Diana: The unseen evidence which has been mysteriously ignored until now

Over English tea served in fine china cups at a sumptuous Paris apartment last November, an astonishing meeting took place to discuss the death of 36-year-old Diana, Princess of Wales.

The conversation was cordial. A butler carrying a teapot and tray of delicate sandwiches moved smoothly between the guests in the richly decorated drawing room of a building owned by the British Government, near the famous Champs Elysees.

In one Victorian armchair sat Lord Stevens, the respected former head of Scotland Yard. He had just finished a three-year investigation called Operation Paget into whether there was a conspiracy to murder the most famous woman in the world ten years ago and a cover-up to hide the truth.

The Princess was travelling with her Muslim lover Dodi Fayed in a Mercedes car when it smashed into the 13th column of the Pont D'Alma road tunnel in Paris at 12.23am on Sunday, August 31, 1997.

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Princess Diana: New evidence is to be heard at the inquest

She was mortally injured, dying in hospital three-and-a-half hours later. Dodi was killed instantly, as was the driver of the car, Henri Paul.

Since that moment, the controversy over Princess Diana's death has not abated. There is a veritable conspiracy theory industry which claims the Princess was assassinated, some even say at the instigation of the Royal Family or the British intelligence services because she was pregnant with Dodi's baby.

The report of Lord Stevens is now published. It concludes that Diana died in a tragic road accident. The report was meant to provide the final, unequivocal chapter on her death and a factual framework for her inquest which will begin next Tuesday.

Yet, if anything, the debate over how and why the Princess came to die is fiercer than ever. At the epicentre of this brouhaha is Lord Stevens himself.

For in the Paris apartment last November, he met the parents of the Mercedes driver Henri Paul for the first time. The couple must have been apprehensive.

No one in the Diana saga has been more vilified than their 41-year-old son. Within 24 hours of the accident he was being blamed for driving "like a lunatic" through the tunnel while "drunk as a pig".

Nevertheless, Giselle and Jean Paul, in their 70s, had bravely made the journey from their home in Brittany, on the west coast of France, to hear exactly what Britain's most famous policeman had to say about their son.

Lord Stevens soon put their minds at rest. The couple had hardly sat down before the peer assured them that Henri Paul had not been drunk - indeed, he'd had only two drinks that night.

As the meeting finished on November 8, 2006, the couple shook hands with Lord Stevens and went off with their heads held high. "We were pleased to hear our son was innocent as we always believed," Mr Paul senior told the Mail this week.

Yet a little over a month later the world was to hear a very different account from Lord Stevens. The 832-page Operation Paget report, compiled by 14 Scotland Yard detectives at a cost of £3.7 million, was published on December 14, 2006.

It declared that Henri Paul was driving at double the speed limit - 60mph - and had consumed a very considerable amount of alcohol before ferrying Diana and Dodi in the Mercedes from the Ritz Hotel in Paris to a private flat, where they were staying.

The driver was twice over the British drink-drive limit and three times over the French one. An expert cited in the report estimated that Paul had sunk the equivalent of ten small glasses of Ricard, his favourite liquorice-flavoured French aperitif, before taking the wheel.

If he had survived, he would be liable to prosecution for causing death by dangerous driving. It was a damning indictment of the dead driver, conflicting sharply with the account given by Lord Stevens to Henri Paul's mother and father.

Now grief can do terrible things to people's minds and it is possible Henri Paul's parents misunderstood or misheard Lord Stevens. However, detailed and contemporaneous notes of the meeting by an Operation Paget police officer suggest that this was not the case.

So why did Lord Stevens appear to have such a massive change of heart in less than five weeks? Did the policeman nicknamed Captain Beaujolais because of his love of fine wines come under pressure to change the conclusions of Operation Paget? It seems implausible.

Yet this troubling question has been aired at the preliminary hearings, overseen by High Court judge Lord Justice Scott Baker, for the forthcoming inquest on Diana and her lover.

Controversially, the judge - acting as coroner - will now order the jury to entirely disregard the Operation Paget report. It is a slap in the face for Lord Stevens. The contents have been removed from an official website linked to the inquest.

Lord Justice Scott Baker insists that 20 vital questions on Diana's death - and possible murder - still have to be answered.

They cover such matters as: whether Henri Paul was drunk or taking drugs; the possible pregnancy of Diana and why she was embalmed on British Embassy orders just an hour before her body was flown home to London, a process nullifying any later tests on whether she was expecting a baby; the presence, if any, of the secret intelligence service, MI6, in the French capital on the night she died; and the enduring mystery of why the Princess feared for her life.

Significantly, the judge has ordered that hundreds of explosive background documents, witness statements and tape recordings garnered during his investigation must now be made available to the jury. Some were not even alluded to in the Operation Paget report.

The background files cover the most contentious allegations surrounding the Princess's death.

For instance, a tape recording of one unnamed informant claims that the Queen's Private Secretary, Robert Fellowes, who was also Diana's brother-in-law, was in the French capital an hour before the crash and was seen in the telecommunications room of the British Embassy. (For his part, he insists he was at home in Norfolk all night.)

Another piece of evidence, detailed in a sworn witness statement from an American man, states categorically that Diana told a close female friend that she was pregnant just before she died, although she never named the father.

The files also delve deep into the lifestyle of Henri Paul. To understand his pivotal role, one must return to the days following the Princess's death.

The world was aghast. Flowers were heaped in Hyde Park, London, outside her home at Kensington Palace. Ordinary men and women wept in the streets across the globe.

Over in Paris, there was grieving too. Yet there was also something strange afoot. Within hours, rumours began to circulate that the driver of the Mercedes had killed the Princess.

By the Monday morning of September 1 - little more than a day after the crash - the French newspaper and television were publishing reports that Henri Paul had consumed "grossly excessive quantities of alcohol" and the speedometer of the Mercedes had jammed at 121mph. None of these stories was denied by the authorities.

Indeed, the allegations grew more detailed. On September 9 there were reports that a search of Henri Paul's flat in Paris had revealed a veritable drinking den. Shelves were groaning with bottles of spirits and wine. Tables were littered with bottles of vodka, Martini and fortified wines, while the kitchen contained open bottles of Ricard and American bourbon.

The reports contradicted what is now known to be the truth. An inspection of Henri Paul's flat by the detectives of the French Brigade Criminale much earlier - 48 hours after the crash - had found only copious bottles of soda water and just one bottle of champagne and a bottle of Martini.

Nevertheless the story that Henri Paul, a deputy security chief at the Ritz Hotel in Paris who had stepped in at the last moment to drive the couple, was a hopeless alcoholic gained credence.

Conspiracy theorists ask was he deliberately turned into the scapegoat? Was the driver, suspected of being a paid informant of the French and British intelligence services, used to cover up a much more sinister set of events?

Almost every person who talked to Henri Paul that night has since confirmed that he did not appear intoxicated before he set off into the Paris night.

Furthermore, a crucial blood sample taken from Henri Paul's suit jacket after his death - and the only one that has been firmly linked to him by DNA testing on his mother Giselle - shows no measurable trace of alcohol in his body.

In addition, a carbohydrate deficient transferring test 'proving' he was an alcoholic and conducted by the French authorities on Henri Paul after his death has also been undermined. A CDT test, the inquest will be told, is unreliable if performed on a dead body.

Meanwhile, what of the clutch of blood samples taken from his body in the days after the crash. They, apparently, showed that Henri Paul was hopelessly drunk. But were they really his own?

Intriguingly, they contained a medicine called albendazole, which the driver's doctor said he was never prescribed. It is a drug taken to get rid of tapeworms and given to downandouts on the streets.

Could they have come from a dead Paris tramp lying in the public mortuary alongside Henri Paul?

Equally puzzling is that the same clutch of blood samples revealed no sign of another medicine named acamprosate, which Paul had been prescribed. It is the only solid piece of evidence that he was a heavy drinker.

The driver was worried about his love of Ricard and had begged his doctor to give him the drug, designed to help alcoholics reduce their intake without cravings.

Pertinently, his doctor has since said that he felt Paul was worrying unnecessarily, as his drinking was moderate.

There is another dilemma, too.

The Henri Paul blood samples at the very heart of the Diana controversy reveal something else quite bizarre - that he had breathed in a very high quantity of carbon monoxide before his death: the same amount as a person committing suicide by putting a rubber hose from the exhaust through the window of his car.

Such a level would have left Paul visibly disorientated and almost certainly comatose. Yet at the Ritz that evening, minutes before he drove Diana, the CCTV cameras show him walking normally and even kneeling down to retie his shoe laces and gracefully standing up again.

It is now accepted that he never drew breath after the crash, ruling out the possibility that he inhaled poisonous exhaust fumes. Significantly, Dodi's blood was tested and was shown to contain no carbon monoxide.

The tainted blood samples remain - as Lord Stevens and toxicology experts say in the Operation Paget report - a complete mystery. One possible explanation is that they are not the driver's blood at all but come from someone else in the public mortuary who had committed suicide that weekend.

So were the samples tampered with? Were they mistakenly, or deliberately, swopped with those from another corpse?

The first samples of blood taken from the driver's body were left unattended and unlabelled in a fridge at the mortuary for more than a day until Monday, September 1.

So what will happen next? Lord Stevens is to be called as a witness at the inquest. He will be asked by lawyers for Henri Paul's family about the 'gross discrepancy' between the soothing account he gave in the Paris apartment on their son and the one contained in the official Operation Paget report.

He is also likely to be quizzed on the plethora of evidence on Diana's death never included in his final report. Of particular concern is the testimony of a Paris jeweller, who sold Dodi an engagement ring on the day before the crash, sparking theories that the playboy was about to propose to Diana.

Of course, Diana might well have turned down any such marriage. But the jeweller, in a written complaint, says that he was pressured - unsuccessfully - by the Paget detectives to change his tale and say it was just a 'friendship' ring. There are other worrying matters too. The preliminary inquest hearings have revealed that important eyewitnesses of the crash - including those claiming there was a blinding flash in the tunnel and that they saw a mystery white Fiat Uno at the scene which may have deliberately clipped Diana and Dodi's Mercedes, causing the accident - were never interviewed by Lord Stevens' team.

Instead, his detectives relied heavily on old statements made years ago to the French police. Now Lord Justice Scott Baker has ruled that crash onlookers and other witnesses should give evidence via video links from Paris and in person at the London inquest. The jury will be taken to the accident site in the Alma tunnel in the French capital.

One important new witness will be a French fireman, Christophe Pelat. He discovered the body of a paparazzi photographer named James Andanson - thought by conspiracy theorists to have been driving the white Fiat Uno - in a remote woodland with a shot in the head three years after the crash.

It was always said that Andanson had committed suicide after marital problems.

The photographer amassed millions selling photographs of Diana and is suspected of tipping off British, American and French intelligence services on the Princess's movements during her last holiday.

Andanson gave conflicting accounts of his movements to French police. They concluded that he was not in Paris on the night of the crash, although he had chased the couple relentlessly as they cruised on Dodi's yacht the Jonikel in the days beforehand.

Why, one might ask, would he have stopped following her when there was still money to be made?

The evidence of Christophe Pelat is vital. It might indicate that Andanson knew the truth and was disposed of. Yet the fireman's name and testimony - just like those of many others - appeared nowhere in the Operation Paget report in what was billed as the definitive account on Diana's death.

Of course, all this must be somewhat discomforting for Lord Stevens. As a life peer and now an international security adviser to Gordon Brown, he moves in the upper echelons of society with a hitherto untarnished halo as a formidable investigator.

Meanwhile, Lord Justice Scott Baker faces the challenging task of guiding a jury through a monumentally complex inquest. For if the 12 men and women leave their verdict open - if there is no conclusion on the cause of the Princess's tragic death - there will have to be a police inquiry.

Yes, a second one. When will the spirit of Diana be allowed to rest?

Article originally published here.

'Man-Eating' Badgers Terrify Iraqi Residents

Residents of Basra are blaming the British military for a recent plague of badgers seen in the Iraqi city streets. The rumour is that these are a giant man-eating variety, deliberately introduced by UK soldiers in order to scare the locals.

It seems more likely that honey badgers, native to the region but not usually found in Iraq, are the real culprits. The animals, weighing up to 14 kilos, are known for their ferocity but this is not directed at humans unless provoked.

Scientists suggest that the species has populated the area because of the reflooding of the nearby marshlands, home to the Shia Marsh Arabs, whose land had previously been drained by Saddam in order to suppress an insurgency there.

Iran Arrests Secret Squirrels for Suspected Spying

The official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reports that 14 squirrels, equipped with eavesdropping devices, have been detained by police in Iran. Foreign intelligence agencies have been blamed for the rodent raiders.

The bushy-tailed agents were taken into custody 2 weeks ago but few details have emerged about the incident. "I have heard about it, but I do not have precise information," said the national police chief.

Oil is a Key Motive Behind Iraq Occupation, Australia Admits

Australia has admitted for the first time what many have long suspected - that securing oil resources is a key motive behind deploying troops in Iraq. "Resource security" is a priority, says Defence Minister Brendan Nelson.

"Obviously the Middle East itself, not only Iraq but the entire region, is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world." he said. Previously the government had denied such reasons for the 2003 coalition invasion.

Critics have questioned the motives behind Prime Minister John Howards decision to join the campaign to oust Saddam and whether the reasons given for participation in the war were excuses rather than genuine concerns.

UK Terrorists Adopt 'Mental Retard' Strategy in New Attack Attempts

In an surprising and strange change of tactics, it appears Al Qaeda is playing the 'retard' card by deploying previously unknown mentally-challenged terror cells in the UK. After one group successfully parked two cars packed with gasoline, propane and nails - but no detonators - in busy London streets, another cell out-bungled them by setting fire to their Jeep Cherokee and driving it into Glasgows international airport. One terrorist was said to be ablaze and the fire had to be extinguished before police and passers by could give him and his accomplice a good kick-in.

The new terror threat is said to be chillingly unpredictable by police. "If the terrorists themselves are unaware of what they're doing until they've done it, what chance do we have?" said one official. Prime Minister of 4 days Gordon Brown sees plenty of mileage in these recent events, though and immediately placed the country on a 'critical' state of alert. His newly appointed Home Secretary was meanwhile busy, apparently putting the final touches to furniture arrangements in her new London office.

Could We Be On The Eve Of Another 9/11?

With US forces poised to attack Iran, the talk is of a Good Friday (April 6th) assault involving massive air power and quite possibly nuclear weapons. Israel is hovering in the wings and would willingly step up to volunteer its services, having already publicly stated that it considers Iran a threat to its national security.

The US has had an assault plan in place for over a year now and has envisaged the concept of an attack for even longer, but the leadership is aware that their public won't go along with their plan just like that. A massive terrorist attack, on the other hand, would almost certainly turn them and support for retaliation on a colossal scale would then be widespread.

Former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi chillingly noted that the Pentagon's plans to attack Iran were drawn up "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States." Writing in The American Conservative in August 2005, Giraldi added, "The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites ... As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."

Just this week Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson warned of the dangers of a nuclear terror attack on the US (source article), which some feel is simply a way of lending plausibility to such an event. The US has already stated that should such an attack occur it would attack Iran whether the 'axis of evil' state was implicated or not.

General Tommy Franks said back in 2003 that this would lead to the US introducing martial law within its borders. He talked of "a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution."

It seems that there would be a domino effect immediately following any 'attack' which would change the US, and the rest of the world, dramatically. You may see this as just another 'conspiracy' theory, but the stakes are far too high to risk complacency. Iran is totally foolish in the game that it is playing with the 15 UK sailors, but isn't about to harm them or nuke the US mainland. There is no threat, just like there was none 4 years ago when Iraq was invaded. This will be another contrived war and it will be one that isn't turned on and then off again as the US would wish. Russia and China won't stand by and idly watch. Nuclear powers Pakistan and India will surely be dragged into the affair. And what of the estimated 450,000 Iranian troops and the missiles capable of reaching Europe? I'm sure that they'll have a part to play in reply. Israel will have its hands full with Hezbollah (remember them from last year?).

This is World War III we are talking about. Next week may well be the last week of peace that we'll experience for a very, very long time.

The Iran Crisis: Defending The Government In The Face Of Hypocracy And Ignorance

Speaking as an ex- serviceman who served in the Persian Gulf while in the Royal Navy, it really knots my stomach to see pussies such as the chattering suits over at The Business, idiots who seem to be unaware of the saying 'pride comes before a fall', declare how the 15 service personnel arrested by Iranian Revolutionary Guards should have resisted arrest by opening fire on their would-be captors:

"British – not American – forces were probably targeted by the Iranians because American rules of engagement, rightly, place an obligation on their military to defend themselves while Britain’s politically-correct, European-style rules are designed to avoid escalation."

What total bullshit. What do these 'commentators think they know about 'rules of engagement'? How do they think they'd fair at fighting off half a dozen patrol boats armed with rocket launchers and sub-machine guns, using just side-arms and SA-80 assault rifles? Having the wrong opinion is sometimes worse than having no opinion at all. If these idiots had their way we'd be in a full-blown war now - easy to encourage if you're not the ones fighting it.

Almost as dumb is the shameless Daily Mail. It expresses similar testosterone sentiments but for reasons it apparently doesn't understand itself:

"Of course, Britain should respond in the most vigorous way possible. Sanctions against Iran should be beefed up and more support from the EU and UN enlisted.

But the bitter fact remains, as Stephen Glover points out on this page, that the Iranians know they will get away with it because there is little that Britain can effectively do."

So we should respond vigorously even though we cannot effectively do anything. Why? Just to make us feel a little better by stepping out from behind the US and shaking our fist? Is that how sad we have become?

The diplomatic approach, while not particularly macho and not necessarily justified, is the only way at this time. Yes the Iranian leadership are playing games and yes we have every justification at being angry, but war or a hostage situation is not what we need. We need to punch smart and know our limits. Yes, the US would have simply attacked Iran over this had the personnel been American, but look at the mess they've already made in Iraq. We need to get our people home and then work to diffuse the situation in the Middle East. If any of you want war, please sign up for the Army and get your sorry asses out to Iraq. This is not a game, it is real. Nobody wins in the next war.

US Closing In As H-Hour For War Approaches

As tensions mount over the fate of the 15 UK marines and navy personnel held by Iran, an increasingly impatient US conducts provocative war games 'aimed at blocking smuggling of nuclear weapons' (according to Bush mouthpiece Fox News) and leans on its British allies to take events to the next level. Prime Minister Blair obliges, warning of a 'different phase' if the situation isn't resolved soon. The Americans accuse the Brits of being too soft and indecisive with their reaction to the detention of its people, although what the UK can do, apart from complain to the UN, has yet to be explained.

What needs to be remembered is that this development is rooted in an argument over who was overstepping a long-disputed border (remember that? OK, it was nearly a week ago....). Either side could be right or wrong and until that is established, or until both sides agree to disagree and settle up, no move should be made by anyone. We are in a mindset where if Iran is found to be in the wrong concerning just about anything, thats good enough to send in the cruise missiles and stealth bombers. It is not. The UN resolution is not a enough; the US accusations of Iranian meddling in Iraq is not enough; the arrest and detention of the 15 British service personnel isn't either. As with Iraq, there is no immediate threat and no legitimate reason.

The PNAC followers may want to stick to the timeline and gameplan decided upon when this new foreign policy fiasco was first introduced early in the Bush presidency, but in case they haven't noticed, the plan is not working. Its been a disaster and trying to distract from one disaster by creating another isn't the answer.

The UK/Iran Stand-Off - False Flag, Iranian Aggression Or Simple Dispute?

The war drums have been beating slowly but steadily ever since the second US carrier task force arrived in the Gulf earlier in the year. The American force required for a massive air attack on Iran appear to be in place. Keeping them there, on a high state of readiness, can only be sustained for a short period of time, so an attack must happen soon. The arguments for a pre-emptive strike against the Iranian (yet to be developed) nuclear threat are being made but after the lies and deceptions of Iraq WMD, terrorist sponsorship, etc. the Bush administration needs something more convincing.

The recent capture of 15 British Navy personnel somewhere along the Shatt al-Arab waterway, a stretch of water straddling a portion of the much-disputed border between Iraq and Iran, couldn't have come at a better time for the US. Border skirmishes are nothing new and up until now incidents have gone largely unreported by the mainstream media. But an incident such as this, whether contrived or otherwise, is different simply because of the timing.

It couldn't have come at a worse time for Iran. Hot on the heels of a modest but widely-backed UN resolution, some countries usually allied to Iran have distanced themselves, publicly at least. So why risk a diplomatic incident with Americas biggest ally, the UK, right now? Surely to do such a thing makes you at least a greater international pariah than before, and at worst creates an ideal opportunity for the US to encourage a chain of events that eventually justify all-out military action.

Many have been suggesting that some kind of false-flag incident is imminent and maybe this is it, or the start of several, but whether this is it or not is so far unclear. Its certainly not in Irans interest to capture the British personnel and threaten to put them on trial for spying unless they're damn sure that they have their facts right. Unlawful abduction would bring memories of the 1979 hostage crisis flooding back to the world community and even the most ardent supporter would find it difficult to defend the Tehran government. The longer this crisis continues the worse it'll get for Iran. We all know (except the Bush administration, it seems) that war with Iran would result in a far worse situation than what we are witnessing currently in Iraq. My guess is that in two months time much of Iran won't exist. I hope I'm wrong.

Global Warming - A Swindle Or An Unknown?

The debate about Global Warming continues to rage as fiercely as the extreme weather many of us appear to be experiencing nowadays. Now a hurricaine-strength storm has been whipped up, taking me (and I suspect many others) by total surprise.

UK TV's Channel 4 aired a documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle (available now on YouTube) recently which temporarily muddied the already-murky waters. Writer and director Martin Durkin put forward the 'truth' about global warming, that we have been deliberately deceived by a variety of all-powerful people (ranging from Margaret Thatcher to extreme-left fanatics bent on seeing the demise of capitalism and preventing third world development) and that the current warming trend is nothing more than part of a natural cycle encouraged by the activities of our Sun.

The arguments in the programme, if taken at face value, seemed to blow a hole right through the heart of the generally accepted climate change theory - the one that states that greenhouse gas emissions, primarily CO2, produced by humans (and partially contributed to by nature) is causing global temperatures to rise at a dangerous and uncontrollable rate. That's the theory I'd always accepted, not because I am an expert in climatology, but because the overwhelming majority of scientists all seemed to say it. Who am I to doubt so many 'experts'?

The Channel 4 documentary thrust a torrent of doubts into my overloaded brain, producing several top members of the science community (from MIT, various universities and professional bodies), all of whom said that my favoured theory was inside-out, upside-down and plain wrong. For example, apparently Al Gore, in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, had lied to us, using misleading statistics that should have shown global temperatures leading CO2 emissions and not the other way round. The whole 'environmental industry' is about 'jobs for the boys' and getting funding for pointless research under the guise of global warming research, they said.

I finished watching it as a semi-convert, actually toying with the idea that the worlds climate was ok, it was all supposed to be this way, it was the work of the Sun. I've always been open to the idea that fluctuations in solar activity may effect our weather and climate, and to an extent I still am, but all we have so far is data from a very narrow snapshot of our Suns existence. If its cyclic, we need to capture the whole cycle. If its random, we need to learn the cause and effect of these random changes and see if they match any of the data we have on our planets climate record. Durkin nearly had me convinced, but not quite.

The Independent has investigated the claims made in the TV programme and has managed to cast sufficient doubt to take me back to my place of origin, back to the 'man-made CO2' camp. Why? Here are extracts from the Independent article:

• Mr Durkin has already been criticised by one scientist who took part in the programme over alleged misrepresentation of his views on the climate.

• Mr Durkin's film argued that most global warming over the past century occurred between 1900 and 1940 and that there was a period of cooling between 1940 and 1975 when the post-war economic boom was under way. This showed, he said, that global warming had little to do with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide.

  The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as "Nasa" but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV's PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.

  However, there are no diagrams in the paper that accurately compare with the C4 graph. The nearest comparison is a diagram of "terrestrial northern hemisphere" temperatures - which refers only to data gathered by weather stations in the top one third of the globe.

  However, further inquiries revealed that the C4 graph was based on a diagram in another paper produced as part of a "petition project" by the same group of climate sceptics. This diagram was itself based on long out-of-date information on terrestrial temperatures compiled by Nasa scientists.

  However, crucially, the axis along the bottom of the graph has been distorted in the C4 version of the graph, which made it look like the information was up-to-date when in fact the data ended in the early 1980s.

  Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. "There was a fluff there," he said.

• If Mr Durkin had gone directly to the Nasa website he could have got the most up-to-date data. This would have demonstrated that the amount of global warming since 1975, as monitored by terrestrial weather stations around the world, has been greater than that between 1900 and 1940 - although that would have undermined his argument.

  "The original Nasa data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the simplest line we could find," Mr Durkin said.

• The programme failed to point out that scientists had now explained the period of "global cooling" between 1940 and 1970. It was caused by industrial emissions of sulphate pollutants, which tend to reflect sunlight. Subsequent clean-air laws have cleared up some of this pollution, revealing the true scale of global warming - a point that the film failed to mention.

  Other graphs used in the film contained known errors, notably the graph of sunspot activity. Mr Durkin used data on solar cycle lengths which were first published in 1991 despite a corrected version being available - but again the corrected version would not have supported his argument. Mr Durkin also used a schematic graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that was at least 16 years old, which gave the impression that today's temperatures are cooler than during the medieval warm period. If he had used a more recent, and widely available, composite graph it would have shown average temperatures far exceed the past 1,000 years.

While I'm sure the burden of proof is not necessarily there yet, its only a matter of time before our suspicions are confirmed. Co2 emissions are a smoking gun and without anything better to go on we have to assume that these theories are correct since time seems to be against us. People with vested interests (of which there are far more on the corporate industry side than the environmental side) will try anything to breed complacency among us. They want us to continue our rabid consumerism, to promote the throw-away culture, for this is what shapes their world. Even if we're wrong and the climate eventually returns to 'normal' (if there is such a thing), think of the new world we'll be inhabiting, one with little pollution, minimal waste, virtually-free energy and no dependence on fossil fuels (one less reason to invade Middle Eastern nations). If they're wrong, its too late. The world might continue on, but the short era of the human race will be be over.

Examples Of Failed Petitions On The 10 Downing Street Website

PM Tony Blair recently took UK democracy forward by providing a facility for members of the public to submit petitions which others could lend their support to. Presumably if a petition receives enough signatories it will then have some bearing on future government policy or lawmaking.

I noticed that, sadly, many seemingly worthy petitions have been rejected for no good reason and I am therefore strongly considering raising a petition myself in order to bring the matter to the Prime Ministers urgent attention. Here are some of the best (all genuine, go check!):

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to…

....ask his wife to wear a burka more often.

....build a large inpenetrable fence around Hull to protect the surrounding areas from those people.

....agree to allowing trolls to live under every bridge in London.

....give freedom to Tooting.

....attend PMQ's in a clown outfit and greasepaint.

....ban broccoli as an edible foodstuff and reclassify it as a toxic substance.

....provide every person of 70 years of age with a grey squirrel.

....invade France and hence provide us with a war we can all get behind.

....impose a maximum weight limit for women wearing stiletto heels as they pose a massive threat to other members of the public on dance floors and in crowded bars nationwide.

....endorse a scheme that would see the child benefit scheme extended to cats.

....force terrestrial television newsreaders to wear underpants on their head.

....to stop numpties creating Petitions and posting them on internet forums.