What to choose from for a lead: The bad ship Sea Shepherd? The stupendous rise and calamitous fall of General Stanley McChrystal - correctly sacked by US President Barack Obama, whose handling of the Gulf War on the beaches and steady promotion of Big Government is under the microscope? UK Chancellor George Osborne's budget made in hell? The John Isner-Nicholas Mahut Wimbledon encounter which broke every known record in the book (Isner won)? World Cup 2010, the dishonour of France and the shame of Italy? Labour's MEP vote on the Cashman report in the European Parliament? The Chief Justice's appointment to the European Court of Human Rights? Mr Justice Joseph Galea Debono's fine career?
I thought I would opt for that vote cast by two Labour MEPs against an abortion clause by any another name, and their vote in favour of a report that included the clause they voted against. There is a dark side to the story which the European Parliament, the European Council, some international organisations and UN agencies tend wilfully to create.
Time and time again, agencies that have a pro-choice, that is, an anti-life, bias have this tendency, more explicitly an agenda, to slip into their documents an abortion clause they clothe in euph-emisms like 'sexual rights and reproductive health services'. European bodies are similarly prone. Only two years ago, to take but one example, a report about an initiative taken by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on the abandonment of children attracted the attention of the UK's Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC).
It warned that a draft resolution threatened to bring the EU closer to mandating unrestricted legal abortion for its member states. The resolution read: "To fight against abandon-ment, the assembly invites member states inter alia to ensure the right of women to freely choose maternity", which in the language of international politics means the 'right' to have access to abortion. The document further stated that "abandonment of newborn babies clearly raises the question of access for women - parti-cularly migrant women - to sexual rights and reproductive services" - again, abortion.
Lest some bright spark reacts by saying that PACE is distinct from the European Union, which is indeed the case, my reason for bringing up this particular tale is merely to point out how international agencies or pan-European bodies can be hijacked by pro-abortion extremists. In this case, the draft resolution, which contained positive aspects (and this is the point - ill-intentioned drafters hope to, and sometimes succeed in, promoting something good over the dead bodies of aborted pregnancies to which they make no overt reference) was drafted by individuals SPUC referred to as "the strongly pro-abortion MP Mike Hancock under the leadership of Christine McCafferty, a leader of the abortion lobby in the British Parliament".
Enough said as to authorship, but this is what our MEPs were confronted with in the Cashman report on the UN Millennium Development Goals, a report that included disguised pro-abortion language in support of those goals. Labour's representatives voted against the disguise and in favour of the report. "This report", Prof. Edward Scicluna said, "was not about abortion, and to claim otherwise is completely untrue".
Completely untrue it demon-strably is not; it would have been had certain phraseology, now known to include abortion without mentioning the a-word, not been brought into the report, but it was, and underlines the point I am making; that ad-vocates with a pro-abortion agenda will stop at nothing to promote it. Scicluna insists that he is not one of them and I have no reason to doubt his word; yet the fact remains that the resolution he and his colleague John Attard Montalto voted in favour of, included language that leaves nobody in any doubt as to its advocacy of abortion-in-disguise.
"This report", I quote Scicluna "(was)...about ensuring that we as Europeans meet our promises made to the developing world in 2000". Those promises "in-clude(d) reducing by 60 per cent the mortality rate of children under five years of age, halving the number of people living on less than a dollar a day... and reducing by 75 per cent the maternal mortally rate".
Why, then, except as an example of bare-faced cynicism, slip in pro-choice language and, by so doing, encourage even implicitly an increase in the mortality rate of embryos? Why not, instead, come out strongly as the British Prime Minister has done in Canada to bring "grand talking shops" like the G8, and now the G20, to account and "to make sure these summits deliver for people... Too often these... meetings fail to live up to the hype and to the promises made". His predecessor thrived on hype, hope and charity.
About time, too
Most of you may recall an advertisement that claimed for its product the tautological ability to kill insects dead. New products have since come to market claiming that a couple of Brand X puff-puffs aimed at germs and insects will dispatch 99.9 per cent of them. Sounded fine to me, a confirmed hypo-chondriac, but the problem with the society of hypo-chon-driacs is that what sounds fine one moment, becomes dis-quieting the next.
How do they know that, I asked myself? I mean, how can they work out that Brand X actually destroys 99.9 per cent of germs invisible to the human eye? More intriguing is the estimate that 0.1 per cent survive the surge? Did you know that swirling around in the vapours set loose by a sneeze are 20 million germs (how do they count them?) carrying all manner of disease or illness, from swine flu (whatever happened to that?) to its fowl relation, chicken-lickin' flu - to name but two. It makes you think how vulnerable one is; getting rid of 99.9 per cent of a sneeze-full is all very well; it still leaves 0.1 per cent of a score of millions gadding about -200,000 to be precise.
Still, there is bad news for the insect-germ population. Brand Y now claims that it has the destructive power to kill all 100 per cent of insects; that's more like it. Even Darwin could not have foreseen this threat to the evolutionary process, but where does this leave the should-be-over-the-moon hypochondriac? In the context of those 200,000 germs - nowhere. He can hardly take his vaporiser to church, where so many sneezers tend to gather, or to the supermarket or wherever it is that crowds come together for one reason or another. Without his weapon of mass destruction he is at their mercy.
In the case of sneezers-in-churches, perhaps priests can point out to the congregation during the sneeze season that this is not the case; that it is a matter of manners and hygiene to cover up when anybody is about to relieve himself of 20 million germs? Perhaps the coughs-and-sneezes-spread-dis-eases chant in schools of yesteryear can be re-introduced to every classroom in the land. I'm not holding my breath, which I find myself doing when I sit behind a sneezing predator and cannot flee, depriving myself of oxygen for a dangerous period of time and risking cardiac arrest. If germs don't get you...
And another thing
If it was about time Brand Y came on to the market, with God knows what side-effects, the banning of dangerous pets has also been a long time in coming. It will now be more difficult to import a polar bear than used to be the case, possibly impossible to pass an orang-utan through Customs, which sounds fine to me.
I must admit I was unaware that reptiles are slurping around the odd Maltese swimming pool, or sliding through somebody's garden knocking back a rabbit here, an unsuspecting chicken there, and capable of snaking through to somebody else's back yard, expostulations of Nimby by the backyard's owner notwithstanding.
And I had clean forgotten that it was not so long ago that a Bengal tiger in its cub stage and presumably with the where-withal to become a scout, was discovered by animal welfare officials - I suspect these were alerted by somebody who heard unnaturally throaty Bengali meows emerging from the house to which the cub had been tracked. The strange thing is not its presence in Malta thousands of miles away from its habitat, but the fact that the owner had all the necessary paperwork for it to enter the island legally.
Now, presumably because it has dawned on somebody that baby snake and baby tiger have this irritating propensity to grow up, turn into adults and, in the fullness of time, reproduce; or because, perhaps, in a flash of illumination, it crossed the mind of whoever is in charge of welcoming animals to Malta that hippos charging down Republic Street in Valletta, or crocodiles charging up Manwel Dimech Street in Sliema, could pose a nasty problem, the authorities have decided to clamp down.
Elephants and things already enjoying the Maltese islands now need to be registered; failure to register them within the next three months will open their owners to prosecution, con-fiscation of cuddly hyenas, and a fine ranging from €232, which sounds and is, dismally small, to €46,587, which sounds more like it.
One other matter needs to be considered; let's think snakes that have taken up residence. Suppose these increase and multiply, as is their wont - and the wont of every animal, harmless or dangerous. What safeguards will the law put in place to make sure that (a) offspring, too, are registered and (b) the security of everybody else is guaranteed?
In other words, how safe are the rest of us from, say, a runaway rhinoceros, or a crazed python? ...Let me end with a non sequitur; by the end of today we will have already lost six minutes of daylight; and Germany or England after this afternoon's match.