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Cambridge University will allow female Muslim students to wear burkas at graduation ceremonies, it emerged yesterday. By tradition, students are required to wear dark suits and white shirts under their graduation gowns. Cambridge has clamped down on breaches of the rules after officials complained students were increasingly wearing casual clothes to ceremonies. They warned the code 'is strictly enforced at ceremonies, and if you do not observe it, you may not be permitted to graduate on a particular occasion'. Yesterday it clarified that clothing linked to religious observance, such as burkas, would still be allowed. Scottish students who want to...

Cambridge University Allows Muslim Students To Wear Burkhas Under Their Mortar Boards At Graduation By DAILY MAIL REPORTER 30th October 2009 Strict dress code: How a Muslim Cambridge University student might look at their graduation ceremony. Cambridge University is to allow female Muslim students to wear burkhas under their mortar boards at graduation ceremonies, it emerged today. The university has a strict dress code for the prestigious events at the city's Senate House, to which all students must adhere in order to graduate. The university website warns students that the code 'is strictly enforced at ceremonies, and if you do...

Poppy was transferred to the leading children's hospital in London for specialist care after she was born three months early on Christmas Eve last year, in Basildon, Essex. But she died after a "domino effect" of mistakes, an inquest was told. Rebecca Tite, a trainee nurse, who had spent just three weeks in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit, set up a machine supplying her with glucose incorrectly, flooding her body with the solution. The levels of glucose in Poppy's blood rose to 20 times the maximum level they should have been, causing ''devastating effects'' to her body, St Pancras...

Oct 28, 2009 — Two articles announced solutions to the evidential problem that most troubled Darwin – the sudden appearance of complex animals at the base of the Cambrian fossil record.  Both of them involve chemical elements.  The only difference is which element. Science Daily announced a “Novel Evolutionary Theory For The Explosion Of Life.”  The article acknowledged that “The Cambrian Explosion is widely regarded as one of the most relevant episodes in the history of life on Earth, when the vast majority of animal phyla first appear in the fossil record.”  The article also acknowledged it to be a...

It may not surprise parents that the head-banging, string-shredding world of heavy metal can seriously damage your health. But now Tony Iommi, the British guitarist who helped to invent the genre, has revealed that he is undergoing stem-cell treatment to save the hand that inspired a generation. The number of rockers suffering from repetitive strain injuries is on the increase, and medical specialists have warned that their careers will come to an end unless they seek professional help. As a founder member of Black Sabbath, the Birmingham rockers fronted by Ozzy Osbourne, Iommi, 61, hit on the distortion-heavy riffs that...

THE Queen's youngest son, Prince Edward, chairman of the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme that encourages participation in outdoor activities, believes that one reason young people are attracted to the program is the possibility that they could die in pursuit of the award. In an interview with The Australian yesterday, the Earl of Wessex, who is seventh in line to the British throne, said the program, established in Britain in 1956 and open to people aged between 14 and 25 in more than 120 countries - remains popular with so many because it offers the promise of adventure and the...

Parents have been banned from supervising their children in public playgrounds, because they have not undergone criminal record checks. Only council-vetted "play rangers" are now allowed to monitor youngsters in two adventure areas in Watford while parents must watch from outside a perimeter fence. The Watford Borough Council policy has been attacked as insulting and a disgrace by furious relatives who say they are being labelled as potential paedophiles.

The British Government's chief drug adviser has sparked controversy by claiming ecstasy, LSD and cannabis are less dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol. Professor David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, attacked the decision to make cannabis a class B drug. He accused former home secretary Jacqui Smith, who reclassified the drug, of "distorting and devaluing" scientific research. Prof Nutt said smoking cannabis created only a "relatively small risk" of psychotic illness. And he claimed advocates of moving ecstasy into class B from class A had "won the intellectual argument". All drugs, including alcohol and tobacco,...

Anti-psychotic drugs, which are recommended in the short-term to calm down people who are agitated or violent, are known to be overprescribed, particularly in care homes. A survey of 62 primary care trusts (PCTs) for GP newspaper found 57 per cnt were failing to offer alternatives to the drugs risperidone and olanzapine. GPs have said they are forced to prescribe the drugs owing to a lack of replacement services for patients. In January, a three-year study published in The Lancet Neurology found people taking the drugs for long periods were twice as likely to die early as those not on...

A wealthy woman who poisoned her neighbour's Abyssinian cats with tuna laced with anti-freeze has been ordered to pay £1,500 in compensation to the distraught owner. Katherine Hall, 57, put the deadly tins of tuna in her garden to stop Nush and Mr Baz urinating on her strawberries. The court heard that the five-and-a-half year old cats died in agony a few days later. When police searched Hall's garden they found remnants of the deadly meal, and a cat-scaring machine. Owner Andrew Boyd said it was a 'disgrace' that Hall did not receive a harsher punishment. 'I don't want to...

The Business, Innovation and Skills minister is expected to say that internet pirates pose a threat to Britain's creative industries and it was vital for such industries to be allowed to flourish. He is expected to outline plans to tackle unlawful downloads, including plans in the most extreme cases, to temporarily suspend individual internet accounts, block access to download sites and reduce broadband speeds. In what will be his first keynote speech on the topic, Lord Mandelson will tell the Government’s C&binet Forum Conference, that persistent filesharers could have their Internet connections cut off for short periods, but only as...

Human eggs and sperm have been grown in the laboratory in research which could change the face of parenthood. It paves the way for a cure for infertility and could help those left sterile by cancer treatment to have children who are biologically their own. But it raises a number of moral and ethical concerns. These include the possibility of children being born through entirely artificial means, and men and women being sidelined from the process of making babies. Opponents argue that it is wrong to meddle with the building blocks of life and warn that the advances taking place...

Shotgun and rifle crime has more than doubled in Scotland because police have been so effective in cracking down on handgun smugglers, it emerged yesterday. Gangs finding it harder to access the smaller weapons are instead arming themselves with shotguns and rifles stolen from licensed holders. The Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency says that a recent rise in illegal handgun trade led officers to crack down on smugglers. In response, many criminals have been robbing legitimate shotgun owners, in particular focusing their attention on country estates. New figures show that shotgun and rifle offences are at a ten-year high....

The More They Know Darwin, The Less They Want Darwin-Only Indoctrination According to an international poll released by the British Council, the majority of Americans — 60% — support teaching alternatives to evolution in the science classroom. The percentage is the same for Britons, despite the fact that both countries have been inundated with pro-Darwin media coverage in this super-mega Darwin Year. Of course, the British media reporting this are chagrined. Britain is the birthplace of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, and the official-sounding British Council, the UK group behind the “Darwin Now” campaign that commissioned the Ipsos...

England is a strange place these days. A sort of political volcano has exploded, and the significance of it is not clear. According to pretty well everyone with access to free speech, fascism has erupted. The British National party has been making surreptitious headway for some time now, but restricted to winning a seat on some local council here or there. Suddenly in elections for the European parliament in Brussels, the BNP got about 900,000 votes, entitling it under proportional representation to two seats. One of those seats goes to Nick Griffin, the BNP leader. [....] Griffin has only one...

MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Somali pirates holding two Britons captive aboard a yacht off the coast of the Horn of Africa nation warned Britain not to try to rescue the couple. The pirates seized the vessel on Friday morning hundreds of miles out to sea near the Seychelles archipelago. They have taken it to the Somali coast with a view to demanding a ransom for their captives. "If warships surround us, we shall point our guns at the British tourists. They are old and we will take care of them -- that is if we are not attacked," said a pirate...

Patients with terminal illness are being heavily sedated by doctors before their deaths in a form of “slow euthanasia”, research suggests. A poll of nearly 3,000 doctors found that almost one in five had administered infusions of drugs to keep patients unconscious for hours or days at a time. In appropriate doses, sedatives and strong painkillers are considered a valuable way of easing the pain and anxiety of patients who are dying with conditions such as cancer. But 18.7 per cent of British doctors polled said they used drugs to invoke “continuous deep sedation” in a dying patient, a practice...

A man who stabbed a burglar to death after catching him in the act was charged with murder yesterday. Omari Roberts, 23, was remanded in custody. Roberts had found two teenage burglars in his mother's house when he arrived to visit her. After chasing one of the youths, aged 14, from the property, he returned to find 17-year-old Tyler Juett still there. There was a struggle and Juett was fatally stabbed in the chest, Nottingham Magistrates Court was told. The Crown Prosecution Service said the decision to charge Roberts months after the incident in March had been taken after 'careful...

'A British officer who trained French Resistance fighters during World War II was told to "go home" by Charles de Gaulle, newly released files show. Peter Lake was awarded the Military Cross and France's Croix de Guerre for his actions in the run-up to D-Day. But just three months after the Allied landings, the leader of Free France told him he had "no business" there. Mr Lake died in June aged 94, but his account of the meeting has been released by the National Archives.'

Prominent antitheist and self-styled “atheist” Richard Dawkins has written a new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Ironically, he admits about all his previous pro-evolution books: “Looking back on these books, I realized that the evidence for evolution is nowhere explicitly set out, and that it seemed like a good gap to close.”. Naturally, CMI is preparing a book to answer Dawkins’ latest. In a chapter about alleged bad design, Dawkins had a section about the loss of wings and evolution of features like halteres, the little drumstick-like stabilizers behind the one pair of wings on...

.... seems FR is slow today.......

Scotland Yard has abandoned plans for armed foot patrols and marksmen on motorbikes in gun crime hotspots in the face of mounting political criticism. Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, was forced to withdraw the proposal before a meeting of his police authority on Thursday, where he would have faced fierce criticism. The plan to deploy armed officers on the beat as a response to rising gun crime in the capital was announced last week when Sir Paul was out of the country. A team from CO19, the unit that shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005,...

There must be some sort of global competition at the moment to see who can come up with the most ridiculous dire warning about the effects of climate change. Up until today Kofi Annan, Al Gore, Ban Ki-Moon and Gordon Brown were all leading contenders. Former Secretary General Annan claims that 300,000 people a year are being killed by climate change. Ban and Brown think we have just months to secure the future of our planet, and Gore believes in torturing us with disaster movies dressed up as documentaries. They’re all blown away however by the latest apocalyptic vision from...

Doctors who support the legalisation of assisted suicide are more likely to withdraw or withhold treatment from dying patients, a study has found. Actively helping someone to die remains illegal in Britain but more than a third of GPs and hospital doctors report making decisions which they expected would accelerate the death of a terminally-ill patient. A significant minority — 7 per cent — said that they had taken steps such as withdrawing medications, foods or fluid, with the intention of hastening a patient’s death. But doctors who actively support a change in the law to allow assisted suicide are...

A longstanding ban that prevents gay and bisexual men from giving blood is being reviewed and could be overturned as early as next year, the Government has said. Men who have had sex with other men are currently banned for life from donating blood, under measures designed to reduce the risk of passing on infections such as HIV. But gay rights campaigners have condemned the policy as being irrational. The Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs (Sabto) meets today to discuss evidence for and against exclusion of high-risk donors as part of an official review of...

Almost one in five girls (19 per cent) also think a boyfriend may expect them to take sexual risks because they have had the jab. One in four girls having the cervical cancer jab would not tell a boyfriend they had been vaccinated while one in five think the vaccine is embarrassing because it is for a sexually-transmitted infection. However, 79 per cent of girls said having the vaccination reminds them of the possible risks of sexual contact and 93 per cent think it shows they are serious about their own health. The survey of more than 500 12 and...

The rate at which foreigners are swelling the population has increased by 50 per cent since a secret Government immigration policy document was written. Critics said it was clear evidence that ministers had implemented the controversial Cabinet Office report. This allegedly claimed mass immigration would make Britain more multicultural and allow Labour to portray the Tories as racists. Speaking in the Commons yesterday, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said it would be 'utterly disgraceful' for ministers to base immigration policy on party politics. He asked Immigration Minister Phil Woolas: 'Can I invite you to put the record straight - what...

October 27, 2009 Climate Chief Lord Stern: Give Up Meat To Save The Planet Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming. In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.” Direct emissions of methane from cows and...

Three Babies Aborted Every Day Due To Down's Syndrome Three babies are being aborted every day due to Down's syndrome, according to a study which shows the number of terminations has more than trebled in the last 20 years. By Rebecca Smith, Medical Editor and Chris Irvine 26 Oct 2009 An increasing number of pregnant women are being told their babies have the condition because of a growing number of women putting off having children until their 30s and 40s and improvements in screening, doctors say. And around nine in ten women who are told they are going to have...

People will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming. In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.” Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas. Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on...

Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activist who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases. The hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor "domestic extremists", the Guardian can reveal in the first of a three-day series into the policing of protests. Detailed information about the political activities of campaigners is being stored on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime. Senior officers say domestic extremism, a term coined by police that has no legal basis, can include activists suspected of minor...

So now the cat is well and truly out of the bag. For years, as the number of immigrants to Britain shot up apparently uncontrollably, the question was how exactly this had happened. Was it through a fit of absent-mindedness or gross incompetence? Or was it not inadvertent at all, but deliberate? The latter explanation seemed just too outrageous. After all, a deliberate policy of mass immigration would have amounted to nothing less than an attempt to change the very make-up of this country without telling the electorate. There could not have been a more grave abuse of the entire...

A few months ago, “Ida” was sitting on top of the world. She’d been lauded as the “eighth wonder of the world” whose “impact on the world of palaeontology” would be like “an asteroid falling down to Earth.” Falling, indeed. On October 21, Nature published an article announcing that “[a] 37-million-year-old fossil primate from Egypt, described today in Nature, moves a controversial German fossil known as Ida out of the human lineage.” Wired also published a story, noting that, “[f]ar from spawning the ancestors of humans, the 47 million-year-old Darwinius seems merely to have gone extinct, leaving no descendants,” further..."...

Personal details about thousands of people – said to include those only suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience – are being compiled on a database run by the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). The data includes pictures of people taken demonstrations and other observations made by police on the scene, such as vehicle registration numbers. These enable cars to be tracked using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. The Guardian reported that a man with no criminal record was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after he...

More than half of adults in a survey of 10 countries thought school science lessons should teach evolutionary theories alongside creationism.

As few as 4.7 per cent of women in England have been given the option of having their child at hospital, in a birth centre or at home, according to the National Childbirth Trust. In April 2007 ministers guaranteed all pregnant women would be able to select the place of birth where they would feel most comfortable. The devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, all say that they aim to do the same but have not made any time-specific promises. Research shows that women who give birth away from hospital obstetric units are more likely to have a natural...

Since the option to go private with NHS funding was introduced in April last year, almost 10,000 patients have sought diagnoses and waiting list operations in private hospitals - the majority of them in the past year. While it is up to individual hospitals whether to take patients at NHS prices, almost all have now opted to do so given the drop in people willing to pay themselves for private healthcare in the recession, and in private healthcare insurance takeup. According to Bob Ricketts, director of system management at the Department of Health, 2,100 hospitals were registering a month in...

The Labour government has been engaged upon a deliberate and secret policy of national cultural sabotage. Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since 2001. Over the next 25 years some seven million more will be added to Britain's population. The Government's 'driving political purpose' was 'to make the UK truly multicultural'. It was therefore a politically motivated attempt by ministers to transform the fundamental make-up and identity of this country. It was done to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions....

• Party claims biggest ever recruitment night • BBC feared far-right victory in high court • Griffin attacks capital as 'no longer British' The British National party will receive a pre-general election boost in the opinion polls, ministers fear, after more than 8 million people watched the far-right leader Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time on Thursday evening. As the party claimed that a record 3,000 people had registered to join its ranks in the biggest recruitment night in its history, Lord Mandelson warned that Griffin's exposure would produce "a bubble in the opinion polls for the BNP". He reflected...

The museum’s Prove It! website, which is designed to influence politicians at the Copenhagen climate summit in December, allows members of the public to pledge their support, or lack of it, to the environmentalist cause. But so far those backing the campaign are out-numbered nearly six-to-one by opponents. By Saturday, 2,385 people who took the poll said “count me out” compared to just 415 who said “count me in”, after being asked whether they agreed with the statement: “I’ve seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they’re serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair...

British police investigating the Lockerbie bombing wanted to investigate eight other potential suspects, a former head of the probe told The Scotsman newspaper Monday. However, they were never interviewed, said Stuart Henderson, a former detective chief superintendent who led the Lockerbie Incident Control Centre from 1988 until 1992. His comments came as Scottish police said they were re-examining the evidence surrounding the 1988 bombing as they seek new suspects in connection with the attack. Detectives are reviewing the case to establish who might have acted with Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi, the only person convicted over the bombing of a Pan...

The U.K. has decided to sacrifice one of its two new aircraft carriers F-35 flight capability due to that bleeding ulcer called a defence budget. While the U.K. is committed to buying two "aircraft" carriers in the original contract, the second one, the Price of Wales, due to go into service in 2018, will be used as a troop and helicopter carrier. With this, the U.K. will cut their F-35 order from around 138 down to 50. This has been agreed upon by senior navy and air force commanders who are preparing for the strategic defence review. “We always knew...

A 13-year-old boy is set to become a father after his 14-year-old girlfriend became pregnant. The two children, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, attend the same school. But the girl, who is several months pregnant, is in the year above the boy, report the Daily Mail. It is the latest in a history of under-age pregnancies in Poole, Dorset. In 1997, Jenny Teague became the country’s youngest mother when she gave birth, aged 12, to daughter Sasha. Two years later, sisters Charlene, 17, and Miranda Way, 15, from Poole gave birth within months of each other. The local...

Following on the heels of his last bestseller, The God Delusion, Darwinian biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins has scored another publishing triumph. The No. 5 bestseller in the country, according to the New York Times, is Dawkins’s The Great Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. You might think his success would give him the courage to face critics of his ideas in open debate. But you would be wrong. As one of the architects of the theory of intelligent design, I have formally challenged Dawkins to debate our contrasting views of evolution before the public, but his representatives have...

Navy surrenders one new aircraft carrier in budget battle Michael Smith The Royal Navy has agreed to sacrifice one of its two new aircraft carriers to save about £8.2 billion from the defence budget. The admirals, who have battled for a decade to secure the two new 65,000-ton carriers, have been forced to back down because of the soaring cost of the American-produced Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) aircraft due to fly off them. The move is a blow to the navy’s prestige and has come on the heels of Gordon Brown’s announcement last month that he was axing one of...

Labour threw open Britain's borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a "truly multicultural" country, a former Government adviser has revealed. The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett. He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for...

(edit)Accounts filed at the Charity Commission show that the Government paid a total of £113,411 last year to a foundation run by senior members and activists of Hizb ut-Tahrir — a notorious Islamic extremist group that ministers promised to ban. (edit) Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, last night described the disclosure as “astonishing and outrageous” and accused the Government of “sleeping on the job”. Hizb regards integration as “dangerous” and says that British Muslims should “fight assimilation” into British society. It wants to create a global Islamic superstate, or “caliphate”, initially in Muslim-majority countries and then across the rest...

It could be the breakthrough that finally has consumers warming to the energy-saving light bulb. A version that brightens up instantly, costs just 88p a year to run and lasts up to 25 years has gone on sale in Britain for the first time. The only catch is that the new LED bulb will cost £30.

Senior Anglican Bishop Reveals He Is Ready To Convert To Roman Catholicism The Rt Rev John Hind, the Bishop of Chichester, has announced he is considering becoming a Roman Catholic in a move that could spark an exodus of clergy. Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Religious Affairs Correspondent 24 Oct 2009 Bishop Hind said he would be "happy" to be reordained as a Catholic priest and said that divisions in Anglicanism could make it impossible to stay in the church. He is the most senior Anglican to admit that he is prepared to accept the offer from the Pope, who shocked the Church...

POOLE, England — It has become commonplace to call Britain a “surveillance society,” a place where security cameras lurk at every corner, giant databases keep track of intimate personal details and the government has extraordinary powers to intrude into citizens’ lives. A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore. But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the...