Daily View 2×2: 4 December 2009

It’s December 4th, and 210 years since the day William Pitt the Younger introduced income tax to help pay for the Napoleonic Wars. By that time, The Observer (the world’s first Sunday newspaper) was already celebrating its ninth birthday.

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

• Sally Bercow is only human like the rest of us
  Mark Thompson speaks up for the Speaker’s wife’s right to speak up.
• There Have Been Too Many Goodbyes….
  Stephen Glenn speaks up for anonymous blogs, and laments the passing of another one.

Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.

2 Big Stories

MPs to go clubbing to investigate cocaine trade

The Commons home affairs committee, led by Labour’s Keith Vaz, will look at what goes on during “student nights”.

Members will look at the latest cocaine-detecting technology and talk to anti-drugs campaigners.

Labour MP Gwyn Prosser has already spent time outside a nightclub in Maidstone, Kent, as part of the committee’s preliminary research. [BBC]

Britain’s bird tables changing the path of evolution
The Telegraph reports on a new study which says that Britain’s bird tables could be influencing the migratory habits and shape of some bird species.

Eventually the “innocent human activity” of feeding birds, a particularly popular British pasttime, could lead to a whole new species of bird, the scientists believe.

“This is a nice example of the speed of evolution,” said Dr Martin Schaefer of the University of Frieburg in Germany and the study author.

“It is something that we can see with our own eyes if we only look closely enough. It doesn’t have to take millions of years.”

The research published in the journal Current Biology shows that the “profound effects” have occurred over just 30 generations of the birds – a period of less than 50 years. [Telegraph]

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