Why Is NATO Still Poking Russia?

I don't understand the NATO strategy when it comes to dealing with Russia or what they hope to gain from today's military exercises in Estonia which take them all the way up to Russia’s border.
While tensions between Russia and the West are already tense, to act so provocatively on Russia's doorstep is not only dangerous but could so easily spin out of control.
The West are always in need of a bogeyman to justify spending hundreds of billions on weapons, listen to the UK's need to spend £130 billion to replace Trident as evidence, and the West have decided that Putin and Russia is it which flings us back to the Cold War years.
Moscow cannot be expected to just accept NATO expanding and holding military exercises all the way up to its borders and will retaliate as it feels boxed in so someone at NATO needs to show some common sense and stop poking a massive military power with a big stick because at some point it will bite back and the frightening consequences that holds.

Summer's Coming And So Is Zika

The World Health Organisation have said that the Zika virus could spread to Europe this summer with a moderate risk in Mediterranean countries such as France, Spain, Italy and Greece while the risk in the UK is low.
Zika has been linked to a rise in brain defects in babies and the virus has been seen in more than 50 countries during this outbreak.
WHO experts say the risk of spread increases in late spring and summer as mosquitoes carrying the virus become more active.  
Mosquitoes already have a bad reputation and could possibly be the most dangerous animals on the planet as an estimated 725,000 people are killed every year by mosquito-born diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever and encephalitis.
In the deadliest animals league, an estimated 50,000 people are killed every year by snakes, 55,000 killed by dogs (mostly rabies from bites), tsetse fly kills 10,000, crocodiles are estimated to kill about 1,000 humans per year, 500 people per year die by Rhino, 130 people killed by deer (rather a driver hitting them on roads), 53 people die each year because of an allergic reaction from bee stings, 35 are killed each year by ants, 30 by jellyfish, 22 by cows (either falling on people or being kicked), 20 by horses, 7 by spider bites and sharks kill on average 5 people per year.
You officially have less chance of making it out alive from a cow field then from swimming in shark infested waters.

UK Abortions Increase

The number of abortions carried out in England and Wales last year was the highest in five years according to annual statistics released by the Department of Health, driven by an increase in women in their 30s and 40s who are terminating a pregnancy.
There was a 0.7% increase to 185,824 operations performed in 2015, and the largest number since the 189,931 carried out in 2011.
The figures show that abortions are becoming less common among women under 30 but more so among women aged 30 and over.
The British Pregnancy Advisory Service said: 'The last decade has seen a considerable rise in the proportion of women having terminations who are either in a relationship or married. Last year 70% of women ending a pregnancy were either married or had a partner'.
The BPAS are concerned that older women were finding it harder to access contraception because cuts to the sexual health services is restricting women’s access especially to the morning after pill, and because of the cost of the pill when bought over the counter from a chemist.    
The figures also show that 833 women travelled from Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK where abortion is still illegal, to England or Wales to have a termination in 2015.
As is so common with this Government who promise so much but deliver so little, ministers promised to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies three years ago but as the numbers of abortions are rising, and sexual health services are cut under the banner of austerity, something has gone very wrong as Conservative ideology leads to another part of the NHS left to whither away.

America Drowning In Cheese

I never knew there was such a difference in cheese between us and the Americans, i wrongly assumed their cheese was the same as our cheese but by all accounts even Americans don't like their cheese and are not even allowed to call it cheese, it is legally known as a 'cheese product'.
It all began when Sky News reported the United States has an overwhelming surplus of cheese, enough to equal three extra pounds of the stuff for every person in the country.
The answer the dairy farmers came up with as the price of their product tanked due to overproduction was to increase the amount of cheese they made or as one yokel put it: 'you milk more cows'.
I, again wrongly, thought why don't they send some this way, Europeans love Cheese but then someone pointed out that they do export it here, those little square Kraft blocks that taste like you have forgotten to remove the plastic wrapper is American Cheese, or rather 'Cheese product' because they legally can't call it cheese.
Reading the comments at some American sites, it appears that the problem is that Americans think American Cheese Product tastes like sh...isn't very nice which is why there is too much of it knocking around so America is drowning in plastic stuff that pretends to be cheese.
My initial solution was to make a massive pizza and send it to the World's starving but apparently the cheese doesn't melt, just sort of gets warm and bubbles a bit so my second idea was to pack it into a convoy of rockets and fire it at the Sun which seems a win-win all around.

Facebook Graveyard

Sobering thought that by 2012, just eight years after the platform was launched, 30 million users with Facebook accounts had died and that number has only gone up since.
Some estimates claim more than 8,000 users die each day so at some point in time, as Facebook accounts remain live even if the account owner isn't, and because Facebook is shedding users, there will be more dead Facebook users than living ones.

Lack Of Drinkable Water Our Next Catastrophe

It is estimated that 98% of the Earth’s water is too salty for drinking or agriculture and one in 10 of the world’s population don’t have access to safe drinking water and almost two million people die from drinking unsafe water every year.
Of the 2% of water that is fresh water, two thirds is locked away in ice caps and glaciers while most of the rest is trapped in soil or underground aquifers which leaves a fraction available for us to use.
In just 15 years time, half the world's population could be living in areas where there isn't enough water to go round and already poor quality water supplies means more people are drinking from dirty sources, and water borne diseases such as typhoid are spreading.
The answer so far has been desalination which is turning sea water into fresh water but the process is high energy intensive and very expensive.
We need a way to make the process more efficient but technology formerly regarded as promising have been in lab development for decades and the by-product, brine, is a source of pollution to nearby water supplies.
Someone, somewhere had better get on it because with a warming globe and the devastation that is already causing, a lack of drinkable water will be the next major catastrophe us humans face.

Bath Da Bomb

I have never understood how a 500lb bomb could have been dropped and not noticed in a city but we keep finding German bombs dropped 70 years ago and another has turned up under a school playground in Bath.
At some point someone must have noticed a bloody great crater with a bomb in it and said 'can't see a problem with just concreting over that' and built a playground on it.
Anyway, an unexploded World War Two bomb which was discovered in a school playground in Bath has been destroyed after being driven out of the city on the back of a lorry and a brilliant photo of men in hard hats and reflective yellow jackets dragging around an unexploded bomb safe in the knowledge that a hard hat would keep them safe if the 500lb monster went off.
Some wags are saying that it was a missed opportunity to have got rid of Bath once and for all but i have been to Bath several times and i know that if that bomb had gone off there it would have destroyed most of the city which experts estimate would have caused approximately £40 worth of damage.

Quick And Dirty Guide To Apostrophes

The laws of electrodynamics state possible values of the angular momentum vector, in the non-inertial body frame, for a free, asymmetric top is a surface of constant energy, and the closed curves are given by the intersection of that ellipsoid with spheres of various radii, corresponding to different values of the total magnitude of the angular momentum.
As it is a law, and as i have no idea what any of any of the above means, it is possible that i have at some point broken that law and could possibly be breaking it now so will hand myself over to the correct authorities as soon as i have finished this post.
Something else that has rules which MUST BE OBEYED is the English language but according to linguists, the English language is one of the hardest to learn and there are no shortage of grammar Nazi's who will try to pick you up if you use the word 'less' instead of 'fewer' or you misspell manouvre manouvere manoeuvre.
It is due to the British Empire and the spreading of it's tentacles back in the day that English is the most practised second language and then along came the World Wide Web with the majority of pages written in English although this percentage has dropped in recent years.
Probably the most common area students go wrong is the use of apostrophes which can either go in words, after words or go missing altogether but another problem area is to/too and a/an.
A quick, dirty guide to apostrophes is if you are shortening two words into one word (there is, was not) then you use an apostrophe to show what you have done so 'there is' becomes there's and 'was not' become wasn't.
It is also used to show possession of something so as this blog belongs to Lucy, it would be Lucy's Blog or a cake that belonged to Paul would be Paul's cake.
The hardest apostrophe to understand is the one that goes after a word which ends in the letter 's' when there are more than one of something. For example you can go to a boys' school (more than one boy), go on holidays in three days' time (more than one day) or go to a festival to watch bands' play (more than one band).
If something is not plural ending in s or doesn't belong to anyone, you can discard the apostrophe altogether so it's a sports car or sport photos as the sports doesn't possess the car or photos. 
The To/Too rule of thumb is if you can replace the to/too with the word 'also', then it should be 'too', if the word after the to/too is a place then it's 'to'. For example you go TO the shops' to buy clothes and go TO the airport to catch a plane but once at the shops' you can buy a latte TOO or at the airport you can buy a newspaper TOO.
A/An is easy to remember, if the following word starts with a vowel it's AN, if not it's A so you have a spark plug but an engine or an eagle but a parrot.      
There are variations on these themes and a grammar Nazi will point out when these rules are not applicable but as a rule of thumb, these will get you through but remember that the most important thing is not how you say something but what you are saying.

The Flat Earth Society

Just when you thought that people who deny climate change, those that pray to a man who lives in the clouds and people who reply to emails from Nigerians was the height of window shaking stupidity, along comes the Flat Earth Society to show that just when we think we have reached the bottom, there is always further below it to explore.   
There are people out there who believe the notion of a globe-shaped world orbiting the sun is a myth and it's all a conspiracy aimed at covering up the concept of space travel which is an even larger hoax.
So if our brains were to fall out of our ears and we were to not just dismiss the cranks as people who should not be left in charge of small children or animals, what can we expect from the movement trying to to save us all from the delusion that our world is a globe?
Handily, the Flat Earthers have a wiki page which explains it all as follows:

'How do you know the Earth is a globe? Only because you were told so by your teacher, who was told by someone else, who was told by someone else, who was told by someone else, who was told by some “authority” or “expert”. Somewhere along the way as a child, you were probably shown some books with photographs, but as has been well exposed, space photos and videos are easily faked, as NASA knows very well.
The flat earth model contends that the Earth exists on a giant, flat plane, with the Arctic (or North Pole) at the center, and a giant wall of ice (the Antarctic) surrounding the entire disc and forming the circumference. The implication of this is that we live in a giant dome, that “space” as we know it does not exist, and that all the planets and stars we see at night are like projections on the ceiling of a planetarium.

The science bit is that photographs of the earth show it as not curving the way it should if the planet was really round and that gravity doesn't exist but i could feel my brain cells committing suicide in protest as i read so i decided to cut my loses and leave but although it won't be easy overturning all the evidence that points that a round earth but i wish them luck in unravelling the true mysteries of the universe and demonstrating that the earth is flat and that Round Earth doctrine is little more than an elaborate hoax.

The 28 Pages

It has become known as 'the 28 pages' and relates to the 28 missing pages from the 2002 congressional report on the 9/11 attacks on America which are reported to show that Saudi Arabian officials were involved in supporting Al-Queda and the hijackers.
The George W Bush administration ordered the potentially incriminating 28 pages be kept secret and President Barack Obama is deciding whether to declassify the material next month but John Lehman, a former member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the attacks, has spoken out that the pages contain 'clear evidence that at least five Saudi government employees helped some of the 9/11 hijackers'.
Saudi leaders have threatened to sell off up to $750bn in US assets if the report is unclassified and they are implicated in the terrorist attack which killed 3000 in 2001.
State Department cables released by WikiLeaks revealed the Saudis have been behind the flow of millions of dollars a year to terrorist groups, Hillary Clinton stating in 2009 that: 'donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide'.
American leaders already know the contents of those 28 pages and have done nothing by way of retribution against the Saudi regime so we may soon find out that the USA (and George W Bush) knowingly invaded a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks but continued to pal up with the country that funded and actively supported it.