I have this little journal I keep that I put all my rants and bitching and whining in so not everybody has to read it. It allows people to continue to think I am civilised and pleasant, easy-going and cheerful. :)

My frind Shona reads it, however, and we often email back and forth about our daily activities. Today she read the entry I wrote on my neighbours and was regaling me with advice on how to handle them. I told her to diguise the details and make a post because she had me laughing so much.

This she has done, and you may read it here:

Keep It N Da Hood 2Nite

Scotsman

TWO suspected Islamic terrorists killed 16 Chinese police officers in a surprise attack on their barracks today.
The men drove a dumper truck into a group of officers on their morning exercise jog, then threw explosives before attacking with knives in the troubled Central Asian border region.

The attack in Xinjiang province came just four days before the start of the Olympics which at least one militant muslim group has vowed to disrupt.

The attackers struck at 8am, ploughing into the police outside the Yijin Hotel next to their paramilitary border patrol station in Kashgar city.

Fourteen died on the spot and two others en route to a hospital while at least 16 others were wounded.

Police arrested both attackers.

The attack was one of the deadliest and most audacious in recent years in the area where local muslims have waged a rebellion against Chinese rule. ( >>Continued )

By CLAIRE GARDNER
Scotsman
04 August 2008

RUSSIAN writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, died last night aged 89.

The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.

The Nobel laureate had suffered from high blood pressure in recent years.

Last night a Kremlin spokesman said: "President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to Solzhenitsyn's family."

Solzhenitsyn's son, Stepan, told Russian news agencies that his father died of heart failure late last night.

However, other literary sources said the author had suffered a stroke.

The writer died in his home in the Moscow area, where he had lived with his wife Natalya, at 11:45pm local time (7:45pm GMT).

For more than 20 years, the Second World War veteran, who spent eight years in Stalin's labour camps for criticising the Soviet dictator, became a symbol of intellectual resistance to the Communist Party's rule.

The Gulag Archipelago, which was written in secret in the Soviet Union and published in Paris in three volumes between 1973 and 1978, is seen as the definitive work on Stalin's forced labour camps, where tens of millions of Russians perished. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience, the testimony of former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's research.

A short-lived policy of de-Stalinisation by the then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made possible the publication in 1962 of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which described the horrifying routine of labour camp life.

Other works, including a series of historical novels and political pamphlets, were banned from publication in the Soviet Union, and their distribution was made a criminal offence.

Major works including The First Circle and Cancer Ward brought Solzhenitsyn world acclaim and the Nobel Prize For Literature in 1970.

Four years later, he was stripped of his citizenship and put on a plane to West Germany for refusing to keep silent about his country's past. He moved to America and became an icon of resistance to communism. He lived in Vermont until his return to Russia in 1994.

Russia's post-Soviet leadership paid respect to Solzhenitsyn, who lived in seclusion outside Moscow after his return.

Solzhenitsyn remained critical of what he saw as the decadence of post-Soviet Russia and had little time for Western-style democracy, which he felt was not a solution for his homeland.

"The main achievement is that Russia has revived its influence in the world," Solzhenitsyn said in a TV interview last year.

"But morally we are too far from what is needed. This cannot be achieved by the state, through parliamentarianism … As far as the state, the public mind and the economy is concerned, Russia is still far away from the country of which I dreamed."

In 2007, he received the Russian State Prize, the highest Russian government award, for his work.

In announcing the prize last year, Yury Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called Solzhenitsyn "the author of works without which the history of the 20th century is unthinkable".

TIMELINE

• 1918: Solzhenitsyn born in Kislovodsk, Russia.

• 1945: Convicted of criticising Stalin's leadership during the Second World War. He spent the next decade in prison camps and internal exile.

• 1962: Came to literary prominence with One Day on the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

• 1970: Received the Nobel Prize for Literature for a body of work including The First Circle (1968), and Cancer Ward (1968).

• 1974: Exiled from Russia.

• 1994: Received a hero's welcome on his return from exile.

• 2006: Became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature.

Telegraph.co.uk
04 August 2006

Samuel Wasser, of the University of Washington, said the elephant death rate from poaching was currently 8 per cent, higher than the 7.4 per cent rate which led to the international ivory trade ban in 1989.

African elephants face extinction by 2020, conservationists warn.

Recent reports have shown that demand for ivory is growing in places such as China, Japan and the US

Writing in the journal Conservation Biology, Dr Wasser and fellow researchers warned that without public pressure to ensure a strengthening of anti-poaching measures, most remaining large groups of elephants will be extinct by the end of next decade.

The population in the 1980s was around 1 million, with around 70,000 elephants being killed a year. The total African elephant population is now less than 470,000.

Dr Wasser said the loss of the animals will have a negative impact on their ecosystem and other wildlife that depend on it - as well as on the cashflow they generate from tourists.

"If the trend continues, there won't be any elephants except in fenced areas with a lot of enforcement to protect them," he said.

"The situation is worse than ever before and the public is unaware. It's very serious because elephants are an incredibly important species. ( >>Read on )

By Fiona Govan
Telegraph.co.uk
04 Aug 2008

The heirs of the Knights Templar have launched a legal battle in Spain to force the Pope to restore the reputation of the disgraced order which was accused of heresy and dissolved seven centuries ago.


Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and Last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, is lead to the stake to burn for heresy (Photo: Getty)

The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, whose members claim to be descended from the legendary crusaders, have filed a lawsuit against Benedict XVI calling for him to recognise the seizure of assets worth 100 billion euros (£79 billion).

They claim that when the order was dissolved by his predecessor Pope Clement V in 1307, more than 9,000 properties as well as countless pastures, mills and other commercial ventures belonging to the knights were appropriated by the church.

But their motive is not to reclaim damages only to restore the "good name" of the Knights Templar. ( >>Continued )