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A Tory Minister is involved in an extraordinary row over claims that taxpayers’ money was used to fund gay sex parties. The politician is said to have been in a feud with a senior party official accused of using dating app Grindr to invite gay MPs and activists to his suite at the Conservative Party conference. The £70,000-a-year official, who is not an MP, has also been accused of bullying staff and being drunk on duty. He was disciplined after a formal investigation. …

A Royal navy ship has arrived in the southern Indian Ocean to verify signals Chinese officials believe could lead to missing flight MH370. The three 'fleeting sounds' have been picked up in the multi-national search currently being conducted 1,000 miles off Australia's west coast. At least one of those 'pings' is believed to have a similar frequency to that given off by a black box. HMS Echo, one of Britain's most sophisticated hydrographic vessels, is racing against time to determine whether the sounds were signals from the plane's black box as the batteries powering the device are expected to run...

A Chinese ship searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 detected a "pulse signal" in the southern Indian Ocean on Saturday, but there was no evidence yet that it was linked to the missing plane, state media said. The signal picked up by the vessel's black box detector had a frequency of 37.5kHz, the official Xinhua news agency said -- identical to the beacon signal emitted by flight recorders. The announcement came nearly a month after the Malaysian jetliner disappeared off radar screens en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, triggering an unprecedented international search. Australian...

Millions will remember Maureen Lipman’s TV character Beattie praising her grandson when he ‘got an ’ology’. But the TV advert from 1988 has been blamed by Ukip leader Nigel Farage for encouraging a generation to study for what he considers to be worthless degrees.

The fragile Tory truce over Europe disintegrated last night after it emerged that more than 100 Conservative MPs and candidates are set to defy David Cameron at the General Election next year by vowing to leave the EU. The Prime Minister has promised the Tory manifesto will spell out his pledge for a referendum by 2017 on Britain’s links with Europe after trying to win back key powers from Brussels. But Tory rebels will go further and make their own personal manifesto vows to campaign to withdraw from the EU—regardless of any concessions by Brussels. …

The BBC is sending 272 staff to the World Cup in Brazil this summer - enough to field almost 25 football teams. Licence-fee payers will spend £12million funding the trip to cover the month-long tournament in South America starting on June 12.

Buenos Aires (AFP) - Argentine President Cristina Kirchner claimed Wednesday that the Falkland Islands serve as a nuclear base for the NATO alliance in the South Atlantic. Argentina, which calls the archipelago the Malvinas, claims the British overseas possession as its own, and fought a brief but bloody war for it in 1982. The islands, she said, "constitute a NATO military nuclear base in the South Atlantic -- this is the truth that they can't continue to hide." She alleged the archipelago is "among the most militarized areas in the world," saying some 1,500 soldiers and 2,000 civilian military personnel...

You’d almost think they had something to hide. But that couldn’t possibly be true, no, could it? After all, they were democratically elected in Egypt! Just ask Mohammed Elibiary of the Department of Homeland Security, or Hussam Ayloush of Hamas-linked CAIR. “MB urges UK not to proceed with probe,” from Al Arabiya, April 3 (thanks to Lookmann): The Muslim Brotherhood has urged Britain late Wednesday not to bow to foreign pressures after London’s recent announcement that it will launch a review into the operations of the Islamist movement. “It is important that the British government does not bend to pressure...

NOAH’S Ark would have floated — even with two of every animal on board, physicists have determined based on the weight of the beasts and the buoyancy of the boat. The students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester who came to this conclusion used the dimensions for the boat that were given in the Bible. In the book of Genesis, Noah is commanded to build an ark which is 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high to house himself, his family and two of every species of animal. For the study,...

David Cameron and Ed Miliband have been hurling insults at each other in a return of the "Punch and Judy" politics both men said they wanted to abolish. In exchanges on the price of Royal Mail shares, Mr Miliband said the PM was "not so much the 'Wolf of Wall Street' as the 'dunce of Downing Street'". The PM said he would not take lectures from the Labour leader and Ed Balls. He branded the pair "the two Muppets" who had advised former PM Gordon Brown on the sale of the UK's gold.

A 17-year-old boy has been arrested over the disappearance of a terror suspect, who absconded after changing into a burka at a London mosque. Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed, who is still missing, escaped from government minders in November while subject to an order restricting his movements. Mr Mohamed had been linked to Somali militant group al-Shabab. The 17-year-old was arrested on on suspicion of conspiring with another to breach a so-called TPim order. Scotland Yard said he had been taken to a south London police station where he remained in custody.

After 8 years of front line operations, the UK's military headquarters in Helmand was disbanded yesterday. In the latest stage of the ongoing drawdown of UK operations in Afghanistan, the functions of Headquarters Task Force Helmand have been subsumed into the wider US-led Regional Command (South West). This milestone marks the end of the 16th Task Force Helmand operation for the British-led coalition task force, which has comprised soldiers from the Danish, Estonian, Tongan, Jordanian and Bosnian armed forces.

Nick Clegg accused Nigel Farage of peddling "dangerous fantasies" in an ill-tempered BBC TV debate on Britain's future in Europe. Mr. Farage accused the Lib Dem leader of "willfully lying to the British people about Brussels' grip on UK laws. He also claimed EU immigration had hit the "white working class" the hardest. Instant polls said Mr. Farage had won by a bigger margin than he did in their debate last week.... The UKIP leader accused the Lib Den leader of being "hell bent on getting Britain involved in a war.... He said he did not want Britain to be...

Eighteen countries, including five of the world’s leading arms exporters, ratified a landmark treaty regulating the multibillion-dollar global arms trade on Wednesday, giving a significant boost to the campaign for the treaty’s entry into force. […] Five of the world’s top 10 arms exporters—Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain—turned in their ratification documents at the ceremony. The other 13 were Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Malta, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Among the hold-outs is the United States, the world’s largest weapons exporter. The Obama administration has signed the treaty but there is strong resistance in...

A student who went to visit family in Iran has been locked up for five months over comments she made to friends on Facebook, her family say. Roya Saberi Negad Nobakht, from Stockport, was arrested as she stepped off a plane in the provincial city of Shiraz and accused of being a spy, husband Daryoush Taghipoor told the M.E.N. Daryoush said his 47-year-old wife has been detained at Evin, an infamous prison in Iranian capital Tehran, on suspicion of plotting to commit crimes against security and insulting Islam. He claimed her arrest was over comments she made on an internet...

The good news is that they’re only overrepresented 200% in London prisons. An investigation into British prisons has revealed that over a quarter of prisoners in the London are Muslims, more than double their population proportion in the UK capital.Data collected by lawyer and shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan revealed that even though Muslims made up just 12% of the population of London, they made up for 27% of the city’s prison population.Furthermore, it was noted that while Muslims in the UK constitute 4.8% of the population according to a 2011 census, 14% of inmates in the country are Muslims....

Black and Asian families are significantly healthier than white people, official figures suggest. A study found that one in three people from white families had long-standing illnesses, compared to only one in five of those from non-white ethnic groups. White people were almost twice as likely as black and Asian people to have long-term illnesses which limit their lifestyle, the research suggests. The figures, released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), show that 36 percent of people from white ethnic groups had long-standing illnesses, while among non-white groups the proportion was 21 percent. …

Why Poland Loves Ukraine ... For Now MARCH 28, 2014 Slawomir Sierakowski Eastern Europe, which beginning with Poland is celebrating its 25th anniversary of freedom from Communism, has suddenly awakened from a beautiful dream about the end of history. No less an authority than Adam Michnik, the legendary Polish anti-Communist dissident, recently announced that 2014 marks the end of the best period in Poland’s history in three centuries. We are entering uncertain times: In contrast to Eastern Europe’s foray into independence after World War I, no close intraregional alliances were formed in the aftermath of 1989; rather, each country placed...

NATO's foreign ministers ordered an end to civilian and military cooperation with Russia on Tuesday and told their generals and admirals to quickly figure out ways to better protect alliance members that feel threatened by Vladimir Putin's Kremlin. The 28-member alliance, the keystone of U.S. and European security since the end of World War II, was reacting to its most serious crisis in years: Russia's unilateral annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which the U.S. and its allies have condemned as an illegal land grab. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the other ministers, meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels...

The boom in American natural-gas production during the past several years, and the consequent crash of domestic natural-gas prices, has caused many to call for the liberation of U.S. natural-gas exports. The ongoing Russian invasion of the Crimea and threat to the rest of Ukraine has added still greater urgency to these calls, as the need take action to weaken Russian President Vladimir Putin’s natural-gas stranglehold over Europe has become vital. Despite these economic and national security imperatives, there are still those who maintain that allowing American natural-gas producers to export their product would damage the national interest. According to...