UK 'will push EU on CO2 targets'

The UK government will push the EU to move to a higher target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It will urge the EU to cut emissions by 30% from 1990 levels by 2020, rather than the current 20% target, partly through more support for renewables.

A higher proportion of tax revenues will come from environmental taxes.

In 2009, EU leaders endorsed two targets for greenhouse gas emissions - 20%, rising to 30% in the event of a global deal on climate change.

That failed to materialise at December's Copenhagen summit.

But the recession has lowered emissions across the continent, making the higher target more easily achievable.

Environment groups have been lobbying governments to move to 30% immediately, to re-stake the EU's claim for global leadership on climate change - a call that the coalition has now endorsed.

Only problem is the conservative-Lib Dem coalition also confirmed there would be a free vote on fox-hunting and that badger culling was back on the agenda for England

10 Misconceptions About Neanderthals

As of 2009, the complete Neanderthal genome has been mapped. The most important implication of this is that it now becomes technically possible to clone a Neanderthal – to raise them back from the dead so to speak. The current estimated cost of doing this is $30 million US and no one is putting up the cash. There are ethical questions that are always going to be raised regarding cloning and this is also a hindrance. But there is absolutely no reason not to believe that we will – one day – be able to give birth to and raise a Neanderthal (or at least the closest thing possible to one).

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Anti-gay laws in Africa are product of American religious exports

When he arrived at Kampala’s Hotel Triangle for a three-day conference, the Rev Kapya Kaoma knew that he would not like what he heard.

The clue was in the event’s title — “Exposing the truth behind homosexuality and the homosexual agenda” — and in the line-up of guest speakers arranged by Stephen Langa, head of the Ugandan-based Family Life Network (FLN), and an outspoken advocate for the criminalisation of homosexuality in Uganda.

Given top billing at the event hosted by the FLN was Scott Lively, president of Abiding Truth Ministries, an American conservative Christian group from California, and a Holocaust revisionist whose controversial book The Pink Swastika names homosexuals as “the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities.”

Weeks after the Kampala conference in March last year — which followed a meeting between the speakers and members of the Ugandan Parliament — a clause appeared in the country’s draft Anti-Homosexuality Bill recommending life imprisonment for certain homosexual “crimes” or, for “serial offenders”, the death sentence.

To Mr Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia who is project director of Political Research Associates — a Massachusetts-based progressive think-tank — it was further evidence of how America’s Christian Right has stoked intolerance to homosexuality in Africa.

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Cameron, Clegg and...chimps?

An interesting article from Anjana Ahuja of the TimesOnline.co.uk website's Eureka Zone section on British Politics and how our common ancestors with Chimpanzee's have been doing the same thing for millions of years.

By bringing their two tribes together, David Cameron and Nick Clegg are hardly making history. They might be partners in the first coalition government that Britain has seen for 65 years but they are, in fact, practising a behaviour that dates back more than five million years.

It was mainly thanks to the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal that psychologists discovered that people don't have the monopoly on forming coalitions. His pioneering observations at Arnhem Zoo, summarised in his 1982 classic Chimpanzee Politics, showed that chimpanzees can be as artful as politicians in orchestrating tactical partnerships and strategic alliances. This has led primatologists and others to conclude that the ability to form coalitions goes back at least as far as the common ancestor of humans and chimps, giving it a provenance of five to seven million years.

In hierarchical chimp colonies, governed by an alpha male, lower-ranking males sometimes gang up to depose the alpha. In fact, these colonies often form a landscape of constantly shifting alliances, with deposed alphas returning later to seize the throne once more. Interestingly, female chimps also form their own alliances to keep overly domineering male counterparts in check, and sometimes to aid the underdog as the colony reconfigures itself

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This is how Muslims should protest

A great article from Michael Peck of True Slant website was posted today that got me thinking.

No bombs. No murders. No screaming fanatics shouting “Allah Akbar” as they attempt to remove someone’s head for daring to draw the Prophet Muhammad.

When the Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics association at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to defend the right of free speech by drawing stick figures of the Prophet Muhammed on campus sidewalks, the campus Muslim Students Association quickly responded. They followed the atheists on their blasphemous journey, and whenever a drawing of the Prophet Muhammed appeared, the Muslim students drew boxing gloves on the figure, and changed the name to Muhammed Ali.

That’s it. No fights. No hatred. Now the atheists are sparring with the college administration over the right to draw Muhammed, but that’s a different matter. Confronted with satire, the Muslim students responded with humor (yes, you could say they desecrated the atheists’ grafitti, but grafitti artists are in no position to complain). Some of their co-religionists will denounce them for not being more zealous (as in violent) in defending their faith. But I think the students gained more respect for Islam by using chalk rather than guns.

Make cartoons, not war.

I couldn't agree more with Mr Peck, and to be honest although I made my own picture of Mohammad, I do believe that some people have taken things too far. Not by the grotesque nature of the drawings, but because some people used the demonstration as an excuse to front their hatred for the Islamic religion.

Anyone who tries to blaspheme against any particular religion because they don't agree or understand it, or even worse because its different to their own religion is really being very hypocritical.

The whole purpose of Draw Mohammad Day is to demonstrate that we cannot be intimidated by fear mongers trying to protect their own interests.

If a group of devout Rolling Stones fans threatened to kill anyone who drew a picture of Keith Richards, then it would make sense that everyone show them that they are not intimidated by their idiotic threats.

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A Nigerian Witch-Hunter Defends Herself

HOUSTON — At home in Nigeria, the Pentecostal preacher Helen Ukpabio draws thousands to her revival meetings. Last August, when she had herself consecrated Christendom’s first “lady apostle,” Nigerian politicians and Nollywood actors attended the ceremony. Her books and DVDs, which explain how Satan possesses children, are widely known.

So well-known, in fact, that Ms. Ukpabio’s critics say her teachings have contributed to the torture or abandonment of thousands of Nigerian children — including infants and toddlers — suspected of being witches and warlocks. Her culpability is a central contention of “Saving Africa’s Witch Children,” a documentary that made its American debut Wednesday on HBO2.

Those disturbed by the needless immiseration of innocent children should beware. “Saving Africa’s Witch Children” follows Gary Foxcroft, founder of the charity Stepping Stones Nigeria, as he travels the rural state of Akwa Ibom, rescuing children abused during horrific “exorcisms” — splashed with acid, buried alive, dipped in fire — or abandoned roadside, cast out of their villages because some itinerant preacher called them possessed.

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Bonobos Say No by Shaking Heads Like Humans?

From the National Geographic website comes a cool video for the first time, according to researchers, bonobos have been recorded shaking their heads to discourage other bonobos from doing something—perhaps a "primitive precursor of the human head shake."

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