Religion , Human Rights, And Perpetual War .
Imagine for a moment a parallel universe where everything looks familiar, but where everyone is a rightwing fundamentalist Christian and Darwinism is widely seen as a crackpot fairytale. Well, now you can visit such a world any time you want: GodTube, Christianity's answer to the heathen YouTube, is a clearing house for Christian music videos, user-generated sermons, evangelical short films and anti-evolution cranks. One of the most popular videos is an excruciating four-part parody of those Mac v PC adverts - Christ-follower v Christian; another features a preacher with a microphone berating a street performer dressed as Gene Simmons from Kiss. A clip titled They Day They Kicked God Out of the Schools characterises the recent spate of US campus killings as God's revenge for outlawing school prayer. Elsewhere, an old man delivers a boring lecture about why the Earth really isn't 4.5bn years old after all.
Gorillas, vultures, corals, Asian crocodiles and even seaweeds are joining thousands of other species on the slide towards extinction, according to the latest edition of the Red List, the international catalogue of threatened wildlife, published yesterday.In the past 12 months there have been nearly 200 to the list, which is published by the Swiss-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), taking the number of threatened species worldwide from 16,118 to 16,306.This means that one in four of the world's mammals, one in eight birds, one third of all amphibians and 70 per cent of the world's assessed plants on the current list are in now in jeopardy. "Life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken," the IUCN said yesterday.The Red List is recognised as the most reliable evaluation of the conservation status of the world's species. It classifies them according to their extinction risk, through the categories extinct, critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable. Once an organism is classified as critically endangered, extinction is very close.
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