"I think this makes Mr Howard the first practising Jew to be leader of a major political party in Britain"

According to the corrections column in the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/corrections/story/0,3604,1077791,00.html there was a jewish Liberal leader in the 1930s, who served as Home Secretary in the National Government of 1931, called Herbert Samuel.

Since Michael Howard is likely to choose Oliver Letwin as shadow Chancellor this will mean that the top two positions in the Tory party are occupied by jewish MPs. I have decided that I will henceforth respond to any criticism of the Conservative party as being anti-semitic in motivation.

fredrik- LOL. Is that what those allegations which the UK press are not mentioning, are all about then?

The cover story of this weeks Spectator is about Darwin denial http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old§ion=current&issue=2003-10-25&id=3647 .

One of the interesting points made in the article is that even amoung people who believe in evolution ignorence is widespread, for example someone in the article explains evolution thus:

"If you use your thumbs a lot, you will have children with big thumbs. If they use their thumbs a lot, and so do their children, then eventually there will be a new sort of person with big thumbs."

So the struggle is not merely to get people to believe in evolution but to then get believers to understand natural selection.

"mercenaries are likely to commit crimes against humanity"

Why would they be any more likely to commit atrocities than regular soldiers? In 1998 in Sierra Leonne the British government paid Sandline International, a mercenaries firm basicly, to restore the democratic government to power after a coup d'etat. They were pretty effective. If America had done something similar in Liberia an awful lot of trouble would have been spared. As long as they are in the pay of a western government I would think that mercenaries are unlikely to go on a murder spree.