Showered by a million poppies: Soldiers stand below a huge red cloud to symbolise Great War dead as they re-enact scenes from the conflict Daily Mail.

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Top Gun pilot probed after crashing £20million jet while flying over home town, Daily Express

AN Italian air force pilot is under investigation for alleged show boating after he crashed his £20 million jet while flying over his home town.

Top Gun Francesco Sferra, 35, was forced to eject from his single seater AMX fighter plane as he swooped low over rooftops but his flight plan should have taken him no where near the built up area.

The jet, which has a top speed of 600mph, smashed into woods close to the town and miraculously no-one was hurt after Sferra steered it away from houses and he parachuted to safety.

Initially he was hailed a hero but local prosecutors are looking at the possibility the AMX crashed due to a technical fault after Sferra had swooped low over his home town of Carovilli near Isernia in central Italy.

The incident is being compared to the "sail by salute" carried out by cruise ship captain Francesco Schettino when he steered the luxury liner the Costa Concordia past the island of Giglio two years ago - only to strike rocks and cost 32 lives.

A source close to the investigation said: "The pilot should have taken off and flown directly north, instead he headed south east we need to know why."

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Gays Are 1 in 50, Not 1 in 4, Michael Brown, In the Line of Fire. Charisma Magazine

According to a 2011 Gallup poll, Americans thought that 25 percent of the population was gay (meaning one out of every four people), while those aged 18-29 put the figure at closer to 30 percent (meaning almost one in every three people). The reality is that less than 2 percent of the population is gay (meaning fewer than one in 50 people), and many gay leaders know this is true.

People of America, you have been duped.

For many years, we were told that "one in every 10 Americans" was gay, a figure based on the massively flawed 1948 study of Alfred Kinsey. (Kinsey actually relied on data from male prisoners to come up with his statistics.)

Even though gay activists knew the figure was inflated, they used it as a convenient lie, since, as two leading gay strategists noted in the late 1980s, "there is strength in numbers." (For details, go here.) As expressed by a gay leader a few days ago, "The truth is, numbers matter, and political influence matters."

In other words, if Americans realized that less than 2 percent of the population was gay rather 10 percent (let alone 25 percent), they would have a very different view of "gay rights."

To be sure, it is wrong to bully or oppress or mistreat anyone based on gender or ethnicity or romantic attractions, so that is not the question. And whether gays are 1 percent of the population or 90 percent, they should not be mistreated.

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Further Reading:

Equal Marriage : Just Plain Wrong: A Christian Perspective on the Gay Marriage Debate in the UK Equal Marriage; Just Plain Wrong.

Horror beyond imagination: The most haunting account of the trenches you'll ever read - from a brilliant anthology by Birdsong author Sebastian Faulks . Daily Mail

  Some teenagers clamoured for excitement of war - before realising the truth

  Fast-moving warfare in 1914 quickly bogged down into war of attrition

  Haunting accounts tell of seeing comrades blown apart by artillery fire

  Others speak of fields coated with corpses, whose stench filled everything

  Eyewitness accounts collected in new a book of stories from the front 

One hundred years ago exactly, in the summer of 1914, teenager Len Thompson was thrilled by the prospect of war.

It was a month since the assassination of the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo, and now Russia and Germany were mobilising their armies. Britain was being drawn into the conflict.

‘We were all delighted when war broke out on August 4,’ he would recall, ‘bursting with happiness.’

It was not that the hardy, blue-eyed teenager from East Anglia was particularly blood-thirsty. Or politically minded. Or jingoistic. But soldiering for King and Country held prospects for him that were otherwise far beyond his poverty-stricken reach.

‘There were ten of us in the family and my father was a farm labourer earning 13 shillings [65p] a week. I left school when I was 13 and helped my mother pulling up docks in the Big Field for a shilling an acre.

Thompson’s account of his recruitment - included in a profoundly moving new anthology of memoirs and contemporary letters and diaries collected by Birdsong author Sebastian Faulks and professor of English Hope Wolf reminds us that the eagerness with which a generation of young men offered themselves up for sacrifice was both appalling and fascinating.

In the beginning, the youthful wish for excitement was as important as the rush of bash-Kaiser-Bill patriotism. It would be over by Christmas - everyone said so - so don’t be left behind, get in quickly and grab your piece of the action.

Go with your mates, don the khaki, pick up a rifle, impress the girls.

Or there was, as in Thompson’s case, the prospect of three square-ish meals a day for the first time in his life and less back-breaking labour than he was used to.

Either way, the war that lured in eager recruits from city and shire was presented as a positive experience that a man would be proud to tell his children and grandchildren about.

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