Extramarital dating advices blog.

Read source of it on the News - Huhne laughs off ‘drugs comments’ page
Liberal Democrat leadership contender Chris Huhne has laughed off comments he allegedly made promoting the use of marijuana while a student in the 1970s.

He was asked if he stood by words in an article attributed to him that “hash” was useful when “work, or love, or lifestyle become too in person dating advices“.

During a BBC News 24 debate, Mr Huhne said he had been “a revolting teenager” and he did not “stand by” such views.

Rivals Sir Menzies Campbell and Simon Hughes also took part in the show.

Expert advice

Mr Huhne, a Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, was alleged to have written his comments in a student magazine, but said: “I must say I don’t recognise that quote.”

Acting leader Sir Menzies and party president Mr Hughes both said they would leave the issue of cannabis’s legal classification to “expert” medical advisers.

The three candidates disagreed on the issue of withdrawing forces from Iraq.

Mr Huhne said he wanted to set a “deadline”, while Mr Hughes suggested this should be 31 December this year.

But Sir Menzies, who is also the party’s foreign affairs spokesman, dismissed ideas of a fixed target date and said a “coherent strategy for exit” was needed, including training Iraqi security forces and establishing political stability.

The candidates also discussed the creative dating idea and whether Scottish and Welsh MPs should vote on Internet dating advices nottingham issues.

The News 24 debate, chaired by the channel’s chief political correspondent, James Landale, came a week after the party’s surprise dating advices website for sale victory in Dunfermline and West Fife.

The Lib Dems’ former Scottish chief executive Willie Rennie good dating tip a 11,500 Labour majority to take the seat, where Chancellor Gordon Brown lives.

The party’s 73,000 members have two weeks left to decide who will replace Charles Kennedy as leader.

All three camps say the race is still wide open.

The candidates do not have access to party membership lists so are unable to canvass voters directly - or get a feel for the likely result.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has accused his estranged deputy of wishing him dead and consulting Islamic holy men on the date of his demise. Mr Obasanjo said the vice president had told a former minister: “Don’t worry, the president will be dead soon.” VP Atiku Abubakar denied the charges, saying Mr Obasanjo’s mind was full of “the cobwebs of juju or occult”. The pair fell out when Mr Abubakar opposed the date idea tip dating efforts to stay in office for a third term. I am not afraid of such stupidity. Olusegun Obasanjo Mr Abubakar ran in last month’s presidential elections as an opposition candidate, despite spirited efforts by Mr Obasanjo to stop him. According to official results Mr Abubakar lost to the governing party’s Umar Yar’Adua, who succeeds Mr Obasanjo as president next week. ‘I will be president’ Speaking about the feud between him and his deputy on national television, Mr Obasanjo said Mr Abubakar had told a minister that he had been consulting a marabout (holy man). President Obasanjo is standing down after two terms The president said Mr Abubakar told the minister: “So the same marabout has told me that I will be President when this man (Obasanjo) dies and had given me a month that he will die, you better prepare.” Mr Obasanjo said the alleged comments showed his rival’s “bankruptcy of ideas, bankruptcy of knowledge and lack of knowledge in God and the affairs of God on the lives of human beings”. He added: “If I will live for another 20 years, it is in the hands of God. I am not afraid of such stupidity. Of course, I know that you can be poisoned but if God wants to save you, you will be saved.” Mr Abubakar fell out with Mr Obasanjo after he publicly opposed attempts to change the constitution to give the president a third term. ‘Smokescreen’ The vice-president who stands down next week with Mr Obasanjo dismissed the president’s extreme dating advices show as “bizarre and ludicrous”. “Unlike Obasanjo who uses Free uk dating advices agencies as a smokescreen while engaged in occultism and diabolical acts, I am a devout Muslim who has always striven to live in accordance with the teachings of Islam,” Mr Atiku fired back in a statement. “The next occupant of the State House (presidential villa) will need to spiritually cleanse the presidential lodge to make it habitable for normal people. “I don’t believe in resorting to marabout and have never wished the president dead. Rather, it is the president who has been hell-bent on dating advices internet single me politically and physically. “By making public accusations of fetish acts against me, the president has exposed his own mindset as one that is covered in the cobwebs of juju or occult. “It is on record that the president had never in the past denied his association with deadly secret societies.” Read more on News - Nigerian leaders row over occult

“To the southern inhabitants of Scotland, the state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown with that of Borneo or Sumatra: of both they have only heard a little, and guess the rest.

“They are strangers to the language and the manners, to the advantages and wants of the people, whose life they would model, and whose evils they would remedy.”

Communications have improved since Samuel Johnson made his famous tour of the Western Isles in 1773, but a cultural divide still yawns.

For many in the islands - known alternatively as the Outer Hebrides - the mere mention of Glasgow or Edinburgh produces a derisive snort.

“Scotland? Yes, I think I went there once,” sniffs one North Uist crofter.

Big ideas

But now Glasgow and Edinburgh are starting to pay very close attention to the Highlands and Islands.

Scotland’s remotest rural regions are the testing ground for the most ambitious idea launched so far by the five-year-old devolved government.

At the beginning of this year, the Scottish parliament finally passed a highly contentious bill on land reform - a piece of legislation that seeks to shake up the centuries-old structure of the rural economy.

The bill’s dynamite provision is the “community right to buy”, which - once certain financial and demographic criteria are met - gives tenants in thinly-populated areas first refusal on their landlords’ estates.

The landlord is dating advices single parent guaranteed a fair market price, but if he does not want to sell, the law can force him.

Its good faith established, a community only needs to raise about 6% of the purchase price - much of the rest will be topped up by a dedicated government fund.

(Click here for a map of community ownership deals agreed so far)

But the bill, with its armoury of funding promises and legal muscle, is sure to increase the flow of deals.

Late last year, with the bill very much in mind, the community of North Harris completed the biggest buyout so far, the 4.5m amicable takeover of Jonathan Bulmer
’s Amhuinnsuidhe Castle estate.

Making amends

More power to them, say many.

Scottish land ownership is peculiarly feudal, with more than half the land held by just over 300 people or agencies.

There’ll be no more of this type of thing

Many of these landlords are absentees, some are neglectful, some - horror! - are foreign.

Returning land to co-operative ownership, proponents of reform say, will give those who work the land a stake in it, paving the way for the sort of investments that could improve quality and enrich the rural economy.

Nor must the symbolic value of reform be underestimated: for some of its more romantic supporters, the bill was a way of making amends for centuries of landlord oppression, bringing Scotland’s medieval agriculture up to date.

‘Silly romantic ideas’

Now, that logic is likely to be severely tested.

Discussions are currently under way over what would be the most ambitious buyout so far, the planned purchase of 93,000 acres - Scotland’s 12th-largest estate - on Benbecula, South Uist and Eriskay.

This time, opposition to a buyout is more organised, and some are already claiming that up to half the locals are firmly against it.

Opponents cover a wide spectrum: online adult dating advices services - plentiful in these adult dating advices ontario personals islands - say the land-reform rules are “quasi-communist”; crofters are furious that the process will be open to the entire community, fearing that their traditional pre-eminence will be trampled.

“If it had been a crofters’ buyout, like at Assynt, I would have been all for it,” says Angus MacDonald, who has a large croft near Benbecula airport.

“But when you let the others in, it gets dominated by people with silly romantic ideas, and the crofters get sidelined.”

And many in the wider community are shocked at the suddenness of it all, reinforcing the impression - widely held - that land reform is yet another cock-eyed scheme foisted on them by the mainland.

Fantasy island

There are broader concerns. One is money.

All parties to a community land buyout can claim to be being ripped off, including taxpayers, who may resent funding a new class of property owners.

Many on Uist wonder how the community can finance a purchase that could top 10m, even with the government’s generous funding assistance.

And if the trickle of deals turns into a flood, the coffers of the Scottish Land Fund, which has already spent half its 15m funding, could run dry within a couple of big buyouts.

Scottish First Minister Jack McConnell recently announced that land reform was to be expanded, raising the maximum allowed community population from the current 3,000 to 10,000 - a move that could see almost the whole of the Highlands, including many towns, become eligible.

The Land Fund admits that it has no idea how such an expansion could be financed.

On the up

Nor is it clear just what are the problems that land reform intends to solve.

Crofters may technically be tenants, but they have complete security of tenure, and the ability to pass their holdings down through their families.

Crofting is not the struggle it long was

And the economy of the Western Isles is no longer the basket case it may have seemed a decade or so ago.

Average earnings - at just over 23,000 per household - are among the lowest in the country; the population has shrunk by 16% since 1981, and may shrink by the same amount again in the next 20 years.

But incomes have risen by almost one-third since 2000, one of the highest rates nationwide.

Councils and call centres

And today’s Hebridean economy is becoming ever more diverse.

“Most crofters have another job,” says Ena MacNeil, who has a croft on North Uist and who currently chairs the Scottish Crofting Foundation. “Very few live off the land these days.”

Even those that do are not complaining too loudly, except at the mounting burden of bureaucracy - “My father used an envelope for all his paperwork,” says Mrs MacNeil. “My son uses his garage.”

Work is plentiful, especially since the creation of the Western Isles Council (the islands were previously split between mainland counties) in 1975. Fish-farming, along with associated processing industries, has become big business; there is a call centre in Stornoway, and even talk of hi-tech companies.

“In fact, try to get someone out to mend your wall, and you will have real difficulty,” says Sheila Roderick, who works a croft on the little island of Scalpay, just off Harris.

‘White settlers’

Incomers, although treated with cordial reserve mingled with suspicion, are helping make a difference, too.

“White settlers” are particularly keen on preserving and reinvigorating the islands’ traditional crafts; Ms Roderick, a self-confessed Essex girl, is a trained Harris Tweed weaver and is applying the techniques to creating a new brand of linen.

Tourism has grown by 20% over the past three years, bringing in almost 40m in 2002.

Now, there is a debate on how to keep it growing, despite the constraints of expensive flights and ferries, scant hotels and wearying single-track roads.

“The last thing we want to do is create a Butlins-style environment,” says Duncan MacPherson of Harris Development, a local economic agency.

Little danger of that, perhaps. But Mr MacPherson still detects an unusual buzz in the air.

“Lots of businesses are being set up, and people are starting to move into the area.

“The changes here aren’t radical. But over time, I think we are going to see a big difference.”

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Next week, BBC News Online visits Aberdeen, to find out how the oil-rich city is gearing up for when the North Sea wells run dry.