffordshire, it was revealed today.

Experts say the hoard, which is at least as significant as any other treasure from the Anglo-Saxon era ever unearthed, is worth millions and could have belonged to a king.

The discovery of at least 1,345 different items, thought to date back to the seventh century, is expected to redefine perceptions of the period.

Terry Herbert, from Burntwood, Staffordshire, came across the collection as he searched a field near his home with his trusty 14-year-old detector and is now in line for a seven-figure sum.

It had been hidden for more than 1,300 years but was recently thrown up by ploughing and amazingly, some was just sitting on the top of the ground.

Experts have already examined the 1,345 items but another 56 clods of earth have been X-rayed and are known to hold more metal artefacts, meaning the figure is likely to rise to around 1,500.

At least 650 are gold, weighing more than than 5kg, and another 530 are silver, weighing around 1kg. This is far bigger than previous finds – including the Sutton Hoo burial site in Suffolk.

Many of the items in the hoard are warfare paraphernalia inlaid with precious stones, including sword pommel caps and hilt plates.

Experts say it is the best example of Anglo-Saxon workmanship they have ever seen and may have belonged to Saxon royalty, possibly the King of Mercia.’

Archaeology expert Leslie Webster, who used to work at the British Museum, said: ‘(It is) absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells.’

It was officially declared treasure by a coroner today, which means the haul will now be valued by committee of experts before being offered for sale.

They may take more than a year to value the collection and, given its scale, the financial worth will be massive.

Once a valuation and sale is complete, its market value will be split between Mr Herbert, who is unemployed, and the owner of the farmland where it was found.

Roger Bland, head of portable antiquities and treasure at the British Museum: ‘I can’t say anything other than we expect it to be a seven-figure sum.’

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

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The gold-proud of warriors, trod the mould grassy, exulting in gold-store.—Beowulf (William Morris translation)

You can gloat over the treasure hoard looted from those puny Christians, just like a true follower of Odin, at the Staffordshire Hoard web-site.

Foxhounds are large (65-70 lbs. – 29-32 kilos.) and powerful animals. They are astonishingly muscular, and a hound pack is fully capable of running for many miles, pulling down, tearing to pieces and devouring its quarry rapidly and on the spot.

Yet, those familiar with hounds often describe the hound temperament as “sweet.” Hounds will eagerly jump up on strangers to lick their faces and be petted, and it is a routine practice as exhibitions to release a pack to be petted and roll around with small children.

Hounds traditionally hunted deer before they hunted foxes. Consequently, the return of the white-tail deer to much of its original range in the Eastern United States in the 1950s and 1960s had a tremendous impact on hunting and hound breeding.

Ben Hardaway, the renowned and colorful Master of Georgia’s Midland Foxhounds, often recounts how, when deer arrived in his territory, he found he could not stop his beloved July-strain American foxhounds from chasing deer, and successfully running them down and eating them.

Hardaway found himself obliged to travel to Britain and Ireland in search of deer-proof strains of foxhounds, and he proceeded to blend appropriate British foxhound strains with American, adding a soupçon of Penn Marydel, to produce what became recognized as a new, very widely used category of foxhound, the Crossbred.

Hardaway’s impact on hound breeding has been so great that he was recently honored by the North American Museum of Hounds and Hunting by admission to its Hall of Fame Huntsman’s Room, an honor rarely conferred on a living sportsman.

It is, therefore, interesting to find that the 30 couple (60) of foxhounds of the Chiddingfield, Leconfield and Cowdray Hunt, whose territory is in Surrey and Sussex, recently adopted a ten-week old fallow deer (Dama dama) fawn, allowing him to accompany the pack on its off-season walks.

Huntsman Adrian Thompson, however, expressed a disinclination to allow the fawn to hunt with his hounds next Autumn. He does not think the young deer would have the stamina to keep up with hounds. (Maybe someone will offer him a ride, and BamBam will be able to car follow.)

Daily Mail

Telegraph

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Terrierman has an eminently politically incorrect posting discreetly lamenting humanitarian reform and the abolition of the Rat Pit.

Just look at those four obviously extremely naughty girls, one smoking a cigarette (in public no less), another casually lifting her skirts just clear of the fracas below. The young ladies’ enthusiasm for blood sport and obvious ease in masculine surroundings almost makes one want to classify them as consoeurs of Pierce Egan’s Corinthian Kate in Life in London (1821), representatives of the Pooter-free epoch predating Victoria, the epoch of the Mohawk, the Corinthian, and the Buck. But, just look at their dresses!

The young ladies are obviously representatives of the gas-light era of Sherlock Holmes, not of the Regency. Moreover, there is that cigarette. The cigarette did not become commonplace until after James Bonsack’s invention of a machine for their manufacture in 1881.

The Rat Pit may have been outlawed in England in 1835, but there they are, enjoying a bout of ratting considerably after the date of the ban. My own surmise would be that these ladies have every intention of concluding their evening at yet another completely illegal establishment of entertainment, too.
——————————-

Again, hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Heck bull

The Nazis were pretty bad, but they weren’t all bad. They invented the Volkswagen and the Superhighway. Leni Reifenstahl made terrific films, and Adolph Hitler was a superb designer of military uniforms. Hermann Goering, in his capacity as Reichsforst- und Jägermeister (Reich Master of the Forest and Hunt), was a keen conservationist eager not only to protect endangered species of big game, but ambitious enough to promote attempts at breeding backward in order to restore especially desirable extinct species, including most notably the aurochs (Bos primigenius).

Reuters reports that one British aficionado has brought a herd of the Heck cattle resulting from Hermann Goering’s breeding project to Britain. According to Wikipedia, there are roughly 2000 Heck cattle in Europe these days. The last known aurochs, a female, died in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest in Masovia (Poland).

A conservationist has re-introduced to Britain a modern relative of the ancient ancestor to domesticated cattle.

The shaggy, russet-colored “Heck” cattle imported into Britain from The Netherlands by Derek Gow are the product of a Nazi-sponsored breeding program intended to bring back the aurochs,” an ancient beast mentioned by Julius Caesar, British newspapers reported on Wednesday.

The ancient species were immortalized tens of thousands of years ago in ochre and charcoal cave paintings in the Great Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux in southwest France.

The modern-day British herd brought to Devon, England is the product of Nazi breeding, an attempt to bring back the extinct aurochs, the last of which died of old age a Polish forest nearly four centuries ago. ...

The herd has Herman Goering, the head of Hitler’s Luftwaffe, to thank for its existence. Goering hoped to recreate a primeval Aryan wilderness in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe. Two zoologist brothers, Lutz and Heinz Heck, took on the task of scouring Europe for the most primitive breeds of cattle they could find in the belief that by “back breeding” they could resurrect the extinct species.

Heinz Heck, based at Munich Zoo, cross-bred shaggy Highland cattle with animals from Corsica and Hungary, while his brother in Berlin was crossing Spanish and French fighting bulls. The success of the Hecks’ breeding program is as disputed as the techniques they used.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

As the Daily Mail reports, Matthew & Thomas Haslam, a pair of 15-year-old twin brothers from Doncaster, are pioneering a new sport: rabbit show-jumping.

Their trained lagoforms performed at a major pet show in Birmingham. Today, Birmingham; tomorrow, the Olympics.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers and Candi Kobetz.

Minister of State for Europe Caroline Flint

Labour Minister for Europe Caroline Flint, supporting a re-vote, patronisingly declared that the Irish had “misunderstood” the treaty.

In debate in Parliament yesterday, Ms. Flint’s own understanding of the treaty came into question.

During questions yesterday in Parliament, Europe Minister Caroline Flint admitted that she had not read the Lisbon Treaty in its entirety.

Following a series of vague answers on the implications of the Treaty for European defence, Shadow Europe Minister Mark Francois asked, “Has the Minister read the elements of the Lisbon Treaty that relate to defence?”. Ms. Flint replied, “I have read some of it but not all of it.” She went on to say: “I have been briefed on some of it.”...

In a press release, Mark Francois responded saying, “It’s wonderfully honest of the Minister for Europe to admit that she hasn’t actually read the renamed EU Constitution. It’s not every day that someone will admit they haven’t read the most important document for their job. Her astonishing admission does leave some questions. How does she know if the Treaty’s good for Britain if she hasn’t read it? How could she lecture the Irish that they’d only rejected the Lisbon Treaty because they didn’t understand it?”

Barack Obama’s rejection of a bust of Winston Churchill and off-handed treatment of Prime Minister Gordon Brown were all over the news during the weekend.

There seems to be more to all this than the explanations that Barack Obama was tired, or simply too distracted by the domestic economic crisis to pay attention to protocol (or to arrange for a gift more appropriate than a set of DVDs from Blockbuster).

Obama seems to bear an actual animus toward Great Britain, which not even the presence in office of the current Labourite regime is able to soften.

The Telegraph elicited a very revealing State Department response.

The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key.

The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

A lot of Americans were delighted to hear that, once Barack Obama was elected, absolutely everyone would be getting exactly the same kind of health care enjoyed by US senators. If you believed that, you need to talk to me about this bridge I have for sale.

Today’s Daily Mail has a story illustrating how government-provided health services really work: by rationing.

Thousands of patients with terminal cancer were dealt a blow last night after a decision was made to deny them life prolonging drugs.

The Government’s rationing body said two drugs for advanced breast cancer and a rare form of stomach cancer were too expensive for the NHS.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is expected to confirm guidance in the next few weeks that will effectively ban their use.

The move comes despite a pledge by Nice to be more flexible in giving life-extending drugs to terminally-ill cancer patients after a public outcry last year over ‘death sentence’ decisions. Leading campaigners last night said Nice had failed the ‘acid test’ of whether it really intended to give new priority to people with just a few months to live.

One drug, Lapatinib, can halve the speed of growth of breast cancer in one in five women with an aggressive form of the disease.

Dr Gillian Leng, Nice deputy chief executive, said ‘The committee concluded that Lapatinib is not a cost-effective use of NHS resources when compared with current treatment.’

Up to 1,500 stomach cancer patients also face a ban on Sutent – the only drug that can extend their lives.

Lt. Gen. H.G. Martin, in his memoir of soldiering and sport in pre-War British India, Sunset From the Main (1951), recalls an unpleasant encounter on angling expedition to the Simla Hills in search of mahseer.

The steep path dropped down to the bed of the gorge past brakes of thorn and matted evergreen and across unexpected lawns where the encircling cactus reared its knotted candleabras, rigid and grotesque as submarine coral-beds. In these occasional clearings troops of brown monkeys basked, scratching in the sunshine: plebeian monkeys, vulgar, thieving, shameless, who lowered and gibbered as we passed. I do not love the brown monkey. Who has ever seen him look pleasant? A typical, politically minded proletarian, he has the Communist’s capacity for hating all creation.

Llewellyn in 1979

The British Press pays admiring tribute to Sir Dai Lewellyn, who died younger than most, not from the years but the mileage.

Evening Standard:

One-time debs’ delight Sir Dai Llewellyn, who has died aged 62, never did anything remotely useful in his career. Defying every known rule of moderation, he simply lived life to the full – and that cheered up a lot of people.

The Telegraph:

The 4th Bt, who died on Tuesday aged 62, became famous as a playboy, bon viveur and darling of the gossip columns, his reputation reflected in soubriquets such as “Seducer of the Valleys”, “Conquistador of the Canapé Circuit”, “Dai ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ Llewellyn” or simply “Dirty Dai”.

The son and heir of the gold-medal-winning equestrian baronet Sir Harry “Foxhunter” Llewellyn, and brother of Princess Margaret’s one-time paramour Roddy Llewellyn, Dai Llewellyn was celebrated for his serial seductions of “It” girls, models and actresses, his relentless appetite for partying and his outrageous indiscretions. ...

He never grew up. On a visit to South Africa aged 60, he claimed to have fallen through a bedroom floor into a cellar while “attempting to roger a girl called Nettie”, the girlfriend of a friend. “I wish I could tell you this was an isolated incident,” he told a journalist.

Daily Mail:

Sir Dai, wracked by cancer, cirrhosis of the liver and anaemia, died in a Kent hospital where he had been receiving treatment for several weeks.

His death leaves a gap in London society that will be hard, if not impossible, to fill. Sir Dai was defined by a recklessness that belongs to another age.

He was 62, a child of the post-war era, but he lived like an Edwardian rake, strutting the boulevards with a wicked smile, never too far from another drink or a beautiful woman. ...

As a young man, Sir Dai pursued a modelling career under the name David Savage.

Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and writer said: ‘When I first met Dai he was incredibly good-looking and well dressed. The girls fell for him like mad.’

Sir Dai assisted the process with relentless flattery and assiduous attention, but he always maintained that women loved a rascal, especially those who make them laugh.

But it didn’t work on one young beauty who, it is said, was the love of his life. ...

His modelling career flopped and when he arrived back in London, two years later, she had married someone else.

Sir Dai threw himself with even more enthusiasm into the life that came to characterise him: parties, drinking and seduction.

Some detected a Celtic self-destructive streak and he was indeed a child of the valleys.

In an interview at the hospice last November he said he once drank eight bottles of wine, a bottle of rum, a bottle of port and a bottle of vodka in one night, yet in the morning he was perfectly lucid.

It was a tale that will pursue him to the grave.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

Cheers as the hunt goes out in Market Bosworth, Leicestershire

Some day Britain’s contemptible Labour Government will fall and the petty tyranny of its Hunting Ban, passed via the overthrow of the British Constitution and the usurpation of the authority of both houses of Parliament by a temporary majority in the House of the Commons, will end.

In the meantime, persecution of rural traditions and sport has backfired on the Left, awakening a new political consciousness and determination on the part of their victims. Hunting is stronger than ever in Britain.

Daily Mail:

Record numbers turned out for the Boxing Day hunts yesterday – adding fresh fuel to criticisms of the ‘ban’ introduced under Labour.

More than 300,000 people converged on the countryside to take part in or cheer on the annual events across England, Wales and Scotland.

Pro-hunt groups used the turnout to renew calls to repeal the controversial 2004 Hunting Act, backed by a petition with thousands of signatures and Conservative plans to end the ban. ...

More than 300 hunts, including 194 fox hunts with packs of hounds, were held yesterday, according to the Countryside Alliance. More than 6,000 turned out for one in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.

The majority used ‘trails’ in which a scent of the quarry is laid down artificially. A dead fox is often used as a reward for hounds at the hunt’s end.

But many took advantage of exemptions, including around 50 which used the ‘bird of prey’ exemption.

This involves a fox being flushed out by hounds into the path of a bird of prey. Many hunts now have their own eagle owl or golden eagle.

Other hunts use an exemption in which two dogs flush out quarry from woodland for shooting. ...

A petition launched last week to repeal the ‘confusing, unnecessary and divisive’ Act has already gathered 7,700 signatures, the Countryside Alliance said.

Spokesman Tim Bonner added: ‘We believe that the evidence of the last four years is that the Hunting Act has just failed in every possible term.

‘It does no good at all for animals’ welfare, is a huge cost of police time, and puts innocent people at risk of prison.’

Mr Bonner claimed a low turnout of protesters yesterday was due to them being ‘drowned out’ by supporters in recent years.

The Hunting Act was controversially passed using the Parliament Act, which meant the approval of the House of Lords – which wanted to regulate hunting with dogs – was not needed. ...

It came into effect in England and Wales in February 2005 and followed a ban in Scotland introduced two years earlier.

The Act was brought in to outlaw the hunting of foxes, as well as deer, hares and mink with dogs, as well as organised hare coursing.

But opponents have argued against it on grounds including there was no evidence of cruelty and it provided a means of controlling animals numbers.

Tory leader David Cameron has said he will offer a free vote on the matter if he becomes prime minister.

Read the whole thing.

FoxNews:

Archaeologists have found what they say is the oldest brain ever discovered in Britain, or at least the shriveled remnant of one, in a decapitated skull that dates back more than 2,000 years.

Inside the skull, the scientists found “a yellow substance which scans showed to be shrunken, but brain-shaped,” according to a University of York statement.

“I’m amazed and excited that scanning has shown structures which appear to be unequivocally of brain origin,” said Philip Duffey, a neurologist at York Hospital who scanned the skull. ...

The skull was found in a muddy pit unearthed during excavations on the site of the University of York’s campus expansion at Heslington East and is thought to have been a ritual offering. Nobody is sure how the brain remained preserved for so long. ...

York Archaeological Trust dig team member Rachel Cubitt reached in and, while she cleaned the soil-covered skull’s outer surface, “she felt something move inside the cranium. Peering through the base of the skull, she spotted an unusual yellow substance.”

“The survival of brain remains where no other soft tissues are preserved is extremely rare,” said Sonia O’Connor, research fellow in archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford. “This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the U.K., and one of the earliest worldwide.”

Daily Mail:

Archaeologists have found Britain’s oldest surviving human brain in a field where it was buried 2,000 years ago during the Iron Age.

It was discovered inside a decapitated skull placed in a small pit near York.

Researchers studying the remains believe they could be from a human sacrifice…

Dr Richard Hall, director of archaeology at the York Archaeological Trust, said: ‘From the size, it was probably an adult but we can’t say whether it was a man or woman.

There is no obvious cause of death because the skull is still intact.

‘The skull must have been removed from the body.

‘We are confident that the skull was buried in this small pit and that it has lain undisturbed since the Iron Age.’

Dr Hall added: ‘It is possible that a living person has been killed and their (sic) head put into a pit for some religious purpose.’

Darker material near the top is the shrunken brain

Richard Munday, in the London Times, observes that citizens of modern democracies are typically less safe in the event of terrorist attack today than they were a century ago in gas-lit London when policemen carried only a truncheon and ordinary citizens were allowed to own and carry weapons.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Mumbai shootings exposed the myth of “gun control”. India had some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny.

The guns used in last week’s Bombay massacre were all “prohibited weapons” under Indian law, just as they are in Britain. In this country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most extreme violence here has left most of us with a sheltered awareness of the threat. We have not yet faced a determined and broad-based attack.

The Mumbai massacre also exposed the myth that arming the police force guarantees security. Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor on the Mumbai Mirror who took some of the dramatic pictures of the assault on the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, was angered to find India’s armed police taking cover and apparently failing to engage the gunmen.

In Britain we might recall the prolonged failure of armed police to contain the Hungerford killer, whose rampage lasted more than four hours, and who in the end shot himself. In Dunblane, too, it was the killer who ended his own life: even at best, police response is almost always belated when gunmen are on the loose. ...

The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.

In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back – and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

That armed England existed within living memory; but it is now so alien to our expectations that it has become a foreign country.

The Belfast Telegraph reports an unusual case of self defence in the United Kingdom.

A grandfather today told how he fought off masked men wielding Samurai swords as they tried to rob his post office.

The two balaclava-wearing intruders took turns at slashing Alan Garratt with the three-foot long weapons at the Leicestershire branch, he said.

But they fled empty-handed after the 68-year-old, who had previously undergone surgery for a triple heart bypass, fought back with a sherry bottle.

The raid was captured on a CCTV camera, which was installed after a burglary at the post office, in Knipton, Leicestershire, just days earlier.

Mr Garratt needed eight stitches in his left arm after Monday evening’s attack.

He told the Leicester Mercury: “I don’t think they thought anyone would tackle them.

“I didn’t really feel it when I was cut on the arm and hand until afterwards. There was blood everywhere.

“The only thing I could find to arm myself with was a bottle of sherry.

0:33 video from security camera.

The Exmoor Foxhounds

The Telegraph reports that turnout at this year’s opening meets and sales at hunt-oriented businesses are booming, despite the Labour Party’s Hunt Ban.

Part of the hunting boom is attributable to sportsmen’s success in devising ways of working around the Ban, such as a more realistic kind of drag hunting termed “trail hunting,” but resistance to the Ban is also a factor.

As the season gallops into action on Saturday, William Little finds that the post-ban hunting world is booming.

According to the Countryside Alliance, there has been a 10 per cent increase in people who pay full subscription – ie go out every week or more.

This represents an increase of 5,000 people on the number that hunted before the fox ban. On Boxing Day, popular with fair-weather riders, an estimated 30,000 more people take part than before the ban.

There is also anecdotal evidence to suggest a considerable increase in the number of people who follow hunts in cars and on foot. ...

Instead of the law causing the demise of hunting and its supporting trades, such as farriers and liveries, the upsurge in newcomers has brought a rural economic boom.

Jenny McCarthy posts dispatches from the front lines of Britain’s class war.

The old-fashioned stereotype of a Tory used to be someone “very fat, very lazy, and very clever,” someone rather like Evelyn Waugh. But embonpoint today is looked upon in Britain, not as an indication of access to good dining and fine wine, but as a sure indicator of indiscipline and low achievement. Basically, Britain’s elite is today firmly Puritan, at least with respect to body image.

Jeremy Clarkson... wrote last week of his experiences driving the new Rolls-Royce coupé around town: “It’s been a genuinely alarming insight into the bitterness of Britain’s obese and stupid underclass.”

When he drove past a bus queue, he said, he realised that “hate is something you can touch and see and smell.”

The “obese and stupid” people at the bus stop hadn’t done anything specific, it seemed: presumably they had simply failed to light up with sufficient admiration as Clarkson coasted by in his swanky car.

Still, you don’t have to be Karl Marx to reflect that if you were waiting for a bus while fretting about the rising cost of heating the family home, the sudden appearance of Clarkson in a £296,500 vehicle might not fill the heart with unalloyed joy.

In July, the Sunday Times and Spectator columnist Rod Liddle saw a fat woman and her plump children in a supermarket.

She didn’t say or do anything discourteous, it appeared, nor did the children, but the mere glimpse of “this hag”, her “vile lardy brood” and the contents of her shopping trolley prompted the writer to a bizarre rant which culminated in the fantasy that “I set the fat mother on fire with my Zippo lighter, and on the way out I kicked the smallest fat child hard in the gut.”

It is worth pointing out that while both Clarkson and Liddle are normal-looking men, neither would exactly be in line to win the Weight Watchers Slimmer of the Year Award. But then middle-class fat is, for them, texturally different from underclass fat. Good things have poured into middle-class fat, you see: steak, Roquefort, red wine and a heartily robust enjoyment of life. Underclass fat, however, being composed entirely of chicken nuggets, chips and wilful idleness, is a mark of moral degeneracy.

The people who are quickest to sneer at “chavs” and the perceived physical shortcomings of the “underclass” often seem to be those most obsessed with flaunting their own “bling” and extending their unprovoked rudeness to those with far less social and financial clout. Odd, that. It does sometimes leave you wondering, though, just what the term “to behave with class” really means.

The interior-linked anti-obesity rants are hilarious.

Urbanista Amanda Platell takes to the moors for one of those journalistic visiting the rustic primitives who shoot think pieces, and finds the shooting sports and the pursuit of the red grouse nothing like what she expected.

Like many townies, my prejudices about the Glorious Twelfth were well and truly fully formed. The official start of the shooting season was nothing more than an ancient ritual to massacre thousands of defenceless birds.

The killers were a bunch of men with Prince Charles cut-crystal accents looking down their long aristocratic noses at ordinary folk like me, city folk, you know, the kind who have to buy their own furniture. Their dogs would have better pedigrees than me.

So it was with some cynicism and not a little trepidation that I agreed to take part in the Glorious Twelfth last Tuesday, the traditional start of the shooting season, on a moor on the Durham/ Northumberland border. ...

Odd, isn’t it, that we city dwellers feel squeamish at the thought of an animal being bred and ultimately shot in the wild, yet feel no pangs over the battery chickens or pigs raised in appalling conditions for our table.

But I wanted to put my prejudices to the test and, more importantly, to try better to understand the problems facing our beleaguered countryside, bled dry by a government that neither knows nor cares about voters outside of their urban heartlands.

The Daily Mail does a fine job of demonstrating just how clueless it is, illustrating a red grouse (Lagopus lagopus) shooting article with a nice picture of a capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), and identifying a picture of a shooter aiming a great big over-and-under shotgun as the “traditional image” simply because the man in the picture is wearing tweeds. Amanda’s side-by-side double is, of course, far more traditional. Nobody cares about waxed cotton versus tweed.

.

Submerged in recent times, there was in the Mesolithic period a land bridge connecting Britain with the continent. Fishermen working the Dogger Banks have pulled up prehistoric human artifacts in their nets, and archaeologists consequently named the sunken landscape once thick with human settlement Doggerland. Efforts at mapping Doggerland are currently underway.

Nature News:

Doggerland is key to understanding the Mesolithic in northern Europe,” says Vince Gaffney, a landscape archaeologist at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Along with his colleagues Simon Fitch and the late Ken Thomson, Gaffney established the mapping project to outline the terrain of Doggerland, named after the sandbank and shipping hazard of the Dogger Bank (see ‘Mesolithic sites around the North Sea’). They managed to borrow seismic survey data, which outline sediment layers below the seabed, from the Norwegian oil company Petroleum Geo-Services. The researchers then put their powerful computers to work to reconstruct Doggerland in three dimensions.

In a pilot project beginning in 2002, the researchers reconstructed 6,000 square metres of the ancient landscape — slightly larger than a football field. There, about 10 metres beneath the modern seabed, they discovered the course of a major ancient river, almost as big as today’s Rhine. They named it the Shotton River, after Birmingham geologist Fred Shotton who, among other things, was dropped behind enemy lines to map the geology of the Normandy beaches before the D-Day landings. Now confident that the reconstruction would work, the researchers expanded the project. The result is a 23,000-square-kilometre map of a part of Doggerland — an area the size of Wales — that they hope eventually to extend northward as well as eastward, towards the Netherlands.

Alexander Allan, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee of the United Kingdom, had been hospitalized and under guard since being found unconscious at his home a week ago today.

The Telegraph today supplied additional details.

He was found by Dominique Salm, a painter who rents an artist’s studio in his west London home.

According to neighbours she found him slumped unconscious with “blood everywhere”. ...

Whitehall sources are blaming the collapse on pneumonia.

Rumors have been flying of Allan being the victim of an assassination attempt by foreign enemies. Russia and Al Qaeda head the list of suspects, but no precise motive for such a crime has been so far identified.

Daily Mail:

For nearly a quarter of a century, Lourdes Maxwell has celebrated the arrival of summer by putting a paddling pool in the garden.

This year, however, her two grandchildren and the children of her neighbours may have to find another way to cool off in the heat.

Miss Maxwell’s local council has decided that the pool – which is only 2ft deep – needs a lifeguard.

The 47-year-old divorced mother of three has also been told she must have insurance before she can inflate the toy outside her house in Portsmouth.

Gin, a dancing border collie, wows the judges on the Britain’s Got Talent television program.

4:08 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Captain Francis Stockdale in Waziristan, 1919

The BBC reports that the privately-printed memoir of a British officer deserves wider contemporary circulation, proving that, in that particular inclement corner of the world, little has changed in nearly a century, beyond precisely who it is the locals are sniping at.

In 1919, a young British army officer, Francis Stockdale, was deployed to the Waziristan area of British India.

The title of his book, “Walk Warily in Waziristan” seems no less appropriate now than it did 90 years ago, because today the autonomous Pakistani tribal region of North and South Waziristan is the centre of militancy orchestrated by pro-Taleban and al-Qaeda militants.

It is also an area where many believe the al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, may be hiding after the September 2001 World Trade Centre attacks.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that Capt Stockdale’s family published a handful of copies of the book, only a few of which survive. But because or renewed interest in the region, the family in the English county of Norfolk are considering reprinting it.

The book provides a fascinating account of what was regarded then – as it is today – as a thoroughly dangerous area.

One of the main towns close to Waziristan is Tank. Capt Stockdale describes it as being “the worst station in British India”.

“It was known as ‘Hell’s door knocker’ because in the summer the temperature would rise so high that a village nearby rejoiced in the highest temperature in the world – a modest 131 degrees in the shade.

“But it was also an area where hostile tribesman waited, watched and pounced,” he wrote.

“My memories of Tank are characterised by sporadic outbreaks of rifle fire by night and spasmodic outbreaks of cholera during the day. The town fully deserved its poor reputation.”

Capt Stockdale goes on to describe just how dangerous the “hostile tribesmen” were in the Wana, the main town of South Waziristan, when a sniper infiltrated a British camp.

“Like all tribesmen in this area, he was a marvellous shot,” Capt Stockdale wrote, “and he killed the commanding officer with his first shot.

“He killed or wounded 11 other men before his hiding place was discovered.”

Ninety years ago, it seemed that British troops in Waziristan faced the same kind of dangers as Pakistani troops in the region do today.

Read the whole thing.

I’d a lot rather watch this form of competition than baseball or football.

Devonport (whatever that is) versus Portsmouth 5:49 video

Hat tip to Theo.

No one wants to see the last remnant breeding population of the Greater Spotted Watzit hunted to extinction. So passing Endangered Species Legislation internationally was a piece of cake. Hunters and animal rights enthusiasts came happily together, beaming with joy, as our political leaders a generation ago signed measures providing such protections into law.

No one foresaw that, in the United States, obscure and totally uninteresting weeds, rodents, or newts would soon be utilized to block developments opposed by selfish neighbors or mere crackpots.

It was also overlooked that somebody, i.e. a committee of obscure and unknown academics meeting happily during well-funded junkets to Geneva, would be empowered to identify as “Endangered” anything they pleased, with no appeal, or recourse to the facts, available.

Big game hunters soon found that many trophies of legally shot game species could no longer be brought back from Safari, because, for instance, the reduction of numbers of leopards in certain portions of the big cat’s historic range (and the politics of preservationism) proved perfectly adequate to persuade the Olympians meeting in Geneva to declare all leopards “endangered,” even where leopards were superabundant or where leopards locally represented a hazard or a pest.

In today’s Britain, superabundant badgers are causing problems for farmers by spreading bovine tuberculosis, but Brock the Badger is utterly and completely protected by law. So much as mess with a badger’s den, and you may get six months in chokey for every badger you’ve theoretically inconvenienced.

The Times of London notes:

Once a species manages to creep on to a protected list, there is no shifting it. Badgers have gained their untouchable status because, in the 1950s and 1960s, farmers were ploughing up their setts. A law requiring farmers to seek licences before destroying setts was passed in 1973. As a result, badgers featured in the Council of Europe’s Bern Treaty in 1979, which committed Britain to protecting the species for ever after. The more badger numbers have increased, the more the Government has defended them. The 1992 Act does include provisions for farmers to seek licences to control badgers, but hardly any have been issued since 1997.

In other words, whether an animal is protected or not owes little to its current numbers; it just depends on how EU ministers were feeling after a good lunch in Switzerland 29 years ago.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Maybe he will.

Musical link

The Telegraph reports that yon wee Gordon Brown is thinking of repealing the 1701 Act of Succession, thus restoring the rights of the Jacobite heir to the royal succession, Duke Francis of Bavaria.

Jane’s Information Group launched last month a new intelligence service providing “Country Risk Ratings” evaluating the stability of 232 countries, non-contiguous territories and de facto independent political entities on the basis of two dozen security factors.

The London Times reports that the US failed to make the top cut, coming in as number 22. Vatican City was at the top of the list. And Labour Britain (7) beat out Switzerland (17).

Switzerland lost points for some sort of deficiency in “social achievements,” presumably meaning it didn’t have enough Socialism.

The US did so poorly because of “the proliferation of small arms owned by Americans” and “the threat posed by the flow of drugs across the Mexican border.”

What a bunch of Euro-wussies they’ve got at Jane’s! These are the guys assessing the merits of different weapons systems?

Americans are safer than Europeans precisely because we own guns, and can in an emergency shoot the criminal, repel the invasion, or overthrow the government. Sophisticated Americans, particularly those of us who were at Woodstock, look upon recreational drugs as “the doors of perception,” or an alternative form of weekend conviviality, not as a threat to national security. Those Jane’s analysts really need to go over to Amsterdam and undertake some first hand research.

They don’t like guns. They don’t like drugs. The list of “security factors” was hidden behind a subscription barrier, but I suspect that sex and Rock & Roll must have been in there, too.

Sky News:

British athletes competing in this year’s Beijing Olympic Games must sign contracts banning them from talking about politics, it is reported.

Athletes must not mention politics -The clause – inserted in contracts for the first time – mean competitors must not comment on “politically sensitive” issues.

It then refers to the International Olympic Committee charter, which “provides for no kind of demonstration, or political, religious or racial propaganda in the Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

The ban means athletes cannot discuss issues such as China’s human rights record or Tibet.

Those who refuse to sign-up face not be allowed to compete and anyone breaking the order could be sent home.

British suspect, tripped in the lavatory

Younes Tsouli, a 23-year-old IT student and son of a Morrocan diploma, is facing terrorism charges in Britain for building several web sites since 2005, including one revealingly titled YOUBOMBIT, promoting Islamic extremism and supporting al Qaeda. His web-sites featured videos of speeches by Osama bin Laden and images of kidnappings and the murder of hostages in Iraq.

The Daily Mail reports that “his arrest led to the arrest of several Islamic terrorists around the world, including 17 men in Canada and two in the US.”

Looking at Mr. Tsouli’s face in the above photograph, one is obliged to conclude that either the poor chap fell down several times, or that he might just possibly have been on the receiving end of some encouragement to talk from British authorities. But there’s not even the slightest notice in the linked British news story of all the marks and contusions on the young man’s face. Just imagine what the New York Times or the Washington Post would say if some pro-al-Qaeda programmer were arraigned in a US court looking like that.

Roger Kimball describes how Western courts are being successfully used to suppress criticism of Islamic extremism.

Last summer, Cambridge University Press announced that it would pulp all unsold copies of its 2006 book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World by Robert O. Collins, a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, and J. Millard Burr, a retired employee of the State Department. Why? Because Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker, filed a libel claim to quash the book. According to a story in The Chronicle for Higher Education [reg req’d], Cambridge instantly capitulated, paid “substantial damages” to Mr. Mahfouz, and even went so far as to contact university libraries worldwide to ask them to remove the book from their shelves. They seem to have been successful in their request: I have searched high and low for the book in academic libraries and public libraries and have found that, although it is listed as “not checked out,” it is nowhere to be found.

Suppressing books he doesn’t like seems to be a hobby of Mr. Mahfouz’s. His web site lists successful actions against three other books Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden and Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed—and How to Stop It. As Robert Spencer explained in The Washington Times, one notable feature of Mr. Mahfouz’s legal actions is that he has sued various American authors in Britain, where libel laws favor the plaintiff.

Yossi Klein Halevi provides the Israeli perspective in the New Republic.

The sense of betrayal within the Israeli security system is deep. After all, Israel’s great achievement in its struggle against Iran was in convincing the international community that the nuclear threat was real; now that victory has been undone—not by Russia or the European Union, but by Israel’s closest ally.

What makes Israeli security officials especially furious is that the report casts doubt on Iranian determination to attain nuclear weapons. There is a sense of incredulity here: Do we really need to argue the urgency of the threat all over again? The Israeli strategists I heard from ridicule the report’s contention that “Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.” Is it, asks one Israeli analyst sarcastically, a cost-benefit approach for one of the world’s largest oil exporters to risk international sanctions and economic ruin for the sake of a peaceful nuclear program?

No one with whom I’ve spoken believes that professional considerations, such as new intelligence, were decisive in changing the American assessment on Iran. What has been widely hailed in the American media as an expression of intelligence sobriety, even courage, is seen in the Israeli strategic community as precisely the opposite: an expression of political machination and cowardice. “The Americans often accuse us of tailoring our intelligence to suit our political needs,” notes a former top security official. “But isn’t this report a case study of doing precisely that?”

Adds a key security analyst: “The report didn’t surprise me. The [American intelligence] system isn’t healthy. It has been thoroughly politicized.

And today’s Telegraph reports that British Intelligence also is questioning the bases for the NIE’s conclusions.

British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran.

Analysts believe that Iranian staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation

The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.

The security services in London want concrete evidence to allay concerns that the Islamic state has fed disinformation to the CIA.

The report used new evidence – including human sources, wireless intercepts and evidence from an Iranian defector – to conclude that Teheran suspended the bomb-making side of its nuclear programme in 2003. But British intelligence is concerned that US spy chiefs were so determined to avoid giving President Bush a reason to go to war – as their reports on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes did in Iraq – that they got it wrong this time.

A senior British official delivered a withering assessment of US intelligence-gathering abilities in the Middle East and revealed that British spies shared the concerns of Israeli defence chiefs that Iran was still pursuing nuclear weapons.

The source said British analysts believed that Iranian nuclear staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation.

Guardian:

The region around Liverpool was once a major Viking settlement, according to a genetic study of men living in the area.

The research tapped into this Viking ancestry by focusing on people whose surnames were recorded in the area before its population underwent a huge expansion during the industrial revolution. Among men with these “original” surnames, 50% have Norse ancestry.

The find backs up historical evidence from place names and archaeological finds of Viking treasure which suggests significant numbers of Norwegian Vikings settled in the north-west in the 10th century. “[The genetics] is very exciting because it ties in with the other evidence from the area,” said Professor Stephen Harding at the University of Nottingham, who carried out the work with a team at the University of Leicester led by Professor Mark Jobling.

They used historical documents, including a tax register from the time of Henry VIII, to identify surnames common in the region. They then recruited 77 male volunteers with “original” surnames, and looked for a genetic signature of Viking ancestry on the Y chromosome. They report in Molecular Biology and Evolution that a Y chromosome type, R1a, common in Norway, is also very common among men with original surnames.

AFP:

An archaeologist using radar technology said Monday he has found the outline of what he believes is a 1,000-year-old Viking longship under a pub car park in north-west England.

Professor Stephen Harding used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to trace the outline of a vessel matching the scale and shape of a longship, perhaps from the time Vikings settled in Meols, on the Wirral peninsula in Merseyside.

Meols has one of Britain’s best preserved Viking settlements, buried deep beneath the village and nearby coastal defences.

Harding, from the University of Nottingham in east central England, is now seeking funds to pay for an archaeological dig to search for the vessel which lies beneath two-to-three metres of waterlogged clay.

“The next stage is the big one. Using the GPR technique only cost 450 pounds but we have to think carefully about what to do next,” Harding said.

“Although we still don’t know what sort of vessel it is, it’s very old for sure and its Nordic clinker design, position and location suggests it may be a transport vessel from the Viking settlement period if not long afterwards.”

The ship was first uncovered in 1938 when the Railway Inn was demolished and rebuilt further away from the road, with the site of the old pub turned into a car park.

Workers unearthed part of an old clinker-built vessel but were told by the foreman to cover it over again to keep construction on course.

Harding said he believes it might be possible to access the vessel from the pub cellar, where the public could eventually view it.

Reintroduced via batches of chicks imported from Russia, the largest Eurasian game bird the Great Bustard, Otis tarda, is being reported to have nested in Britain for the first time, as the London Times puts it, “since Queen Victoria was a child (1832).”

A female bustard has laid two eggs somewhere on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. The precise location is not being publicly released in order to foil the hordes of mad-keen British ornithologists (bird watchers) and the now nearly as endangered as the bustards themselves oologists (collectors of birds’ eggs).

Press release with photo

London Times

Telegraph

UK Great Bustard Reintroduction Project

The primary wing feathers of the great Bustard play an important role in the dressing of traditional featherwing Salmon Flies, being featured as ingredients in the wing of many of the most famous patterns.

Jock Scott

The large patterned black-and-orange mottled strip of feather, third from the top in the wing, beneath the Golden Pheasant crest feather and brown mallard, is from the great Bustard.

There is a bloody brave little animal in Africa called the honey badger. It may be the meanest animal in the world. It kills for malice and for sport, and it does not go for the jugular—it goes straight for the groin.—Robert Ruark

0:52 video of Iraqi proudly holding up a specimen… a big specimen!

IRAQSlogger Zeyad Kasim tells a tale of nightime fear gripping the native villagers of Southern Iraq.

For over a month now, people in Basrah have been circulating rumors about a “strange,” bear-like deadly creature that attacks people at night with its strong claws. Locals in rural areas around Basrah claim it has killed three people and injured six others, and that it usually pounces on its victims as they are sleeping outdoors during hot summer nights, when electric power outages are common. Farmers at Garmat Ali, Abu Skheer, Jisr and Shikhatta were so alarmed, they assigned guarding duties at night to prevent its attacks, the Nahrain website and Radio Sawa reported last week.

Eventually, several animals were caught or killed – up to 28, locals claimed – and cell phone videos of them were published on Iraqi websites and forums. The dead creatures look like honey badgers, compact but vicious omnivores that typically consume insects and small animals. Honey badgers are more prevalent in Iran—their presence in Iraq dwindled after the destruction of the salt marsh habitat in the south.

Residents of Garmat Ali, north west of Basrah, hanged one of the killed badgers on the Garma bridge that connects the southern city to the main Baghdad-Basrah highway, according to Mudhar Nazar, a resident interviewed by the pan-Arab Al-Hayat daily. “It looks like a dog, but its head looks like that of a bear,” said Nazar. “It has short hands and 15-cm-long claws, long hair, a penis like a man’s, and it only moves around at night.”

The animal is known locally as the Garta or ‘the muncher,’ and mothers in Basrah used to tell scary stories about the Garta to their children so they would not wander out alone at night. Old families in Basrah believe the animal brings bad luck because it is mostly found in cemeteries at night. The unusual phenomenon, however, is their sudden appearance in large numbers near the city and their increasingly aggressive behavior.

The rumors led people to indulge in conspiracy theories, speculating that U.S. or British forces have dropped large numbers of this animal, or its “eggs,” around Basrah in order to spread chaos and instability, while others say the animal crossed over from neighboring Iran through the marshes.

The mysterious origin of the badgers has become the talk of the town and outlandish stories have proliferated in Basrah as a result, local Slogger sources say. People are now sharing stories about British troops unleashing stray dogs – which locals have described as German Shepherds, known in Iraq as “police dogs.” British troops often release military dogs, used to detect explosives, on the streets when they become too old to perform their duties, said Abbas Kadhim, an Iraqi policeman in Basrah, according to Al-Hayat.

In the orchards of Abu Al-Khasib (20 km south east of Basrah), locals are talking about huge 6-metre-long snakes in water creeks, with one fisherman even claiming a seal (sea lion) fell into his nets. Fisherman in Faw, near the Persian (Arabian) Gulf, also claimed to have caught two dolphins in the Shatt Al-Arab waterway.

Authorities in Basrah have not commented on the rumors, but Dr. Mishtaq Abdul Mahdi, director of the Basrah Veterinary Hospital, dismissed them as nonsense and revealed that the honey badger is actually an indigenous animal that has been present in the marshes of southern Iraq and rural areas around Basrah for decades, in an interview with WNA News.

Dr. Abdul Mahdi said the hospital has so far received three of the badgers killed by farmers in Garmat Ali, Shikhatta and Abu Sikheer.

The BBC reports:

British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.

But several of the creatures, caught and killed by local farmers, have been identified by experts as honey badgers.

The rumours spread because the animals had appeared near the British base at Basra airport.

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

“We have been told these are indigenous nocturnal carnivores that don’t attack humans unless cornered.”

The director of Basra’s veterinary hospital, Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, has inspected several of the animals’ corpses.

He said: “These appeared before the fall of the regime in 1986. They are known locally as Al-Girta.

“Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific.”

London Times story:

British forces operating around the southern Iraqi city of Basra are being blamed for the arrival of a plague of vicious badgers that stalk the streets at night, attacking livestock and even humans.

Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel rumours of a bear-like monster that eats humans and was, according to the local rumour mill, released into the area by UK forces to spread panic.

Major David Gell, a British Army spokesman, said the animals were thought to be a kind of honey badger or ratel – melivora capensis – which can be fierce but are not usually dangerous to humans unless provoked.

The animals are indigenous to Africa and large parts of the Middle East and are about the same size as European European badgers but much more aggressive, with long claws and strong jaws. They have been described in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most fearless animal.

“They are native to the region but rare in Iraq. They’re nocturnal carnivores with a fearsome reputation, but they don’t stalk humans and carry them back to their lair,” Major Gell said.

Iraqi scientists have attempted to calm the public but the story of the British badgers has spread like wildfire through Basra and the surrounding villages.

Mushtaq Abdul-Mahdi, director of Basra’s veterinary hospital, has inspected the corpses of several dead badgers and sought to reassure his fellow citizens that they are not new to the region but had been seen well before Saddam’s ouster in 2003.

“Talk that this animal was brought by the British forces is incorrect and unscientific,” Mr Abdul-Mahdi told AFP.

But their numbers are increasing, possibly, scientists say, because Iraqi authorities are trying to reflood marshlands north of Basra that were drained under Saddam Hussein.

So far neither the scientists nor the soldiers have been able to calm the populace’s fears.

The ferocious creature is none other than Bob Ruark’s brave, bloody Honey Badger, Mellivora capensis, native “throughout most of Africa and western and south Asian areas of Baluchistan (eastern Iran), southern Iraq, Pakistan and Rajasthan (western India).”

At 50in high from head to paw and still growing, Samson, a Great Dane/Newfoundland cross is Britain’s biggest dog

Telegraph:

Standing 6ft 5in (1.956 meters) on its hind legs and tipping the scales at 19st 10lb (276 lbs. = 125.19 kg.), Samson is a giant in every sense of the word. ...

He boasts a 59in (1.499 meter) chest and a 29in (.737 meter) neck, meaning he has to wear pony coats when it rains and has had to have an extra large collar fitted. The dog’s paws are almost the size of dinner plates.

While Samson’s awesome build is impressive enough for a fully grown dog, this huge hound is only three years old and will grow even more.

Julie Woods, 54 and her husband Ray, 65, whose last dog was a small terrier, spend £60 a month on dried food and turkey legs for Samson and take him on four two-mile walks a day.

Mrs Woods, from Boston, Lincs, said: “He’s a lovely dog whose bark is definitely worse than his bite. People are often intimidated when they first see him because he’s about the size of a small horse and very quick.

slideshow

Read the whole article.

WorldNetDaily:

Across town from the site of the recent attempted car-bomb attacks, several thousand Muslims gathered in front of the London Central Mosque to applaud fiery preachers prophesying the overthrow of the British government – a future vision that encompasses an Islamic takeover of the White House and the rule of the Quran over America.

“One day my dear Muslims,” shouted Anjem Choudary, “Islam will govern Britain!”

Choudary was a co-founder of Al Muhajiroun, the now-banned group tied to suspects in the July 7, 2005, London transport bombings and a cheerleader of the 9/11 attacks.

“Democracy, hypocrisy,” Choudary chanted as the crowd echoed him. “Tony Blair, terrorist! Tony Blair, murderer! Queen Elizabeth, go to hell!” ...

Abu Saif is believed to be a member of the group Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation, which states its aim is to unify Muslims and establish Islamic rule over the world. The group’s Cambridge cell reportedly had tried to recruit the Iraqi doctor now suspected of mounting the attack on Glasgow’s airport June 30. The failed car-bomb assault followed two similar attempts in London the previous day.

Abu Saif spoke with disdain of Blair’s appointment as a special envoy to the Middle East, issuing an apparent threat.

“Inshallah,” meaning “Allah willing,” he told the crowd, Blair will “go to the Middle East as an envoy, and he’ll come back in a box. Inshallah. What box that is, we leave that up to you.”...

Humphries’ interview with Abu Saif underscored the radically different vision many of Britain’s citizens have for the country’s future.

The Muslim leader said he does not believe in democracy and insists there is no such thing as freedom of religion, “because freedom is an absolute term.”

“Are we to say that Muslims can fully practice religion in America,” he asked in an attempt to explain. “Say, for instance, I was a Muslim in America. Could I call for the destruction of the American government and establishment of an Islamic state in America? No. So where is the freedom of religion? There is none.”

Humphries asked: “Do you call for that?”

“Of course,” he replied, “we want Islam to be a source of governance for all of mankind. And we also believe that one day America will be ruled by Islam.”

Abu Saif explained Islam, like Christianity, has a prophetic tradition.

“One of the prophecies of the message of Muhammad was the hour will never come, i.e., the last day – which you also believe in – will never come until a group of the Muslims … will rise and conquer the white house.”

The Guardian indicates that the recent bomb attacks in Britain were thwarted by means of surveillance of telephone and email traffic.

The plot to mount car bomb attacks in Britain was hatched outside the UK, with the doctors allegedly involved linked to a ringleader or mastermind abroad, counter-terrorism officials believe. One theory is that the alleged plot was orchestrated by one or two jihadists who infiltrated the NHS and indoctrinated others.

It emerged last night that investigators suspect that the two men caught at Glasgow airport trying to ram a Jeep into the terminal building were also behind the failed attempt to detonate two car bombs in central London last Friday.

Sources also suggested that all known members of the cell had been accounted for. “There is not a huge manhunt,” one well-placed official said. Though the terrorist threat level remains at “critical” there were indications that it would soon be downgraded to “severe”, meaning an attack is highly likely but not imminent.

All eight people arrested have links with the NHS - seven are doctors or medical students and one worked as a laboratory technician. All entered the UK legally.

Intelligence sources last night declined to say where the “guiding hand” or mastermind behind the plot was based. It is likely, given the dates on which some of the suspects entered Britain, that the plot was hatched a year ago, or even earlier.

Though MI5 insists none of the suspects arrested in connection with the plot were under surveillance, the mobile phones detectives recovered from the would-be car bombs contained details that matched material on the security service database. Counter-terrorism officials say data from the phones and email traffic was checked on the database used by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre. Connections were found linking that information and communications abroad, which enabled the police and security services to speed up their investigations in Britain.

“This linkage allowed the police to move quickly,” said a source. The foreign intercepts included talk of jihad, an official added. Counter-terrorism officials say the links between members of the British-based cell were via the foreign intercepts. It is believed, for example, that Mohamed Haneef, the doctor arrested at Brisbane airport, had long conversations with one of the suspects arrested in Britain.

The Sun is reporting:

Iranian forces are being choppered over the Iraqi border to bomb Our Boys, intelligence chiefs say.

Military experts claim this worrying move means we are at WAR with Iran in all but name.

Last night an intelligence source told The Sun: “It is an extremely alarming development and raises the stakes considerably. In effect, it means we are in a full on war with Iran — but nobody has officially declared it.

“We have hard proof that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have crossed the border to attack us.

“It is very hard for us to strike back. All we can do is try to defend ourselves. We are badly on the back foot.”

Our Boys picked up the Iranian helicopters on radar crossing into empty desert.

The sightings have been confirmed to The Sun by very senior military sources.

Depkafile reports (in non-linkable marquee’ing banner text):

British military source in Basra: We see the Iranians and their helicopters but are under strength to stop them.

But it looks like the Brits won’t be understrength to stop them much longer.

Depkafile also is reporting that third US carrier group, the Enterprise, is approaching the Arabian Gulf:

According to DEBKAfile’s military sources, the US naval build-up off the shores of Iran marks rising military tensions in the region. ...

The USS Enterprise CVN 65-Big E Strike Group will join the USS Stennis and the USS Nimitz carriers, building up the largest sea, air, marine concentration the United States has ever deployed opposite Iran. This goes towards making good on the assurances of four carriers US Vice President Dick Cheney offered the Gulf and Middle East nations during his May tour of the region.

The “Big E” leads a strike group consisting of the guided-missile destroyers USS Arleigh Burke DDG 51, USS Stout DDG 55, Forrest Sherman DDG 98 and USS James E. Williams DDG 95, as well as the guided missile cruiser USS Gettysburg CG 64, the SS Philadelphia SSN 690 nuclear submarine and the USNS Supply T-AOE 6>

On its decks are the Carrier Air Wing CVW 1, whose pilots fought combat missions in the Gulf and Arabian Sea during 2006. The Air Wing is made up of F/Q-18 Super Hornet strike craft, the Sidewinders Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-86, the 251st Marine Fighter Attack Squadron MFA, and the Electronic Attack Squadron VAQ 137.

The 32nd Sea Control Squadron VS consists of S-3B Vikings. The Airborne Early Warning Squadron VAQ 3 flies E-2C Hawkeye craft. The Fleet Logistics Support Squadron VRC is based on C-2A Greyhounds.

The Guardian reports:

The award of a knighthood to the author Salman Rushdie justifies suicide attacks, a Pakistani government minister said today.

“This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision,” Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. “The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the ‘sir’ title.”

After his comments were reported on local news stations, Mr ul-Haq told MPs that his aim had been to look into the root causes of terrorism.
The comments follow other condemnation of the award for Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses provoked worldwide protests over allegations that it insulted Islam.

He received the knighthood for services to literature in the Queen’s birthday honours list published on Saturday.

Earlier today Pakistani MPs demanded Britain withdraw Rushdie’s knighthood.

A government-backed resolution condemning the author’s knighthood was passed unanimously by the lower house of the Pakistani parliament amid angry protests across the country.

Gallery of photos of views from the tallest (170 meters 557 feet) glassfloored building in Europe: Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower.

Reuters:

A British artist has eaten chunks of a Corgi dog, the breed favored by Queen Elizabeth II, live on radio to protest against the royal family’s treatment of animals.

Mark McGowan, 37, said he ate “about three bites” of the dog meat, cooked with apples, onions and seasoning, to highlight what he called Prince Philip’s mistreatment of a fox during a hunt by the Queen’s husband in January.

“It was pretty disgusting,” McGowan said of the meal, which he ate while appearing on a London radio station on Tuesday. Yoko Ono, another guest on the show, also tried the meat. ...

Corgis are the favored dogs of the queen, who has owned more than 30 of them during her reign.

McGowan’s Corgi had evidently died of natural causes. One likes to hope of some particularly loathesome and communicable disease able to survive cooking.

Let’s hope that Prince Phillip will soon hunt another bold fox, and that the nincompoop McGowan will consequently get to consume some more dead dog.

And don’t forget to save some for Yoko!

Photo gallery

1:01 MSM video

1:21 YouTube video lets you hear this idiot’s vulgar accent and see his hostility.

His web-site announcing the event.

Wikipedia entry detailing this great artist’s other contributions to civilization.

The Telegraph reports:

Breaking into the exclusive Highgate property market in north London is notoriously difficult. But yesterday a homeless man apparently did the almost-impossible, managing to secure his very own slice of prime real estate on Hampstead Heath for free.

Harry Hallowes, 70, says he has been given the title deeds to a piece of land on the edge of the heath on which he has been squatting for more than two decades. The 65ft by 131ft plot has been estimated to be worth up to £2 million.

The Land Registry’s decision marks the end of a three-year dispute between Mr Hallowes and the property developer Dwyer.

The developers originally wanted to build on the land, which forms part of the grounds of Althone House. In 2005 Dwyer, which is turning a plot of land including a former nursing home into 25 luxury flats, failed in an attempt to evict Mr Hallowes.

At a court hearing over the eviction, lawyers presented evidence that Mr Hallowes had lived on the plot for 18 years. This later became the basis for his title claim for the land. Possession of the title deeds means the plot could now be sold or passed on.

Adverse possession is a standard principle of British and American Common Law.