It also has to find a site where it can create large pools of clean seawater with nets over the top, for the cleaned and fed birds to regain their strength.Stephen Mulholland, the RSPCA’s regional manager, accused some officials of failing to tell the truth last week about the extent of the oil spill. About 10,000 – half the British population – winter in nearby Carmarthen Bay, which has been heavily oiled.The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals hopes to open a major wildlife hospital for oiled seabirds today. The oiled birds need about two weeks of intensive cleaning, rest and recuperation before they can be released back into the wild.One of the RSPCA’s main worries is that the local sea and mudflats might still be heavily polluted when the birds are ready to be freed.At the weekend the society converted an empty warehouse on an industrial estate in Steynton, just outside Milford Haven in Dyfed, into a hospital. It was already clear that it would do far more harm than the Braer oil spill in Shetland in 1993.Some 700 of the rescued birds were scoter ducks. Wildlife conservation and rescue organisations believe hundreds more birds, alive and dead, will come ashore during this week.The Countryside Council for Wales said aerial surveys had shown 120 miles of coastline had been significantly polluted, much of it in Britain’s only coastal national park.

At least 300 had been found dead on the beaches.Biologists usually estimate that for each dead bird found, another nine are never recovered. Almost all had come ashore on Saturday, Sunday and yesterday, weakened and sick.A further 140 had been picked up on the island of Lundy, 40 miles away, or on the north coast of Devon across the Bristol Channel. Yesterday it became clear that it was Britain’s worst environmental disaster since the Torrey Canyon sinking off Cornwall in 1967, and may yet prove to be even more damaging.Yesterday afternoon, 1,100 oiled seabirds had been rescued along the Pembrokeshire coast and were receiving treatment. If we fail in court, we will have to watch Thomas cough and splutter, retching his way through life and living out a horrid existence.”. NICHOLAS SCHOON

Environment Correspondent
The Sea Empress oil spill could kill more than 10,000 seabirds. Thomas had some higher brain function and awareness.Thomas’s doctors wanted to continue feeding him and were set to oppose his parents’ application.

They disputed the Creedons’ belief that he was constantly in pain.But earlier this month, Mrs Creedon said: “Thomas has a very distressing existence and I find it difficult to see how the medical profession in this particular area is prepared to perpetuate that suffering, no matter what the realistic outcome is likely to be.”We all know that he will die prematurely. Thomas Creedon, the brain damaged two-year-old at the centre of a euthanasia battle, has died of natural causes. Thomas’s parents, Con and Fiona Creedon, of Keyingham, Humberside, were trying to win the legal right through the High Court to stop him being fed artificially.
They claimed their son, who could not hear or see, was paralysed, had constant fits, was in constant pain and suffering by being forced to stay alive.But yesterday, John Burman, the couple’s solicitor, said that Thomas had died at home with his parents on Friday night.The cause of death was cerebral palsy, following a chest infection, Mr Burman said.If the High Court application – which was about to be lodged by lawyers – had been successful, Thomas would have stopped being fed and been sedated as he starved to death.His mother Fiona, who also has two daughters, said yesterday that his funeral would be private, adding: “We need some time to ourselves now to grieve for Thomas privately.”A High Court case concerning Thomas’s right to die would have raised profound ethical questions, prompting fears that it was the first step towards legalising euthanasia.Tony Bland, a survivor of the Hillsborough football tragedy, was allowed to die in 1993 after his parents and doctors supported an application to withdraw feeding.But Tony, unlike Thomas, was in a persistent vegetative state and totally unaware of his surroundings. “The Government set the report up and then wanted to walk away from its conclusions,” he said.. The Government will never again be able to go to a judge and say these documents should be suppressed on national security grounds.”Peter Thurnham, who last week resigned the Conservative whip, said he had carried out his threat to vote against the Government because of the recommendations in the report.

The bad old days of national security being quoted as a good reason to suppress documents which actually had nothing whatever to do with national security and more to do with administrative inconvenience – that’s finished. The emphasis is to be on disclosure of documents (even if with some sensitive documents they will be partly deleted) rather than the suppresssion of information.”I am pleased to have used my position as a backbench Member of Parliament to extract maximum influence and get what I’ve been campaigning for three years. I spent three years trying to stop PIIs being used in this way, that is to say in the national interest.”I intervened on Roger Freeman and got two fundamental undertakings. The matter has been decided in the Government’s favour, albeit by one vote.” He added, however, that this did not necessarily indicate that the issue had been laid to rest.Rupert Allason, who voted with the Government, said he had been willing to do so because he had been given assurances of fundamental changes is the way Public Interest Immunity Certificates were used: “They halted PII certificates once and for all in the way they were used against the defendants in the Matrix Churchill trial.”[This] was not a quibble These PIICs were trump cards [in the Matrix Churchill case]. If there was a vote of confidence, we would then have decided on quite different criteria, and might very easily have arrived at a very different decision, but that was another matter.”Tory rebel Quentin Davies said he had made his point quite clearly in the Commons during the debate when he intervened while Roger Freeman was addressing the House: “It went to the heart of the debate of whether the Government had been frank with the House of Commons I agree with [Sir Richard] that it was not …