Telegraph | News | Revealed: the Iraqi colonel who told MI6 that Saddam could launch WMD within 45 minutes: “An Iraqi colonel who commanded a front-line unit during the build-up to the war in Iraq has revealed how he passed top secret information to British intelligence warning that Saddam Hussein had deployed weapons of mass destruction that could be used on the battlefield against coalition troops in less than 45 minutes.” He goes on to say that the claims were... Read more

Random Plug @ blogs4God.com: “Adrian’s a bright chap with a splendid blog.” Read more

Joshua Claybourn’s done a fine job of cheering me up this evening by email as I wait for the final verdict on the King of The Blogs. I feel certain I am not going to win- after all I’m not an American! Anyway, its all been fun and certainly given me a raft of new visitors to the Blog. Josh said ‘Adrian don’t loose hope. You run a great site, and I’ve been reading it regularly.’ Don’t worry Josh, I... Read more

Spider’s silk is, pound for pound, five times stronger than steel and far more elastic than rubber. For more than 10 years the US military has been trying to find ways of turning it into ultra-strong, lightweight, bulletproof vests. Spider silk is a material sciencewonder – a self-assembling, biodegradable,high-performance, nanofibre structure one-tenth the widthof a human hair that can stop a beetravelling at 20 mph without breaking.” “Spider silk has dwarfed man’s achievements in material science to date.” Guardian 2001 Read more

‘This is a fight for freedom. And I want to make it a fight for justice too justice to bring those same values of democracyand freedom to people around the world the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want or squalor from the deserts of north Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they are our cause.” This is as breathtaking in its scope as it is impossible to achieve through... Read more

JUST a reminder. Some 40m people are infected with HIV, the AIDS virus. Another 20m have died of it already. Around 3m more will do so over the next12 months. That is nearly 9,000 a day–three times as many people as died in the terrorist attack on the WorldTrade Centre (The Economist 2002) Read more

Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite so certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with a bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler ? That is why Christians are told not to judge.... Read more

keep your POWDER dry Oliver Cromwell (1599 1658) is said to have said this to troops when they were about to cross a river: Put your trust in God; but mind to keep your powder dry. This combining spiritual trust and sensible action is such a wise, seemingly obvious statement it is amazing how often it is ignored! Read more