Threepeat for Tony

The big news of the day is an historic third-consecutive majority Labour government for Tony Blair. With Labour winning 355 seats to the Conservative's 197 and Liberal Democrats' 62, the leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard, has already announced his intentions to resign from his position. Charles Kennedy is sticking around though, after leading his Liberal Democrats to their best electoral outcome since the 1920s. In a surprising upset, leader of the Ulster Unionists, key Ireland peace-deal figure and Nobel Peace Prize winner David Trimble lost his seat in Upper Bann to a more hard-line Unionist party candidate.

In other elections, early results show that Fatah has a lead over Hamas in the Palistinian election. In Ethiopia, the current Prime Minister is accusing opposition parties of stirring up ethnic hatred, while the opposition claim that the police and military are intimidating their supporters. This election is more important than you might think, since the United States has a military operation currently underway in Ethiopia to expose terrorist cells.

Kansas is once again going through the teaching evolution vs. intelligent design debate, holding four days of hearings on the matter. Mainstream scientists have boycotted the event, stating that the conservative panel is biased against their case. Instead, they have held a news conference where a wheelbarrow and two crates of journal articles supporting the case for evolution were presented to the media. The council for the evolutionists in the hearing in the meantime had ID's supporters admit that there was nothing in the curriculum currently that did not allow challenges to the theory of evolution.

The whole argument can be summed up first by William Harris of the Intelligent Design Network: "Part of our overall goal is to remove the bias against religion that is currently in schools." And second by Jack Krebs of the opposing Kansas Citizens for Science: "They have created a straw man. They are trying to make science stand for atheism, so they can fight atheism." This has nothing to do with science, with whether evolution is right or wrong, only about whether fundamentalist Christians can force their teachings on everyone in the school system.

In addition:
- More studies have shows the large benefits of antioxidants on human life span.
- The editor in Sudan has denied he made a slur against the Prophet Muhammad, apparently he was just joking.
- Egypt has arrested up to a thousand members of the Muslim Brotherhood for engaging in an unauthorized protest.
- A true popemobile, or the 1999 Golf that was formerly owned by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, has been sold on eBay to an American casino for $244,000US.
- American automobile manufacturers are doing less well. Standard and Poor has just reduced both GM and Ford to junk bond status.
- How Stuff Works commemorates the upcoming Star Wars movie with a new feature: How Light Sabres Work. I especially liked the 'how to use your light sabre around the home' pics.
- Just to show that this page is not solely about the esoteric -- this page shows the solution of a practical problem that has always haunted me: how to fold a fitted sheet properly.