Why are babies born young? This sounds like an odd question. People would say "of course babies are born young". However, this goes to the core of the question of human (or animal) development. Why is it that as time passes people develop initially through puberty and then for women through menopause and more generally getting diseases such as sarcopenia, osteoporosis, diabetes and cancer, but most of the time babies start showing no signs of this. Lots of research into this has happened over the years and now I think it is clear why this is. It raises some interesting questions. Biological youth is about how well a cell functions. Cells that are old in a biological sense don't work that well. One of the ways in which cells stop working is they fail to produce the full range of proteins. Generally the proteins that are produced from longer genes stop being produced. The reason for this relates to how the Genes work (the Genome). Because the genome is not gettin
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Where's that party got to now?
...except where it might affect their local vote, so is deemed suitable for local reasons in Edinburgh or Bristol.
Charlie Kennedy couldn't name one city where they want to bring in congestion charging. Can you?
First, read this report in Saturday's Guardian - "Lib Dems challenge Blair to spell out Iran plans".
Next, to find out how serious are the USA's plans to invade Iran, take a look at these articles, all from sane and authoritative commentators:
Scott Ritter article (Al Jazeera, 30 March 2005)
Scott Ritter speech (18 February 2005)
Dan Plesch article (Open Democracy, 21 March 2005)
Seymour Hersch article (New Yorker, 24 January 2005)
If, having read these, you want to do something about it, support the Our World Our Say campaign, which aims to extract commitments from all the party leaders that they would not support a new war.
Memo to Bob Piper: If Blair refuses to disassociate himself from Bush's next move, he may win this election but, when the tanks roll in, his 'popularity rating' will go right down the toilet.
However, asking a PM (any PM) to rule out future military action isn't ever likely to get a definite answer. He has no way of knowing what events lie around the corner that might possibly justify action against Iran, but as things currently stand, whatever Shrub might do in Iran will not involve British forces.