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Hollywood actress Jane Fonda lobbied the British Government to intervene and stop the 1981 hunger strike, newly released files reveal. The two-time Oscar winning star sent a telegram to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher urging her to grant the prisoners political status. Her message was sent in May 1981, at the height of a crisis which saw 10 republican prisoners starve themselves to death. The telegram, dispatched to Downing Street, is also signed by her then husband Tom Hayden, a US social and political activist. It states: “Please save the lives of the hunger strikers by granting them political status. “The...

"God made man but Sam Colt made them equal." Yet is said that the 2nd Amendment follows hard upon the 1st so as to serve as its bodyguard -- providing the added incentive of coercive force by a wary citizenry to guarantee that those initial cherished liberties, expounded by our Founders, did not go the way of the 10th Amendment. The 2nd Amendment, interpreted as the right to bear arms by a free people, has not escaped that yawning chasm that has opened up between the political Right and Left, and the rationale behind this stratification falls along the same...

Like most people, I’m a sucker for a heartwarming story around the holidays. Sometimes, you get that nice feeling when good things happen to good people, like you find at the end of a classic movie like “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But since I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, I also feel all warm and fuzzy when bad things happen to bad people. That’s why I always smile when I read stories about taxpayers moving across borders, thus preventing greedy tax-hiking politicians from collecting more revenue. “Where’s our tax revenue?!?” I’m glad when that happens to French politicians. I’m glad...

Wealthy British couples who cannot have children are increasingly seeking "wombs for hire" from women overseas, according to figures obtained by The Independent. The number of couples formally registering children born to foreign surrogates has nearly trebled in five years, raising concerns that poor women in developing countries are being exploited by rich Westerners. "Parental orders" granted following surrogacy – to transfer the child from the surrogate mother to the commissioning parents – have risen from 47 in 2007 to 133 in 2011. While the figures are still relatively small, experts say they understate the true scale of the...

Thatcher urged to steal French-made Exocet missiles during Falklands war National Archives papers outline plan of attorney general to hijack missiles being transported through South America One of Britain's most senior law officers at the time of the Falklands conflict, the attorney general, Sir Michael Havers, urged the prime minister to steal deadly French Exocet missiles to stop them ending up in the hands of the enemy. The ingenious scheme is revealed in previously secret documents released to the National Archives on Friday which show how the UK government attempted to subvert South American solidarity with Argentina. The Chilean junta...

After her son Mark got lost in the desert competing in the Paris-Dakar rally, Margaret Thatcher shed a rare tear in public. When it came to paying for his rescue, however, the 'Iron Lady' was firmly back in the driving seat and at pains to ensure she personally, not taxpayers, footed the bill for her hapless off-spring's misadventure. ..... With that matter resolved, the Foreign Office calculated their costs for other accommodation, travel, telegrams and telephone calls to be £1,191. No charges were made to official funds 'other than those which would be so charged in case of assistance for...

After her son Mark got lost in the desert competing in the Paris-Dakar rally, Margaret Thatcher shed a rare tear in public. When it came to paying for his rescue, however, the 'Iron Lady' was firmly back in the driving seat and at pains to ensure she personally, not taxpayers, footed the bill for her hapless off-spring's misadventure.

This is the shocking moment two masked thugs brutally attacked a 62-year-old man with a gun moments after he arrived home. The footage shows how the man, who had just driven up to his house and parked his Range Rover, was punched to the floor before being repeatedly hit with the weapon.

'Ronald Reagan issued a last-ditch appeal to Margaret Thatcher to abandon her campaign to retake the Falklands and to hand over the islands to international peacekeepers, according to official documents made public today. Files released by the National Archives at Kew, South West London, under the 30-year rule show that as British troops closed in on final victory, the US president made a late-night phone call to Mrs Thatcher urging her not to completely humiliate the Argentines. However, his request fell on deaf ears as a defiant Prime Minister insisted that she had not sent a British task force across...

Back in my less sophisticated days (shocking as it may seem, I wasn’t always the mature, statesmanlike figure I am today), I sometimes resorted to silly arguments when debating gun control, such as, “does this mean you want to ban knives since they also can be used to kill people?” Smarter opponents would scoff and accuse me of knocking down straw men, assuming a non-existent slippery slope, or engaging in reductio ad absurdum.I wasn’t even sure what the last one meant, but I secretly felt chagrined because I also thought the argument was nonsense. But it’s not like we had...

A 'gentle, well-respected' organist has died after being subjected to a brutal attack that left him with horrific head injuries. Grandfather Alan Greaves, 68, was on his way to Midnight Mass at St Saviour's CoE church in High Green, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, on Christmas Eve when he was set upon. He was found by a pizza delivery worker collapsed on the pavement outside a primary school just 300 metres from the church. He was rushed to hospital with severe head injuries and underwent a four-hour emergency operation but has since passed away. 'He was a good man and this was...

The Department for International Development (DFID) paid almost £500million last year to consultants, mostly British, many of whom earn six, even seven-figure incomes, courtesy of the taxpayer. DFID also funds dozens of foreign consultancy firms. It is paying £6million to the University of Cape Town to investigate mental health issues in southern Africa and millions of pounds to US-based organisations, including the Clinton Foundation, the International Food Policy Research Institute and Family Health Inter-national. It is paying a Washington-based group, Search for Common Ground, £3.9million to “support the electoral cycle in Sierra Leone”. Consultancy firms in India and Uganda are...

We joke about it here in the U.S. that maybe the UK should ban kitchen knives since they can be used to kill someone. It looks like the UK may have taken those jokes a little too seriously because theyÂ’ve been considering banning long, pointed kitchen knives for the past several years. Researchers from West Middlesex University Hospital found that crime in their country was on the rise, and that kitchen knives were used in as many as half of all stabbings.At least theyÂ’re being consistent. They thought guns were dangerous, so they banned guns. Now, theyÂ’re acknowledging that knives...

The good news is that if we ever do get that assault rifle ban, followed by a handgun ban, followed by a ban of anything that can shoot bullets, the “Banners” will still have a banner year of banning all the other ways with which people kill other people. Violent crimes haven’t gone away with the UK’s gun control. They’ve actually gone up. Britons suffer 1,158,957 violent crimes per year, which works out at 2,034 per 100,000 residents. The U.S., meanwhile, has a rate of 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, which is lower than France’s, at 504 Instead of gun...

Sergeant-Major Stan Hollis, of Middlesbrough was the only soldier awarded a VC at D-Day and is believed to have gunned down 100 German soldiersDuring the early hours of June 6, 1944 - D-Day - lines of scared young soldiers waited in the dark for the order to board the landing craft that would take them into battle on the beaches of northern France. At the last minute they were issued with an unexpected piece of equipment — a condom each! ‘What are these for?’ boomed out the voice of Sergeant-Major Stan Hollis, a hulking power-house of a man from...

However, the UK will not be able to avoid a relative decline over the next decade – falling to eighth behind India, Brazil, and Russia but avoiding the dramatic plunge expected for France and Italy – according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). Brazil overtook the UK over the past year but has slipped to seventh in CEBR’s World Economic League Table rankings due to the weakness of its currency.Brazil is expected to overtake the UK again in 2014. The next decade will see Brazil, Russia, India, and China – cement their economic dominance as Europe suffers...

Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, has signalled that the Government might be prepared to use the Parliament Act to get its planned “equal marriage” legislation on to the statute book if it is rejected in the Lords. The Act, which has been used only seven times in the past century, is sometimes described as the “nuclear” option of parliamentary process to break stalemates between the Commons and the Lords. It asserts the superiority of the House of Commons by allowing Bills that cannot clear the Lords to become law, but is intended to be used only in exceptional circumstances. The...

The concept of 'equal marriage' is fundamentally flawed as it presupposes a questionable notion of 'equality' and ignores the essential and defining components of conventional marriage. Gay marriage falsely judges parenting roles as interchangeable. Same sex marriage wrongly assumes that the benefits of marriage are automatically transferable to same-sex couples who 'enter' the same institution. There is no evidence that same-sex couples will benefit from the 'commitment device' invoked by marriage. Gay marriage introduces a disturbing, unproven and socially risky new norm into society, that children do not need both a mother and father for optimal development, when all the...

Recently discovered wax cylinders have been shown to contain what could be the earliest audio recordings of Christmas in the world. The Museum of London discovered 24 wax cylinders dating back to 1902 that contain a British family’s home phonograph recordings taken at Christmas. The recordings are considered incredibly rare because wax cylinders are fragile. They are made of wax after all, and as such they don’t store very well. Finding them over one hundred years later in playable condition is a Christmas miracle of science.The recordings were made by the Wall family of New Southgate and Friern Barnet in...

The intelligence agency GCHQ has dismissed claims that a coded message from the Second World War found tied to the remains of a pigeon in a chimney has been cracked. A team of Canadian researchers claimed earlier this month that the code contained details of German tank movements which had been sent by a British soldier. However, Michael Smith, a trustee of Bletchley Park, said the claims were "nonsense". He said the Canadian academics had used a World War 1 code from the First World War as the basis of their research. He said: "The idea that a World War...