A mouse that can speak? A monkey with Down's Syndrome? Dogs with human hands or feet? British scientists want to know if such experiments are acceptable, or if they go too far in the name of medical research.

The Academy of Medical Sciences has launched a study to look at the use of animals containing human material in scientific research.

Using human material in animals is not new. Scientists have already created rhesus macaque monkeys that have a human form of the Huntingdon's gene so they can investigate how the disease develops; and mice with livers made from human cells are being used to study the effects of new drugs.

But scientists say the technology to put ever greater amounts of human genetic material into animals is spreading quickly around the world -- raising the possibility that some scientists in some places may want to push boundaries.

Religious groups are among those that are uneasy about the trend. One Catholic cardinal, Keith O'Brien of Edinburgh, has branded such work "Frankenstein science."

Martin Bobrow, a professor of medical genetics at Cambridge University is chairman of a 14-member group looking into the issue.

He says: "Do most of us care if we make a mouse whose blood cells or liver are human? Probably not. But if it can speak? If it can think? Or if it is conscious in a human way? Then we're in a completely different ballpark."

What do you say?

Fight them there or fight them here?

Former Foreign Office minister Kim Howells poses the question in the Guardian in a piece made grimly relevant by Wednesday's shooting dead of  five British soldiers by an Afghan policeman.

Howells says troops should be brought back from Afghanistan and that the billions of pounds saved should be used to beef up homeland security in Britain -- drawing the front line against al Qaeda around the UK rather than thousands of miles away in Helmand province.

He accepts that such an approach would result in "more intrusive surveillance in certain communities," a tacit acknowledgment that Britain's Muslims would be subject to greater scrutiny by police and intelligence services.

His "Fortress Britain" theory takes into account indications that a growing number of experts feel the war against the Al Qaeda's supporters the Taliban in Afghanistan is unwinnable.

It also makes the point that not all Al Qaeda training camps are in Afghanistan anyway.

Howells is Gordon Brown's intelligence and security watchdog and his theory goes counter to the prevailing wisdom in Washington and London, both of which are preparing to send more troops to Afghanistan.

Do you agree with him?

The shockwaves reverberating through Westminster as the MPs' expenses scandal unfolds have been compared with the "Clean Hands" bribery scandal that effectively demolished Italy's post-war political establishment in the space of a couple of years in the early 1990s.

If things are going to get that bad, the guilty politicians are going to have an uncomfortable time.

As a reporter in Rome at the time, I remember how surprise turned to anger then just as it has now as the public began to realise the sheer extent of the corruption that was helping to line the pockets of the country's leading politicians and their parties.

The morning newspapers brought fresh revelations almost daily of how the main political parties routinely demanded kickbacks in return for government contracts. There were the "golden sheets" for example in which invoices for linen and bedding were inflated to thousands of pounds, and the exorbitant demands placed on suppliers to hospitals, which caused particular anger.

People used to demonstrate in the streets wearing white gloves to show they had clean hands. They would try to scare MPs they felt were corrupt by sending them spoof versions of the "avviso," the official notice that warned potential offenders they were under investigation. The avviso itself became one of the enduring symbols of the scandal, almost like the guillotine in revolutionary France. Reproductions of it used to sell well as birthday and Christmas cards.

Another favourite amng the angry public, if any disgraced politician dared show his face his public, was to mockingly shower them with coins.

Such was the fate of one of those held to have been most deeply involved in the corruption, Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, who was forced to flee to his second home in Tunisia to escape jail in Italy. Other disgraced politicians and businessmen even took their own lives.

What was going on in Italy at that time was undoubtedly far more serious than the exploitation of MPs' expenses, but because the British have tended to be less cynical about their elected representatives, the sense of outrage has been much the same.

But before the calls for a complete shake-out of the British political establishment become so loud as to be unstoppable, it might be worth remembering, as former Labour minister Michael Meacher points out in his blog, that political vaccuums often produce surprise results.

Fringe parties, for example, can make big gains, as seems to be happening already in Britain.

And in the case of Italy, the net result of the collapse of its main parties was -- Silvio Berlusconi.

As if the challenge facing President-elect Barack Obama of stabilising Afghanistan was not difficult enough, it may have just got much, much harder after the Mumbai attacks soured relations between India and Pakistan -- undermining hopes of finding a regional solution to the Afghan war.

As discussed in an earlier post, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has blamed a group outside India for the attacks which killed at least 121 people. The coordinated attacks bore the hallmarks of Pakistani-based Kashmiri militant groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India says was set up by Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

Pakistan has condemned the attacks and an Indian government spokesman said the head of the ISI had agreed to visit India to share information -- an extraordinary agreement given that the two countries have fought three wars and came to the brink of a fourth in 2001/2002. But it's hard to believe that would be enough to appease India after the brazen attack on its commercial capital exposed its vulnerability.

So where does that leave Obama's plans for Afghanistan, given that a major element of this was to persuade India and Pakistan to make peace over Kashmir?

As discussed in posts here, here and here, the argument is that the cause of instability in Afghanistan is in Pakistan, and that Pakistan in turn will never fully turn against Islamist militants as long as it believes it might need them to counter India.  Since Pakistan is nervous both about the growing power of India on its eastern border, and about rising Indian influence in Afghanistan on its western border, the best way to calm the situation down, so the argument goes, would be to persuade the two rivals to make peace.

It was always an ambitious plan -- getting India and Pakistan to put behind them 60 years of bitter struggle over Kashmir as part of a regional solution to many complex problems in Afghanistan.  Have the Mumbai attacks pushed it out of reach? And if so, what is the fall-back plan?

(Reuters photo of smoke and flames billowing out of Taj Mahal hotel/Jayanta Shaw)

An attack of the scale and sophistication unleashed on Mumbai would not be possible without months of planning, and yet it completely went below India's intelligence radar.

Indeed, so unaware were the security agencies that even when the attacks began, the first reaction was these were probably gangland shootings that India's financial capital is known for.   So if the agencies have been so clueless about an attack so mammoth in its sweep, the question experts are beginning to ask is how safe are India's vital assets?

The nuclear facilities for instance ? A chilling thought but one that must be answered, says B. Raman, a former top officer at India's Research and Analysis Wing. "I shiver and sweat at the thought of what is waiting to happen tomorrow and where. The mind boggles as one tries to think and figure out how the terrorists could have planned and carried out terrorist strikes of such magnitude, territorial spread and ferocity without our intelligence and police having been able to get scent of it," Raman, one of India's foremost intelligence experts, wrote. "I could not sleep the whole of last night. One question, which kept bothering me again and again was : how safe are our nuclear establishments and material?"

Of course nuclear installations are far more heavily guarded than a public place such as a hotel, hospital or a railway station and Raman probably means to rouse what he thinks is an establishment gone into deep slumber. But after the attacks on Mumbai, no longer can Indian experts be be going around saying Pakistan is unique in not having a grip on the militant threat. After repeated attacks beginning in Varanasi last year to Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Delhi twice this year and finally Mumbai, and still no wiser as to who is behind them,  New Delhi looks as much at sea as its counterpart in Islamabad.