Our national parks are under assault from the Government As a result, our parks receive some 100 million visitors a year, who spend more than £4 billion on recreation, while accommodating 300,000 inhabitants and businesses that turn over £10 billion a year. As the Campaign to Protect Rural England puts it: "Far from being museum pieces, they are exemplars of sustainable development." The first sign that ministers intended to meddle with this was embedded in the NPPF. They retained an intention in previous planning rules that developments should only be allowed in the parks "in exceptional circumstances" but ominously omitted a requirement that proposals for them should be "subject to the most rigorous examination." Within months of its publication, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles gave the go-ahead for plans to extract natural gas from beneath the North York Moors National Park - and to process it just yards from the park boundary near Thornton-le-Dale - which had been resoundingly rejected by both the park authority and the North Yorkshire County Council. Campaigners warned that, as the first test under the NPPF, it showed parks were no longer safe against "major industrial intrusion." They were not wrong. Some 20 miles away, south of Whitby, the North York Moors National Park Authority has had to spend £500,000 over the past year - a tenth of its budget - on processing plans to establish the world's biggest potash mine deep in the protected area. And right at the other end of the country, Fernhurst in the South Downs National Park is lined up to be the second site in the South East, after Balcombe, to have exploratory drilling for fracking. By contrast - and contrary to popular belief - no wind farms have been erected in national parks, although there are a few solitary turbines. But they have been constructed nearby, spoiling views, especially around the Lake District, and a 76,000-panel solar farm has been proposed for the South Downs. The Government's road-building programme poses an even greater threat, running dual-carriageway highways through the Lake District, Peak District, South Downs and Broads national parks. And just this week the Government revived plans, rejected by the local county council partly because of implications for the Lake District, for a nuclear dump in Cumbria. Meanwhile, new measures will allow overhead cables and unsightly cabinets to be erected without planning permission during the otherwise welcome drive to bring high-speed broadband to the parks, while similar exemptions are being given to converting farm buildings. It seems a poor time to relax controls even further. Mr Boles would do better, as the Campaign for National Parks has suggested, to establish an independent commission to examine how they can continue both to serve their inhabitants and fulfil Wordsworth's original vision of national properties "in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy." Tough old bird with head for heights but no nose for dung We've all come across tough old birds in our time, but the Tibetan ground tit is the real thing. Officially the world's hardiest avian, it so distinguishes itself from other birds as to live above the treeline, between 10,000ft and 16,200ft up. It likes to hop rather than to fly, jumping out of the way when approached rather than taking to the air, and its locomotion is compared to that of a "small greyish-brown rubber ball." Its table manners consist of turning over yak dung for insects. It digs burrows for nesting and surviving the harsh winter months. While softer species all over the world are declining, numbers of the Tibetan ground tit (pictured below) remain stable, and conservationists have classified it as "of the least concern." Now scientists mapping its genome have uncovered some of its secrets. Unsurprisingly, it has genes that help it with low levels of oxygen, and to metabolise fatty acids to protect against the cold. But it has little sense of smell. The researchers, at Queensland's Griffiths University, are puzzled by its olfactory incapacity, as other high-altitude species have powerful noses. But surely it's obvious. How else would it cope with all that yak cack? Scary" rise in death toll from people resistant to antibiotics It is one of the most terrifying - and most neglected - crises we face. This week medical authorities on both sides of the Atlantic warned that resistance to antibiotics is already taking a massive toll. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report concluding that 23,000 Americans are killed every year by bugs immune to the drugs. And Prof Dame Sally Davies, the Government's Chief Medical Officer, added that they also annually cause the deaths of 25,000 Europeans. Dr Tom Frieden, the CDC director, says the crisis, caused by the misuse of antibiotics in medicine and their widespread feeding to farm animals, has "potentially catastrophic consequences." Prof Davies, who says that she "is not easily rattled," confesses that she is now "scared" . If it is allowed to continue, she speculates, people could well end up dying from "mundane" sore throats and grazed knees within just 20 years. Governments have been warned of this impending disaster for three decades - and have done little or nothing. Drug firms, in a classic market failure, decline to research new antibiotics because other medicines are more profitable. Dr Frieden and Prof Davies have done well to sound the alarm. But will anyone listen?