Robert Mugabe became President of Zimbabwe in 1980. He was then a popular hero, having fought to liberate the country from white minority rule under the Rhodesian Front.

Mugabe’s time as President has seen the ruin of the country. His government has been criticised as riddled with corruption, and with high unemployment and runaway inflation Zimbabwe is now suffering financial disaster. There have also been reports of frequent attacks on his political opponents as he seeks to cling to power, including the use of wide-spread intimidation and of torture, and he is accused of having stolen the last election.

Five weeks ago, there was a Presidential election, and a real hope that Mugabe might be ousted. Things in Zimbabwe have become so bad that it seemed possible that Mugabe would no longer be able to control the opposition to him.

Following the election, Mugabe’s rival Morgan Tsvangirai quickly claimed outright victory. He didn’t have direct access to the ballots, but as a measure to promote fairness polling stations had been required to post local results, and Tsvangirai’s MDC party said that according to these results he had won 50.3% of the vote, more than the 50% required to make him the new President. Meanwhile, Mugabe’s Zanu PF party refused to publish the results, amidst claims that they were looking for ways to rig them.

Today, finally, the official results were announced, giving Tsvangirai a win but not a large enough share of the vote to avoid a second round of voting with just him and Mugabe on the ballot paper. Whether or not Tsvangirai really won the vote outright is a mystery.

Both parties have some access to the results, Tsvangirai to those posted outside the polling stations and Mugabe to the actual ballots cast. Both have a clear vested interest to lie in order to gain power, however. Although Mugabe’s reputation for rigging elections gives him the least credibility, without a neutral observer able to operate unhindered by Zanu PF it’s almost impossible to know what the outcome of the election really was.

Today will see the first national teachers’ strike for 21 years. Around 8000 schools will be disrupted, either partially or fully closed.

Teachers are skilled professionals. They do a tough job, working long hours and often enduring difficult working conditions. They also play a key role in society, so it’s important to attract good staff to the profession.

On the other hand, teachers are already well paid. According to Jim Knight, the Schools Minister (admittedly not a neutral source), the average salary for a teacher is £34000.

So there’s an interesting argument to be had about teachers’ pay.

However, for the most part that isn’t the argument that’s being had. Instead, the argument from the NUT (the teachers’ union that’s called the strike) that we’re hearing most is all about past levels of pay. Christine Blower, the NUT’s acting head, put it like this:

What we’re saying to the government is, if you really do value teachers, then make sure that they’re paid at least at the level of inflation - which we take to be the RPI [Retail Price Index], which is 4.1%.

The NUT’s argument is that the 2.45% pay rise that teachers have been offered is below the rate of inflation. If teachers’ pay rises more slowly than the rate of inflation, then their salaries will buy less than they used to; in real terms, teachers will have had a pay cut. And the NUT won’t stand for a pay cut.

There’s nothing in that argument about why a pay cut for teachers would be such a terrible thing, though. It doesn’t argue that teachers deserve more than they’ve been offered, or that a fall in teachers’ pay would hit recruitment, or anything like that. Instead, it’s a straightforward appeal to history, arguing that next year’s pay should be the same (in real terms) as last year’s pay.

Appeals to history are, of course, fallacies. That things were a certain way before doesn’t prove either that it was right that they were that way or that they should continue to be that way. The NUT needs to shift their focus to a better argument.

It probably wouldn’t be a great idea to try to explain that to your teacher, though. Except, perhaps, your Critical Thinking teacher.

We hear a lot about climate change and what we need to do to reduce carbon emissions and so preserve the environment.

One suggestion is that we should replace fossil fuel consumption with biofuel consumption, moving from burning coal and oil to burning ethanol and biodiesel.

Biofuels are liquid fuels made by fermenting plant material such as corn and rapeseed. Although they release carbon when burned, this is carbon aborbed by the plants when they’re grown. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, release into the atmosphere carbon which would otherwise be stored in coal and oil desposits underground. The impact on the environment of burning biofuels is therefore less than the impact of burning fossil fuels.

Or is it? Critics of biofuels point out that to fully understand their environmental impact we need to think more carefully than this.

The process of growing the crops used to make biofuels can be polluting, as can the process of converting the crops into fuel. Areas of rainforest, which act as a carbon sink, are being destroyed to make room to grow biofuel crops; whatever carbon would have been absorbed by the rainforest but now isn’t is a carbon cost of biofuel production.

It may well be that all things considered, biofuels are greener than fossil fuels, at least when they are produced in the right way. What we can’t do, though, is generalise from biofuels being greener than fossil fuels in one way (whatever carbon is emitted into the atmostphere when biofuels are burned is first absorbed when the biofuel crops are grown) to the conclusion that they are greener than fossil fuels full stop.