U.K. politician inspired by Harper’s roots
For more World Daily blog posts, visit thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily/ It’s unlikely Nigel Farage will be Britain’s next prime minister, but there’s no denying he’s good value.
The leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party may be best known — by those who don’t follow U.K. politics obsessively — for surviving the crash of a light plane, which was towing his party’s banner, during the 2010 general election. Not funny. (OK, kind of funny. Now.)
Despite that mishap, Farage hasn’t been afraid to get back on the campaign trail, and this morning, he’s on the front pages of many U.K. news websites either supping a pint or giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. This is because Nigel and his party have had a Good Night.
Thursday saw elections in about 30 county councils, mostly in England, and while these are pretty yawninducing for the general public, they’re a relatively big deal for Britain’s political classes. Many conclusions will be drawn, and with European Union and national elections looming, the results will be scrutinized to within an inch of their lives.
Farage’s UKIP appears, so far, to have taken about a quarter of the votes cast where it has candidates. Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor, summed it up when he said, “UKIP have changed from being a pressure group to a real political party.”
Farage hopes this is just the start. And while he isn’t fond of the politics across the Channel, he’s happy to look across the Atlantic for inspiration.
“We want to fundamentally change British politics. And there is a very good example of this,” Farage said Friday morning on the BBC’s Today program, must-listen radio which often sets Britain’s news agenda.
“You know, 25 years ago, the Reform Party of Canada started, everyone said you’re wasting your time under a first-past-the-post system,” Farage said. “They won one byelection and then at the next general election, they were the biggest party in the Canadian parliament. It can happen.”
Just to keep things in perspective, with 32 of 34 races counted, the Conservatives have 970 councillors; Labour has 400; the Liberal Democrats 291, and UKIP 117. Jennifer Quinn
TRACKING POOP FOR BIG CATS
Saving endangered wildlife means taking the extra step. For instance, remember how scientists have resorted to giving Viagra pills and showing porn to giant pandas? Well, scientists studying Bengal tigers are also using a unique method: tracking poop. Here is why: Bengal tigers are native to Southeast Asia and there are about 1,850 in the wild. But since it’s tough to count them because they are so elusive, researchers in Nepal have developed a system they think will make it easier to figure out how many tigers live there. They are using genetic data out of their poop, reports motherjones.com. The Nepal Tiger Genome Project has collected more than a thousand samples from the southern part of the country known as the Terai Arc landscape, believed to be one of the last remaining tiger habitats. DNA from the poop allows researchers to study and catalogue the genetic material and to create a database of all the country’s tigers.
To gather the samples, the project sent surveyors — armed with specimen vials and field surveys for logging the GPS location, type of forest cover, and condition of the scat — into four national parks and the wildlife corridors that tigers are thought to use.
The hope was they would collect 700 samples but the crew turned up 1,200 over two months.
“We collected a lot more s*&% than we thought we would,” Dibesh Karmacharya, executive director of the project, said to motherjones.com.
The poop project isn’t just useful to keep track of Bengal tiger numbers but also is a tool to tackle poachers. If part of a tiger is confiscated from poachers, researchers can use the DNA to see if it’s been previously catalogued in their system.
The project was founded in 2011. Raveena Aulakh