Free Republic

olice confident in bombers hunt A forensic team were at the scene of the Glasgow attack Enlarge Image The links between three terror attacks in Glasgow and London are becoming "ever clearer", says the UK's top counter-terrorism officer.Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke said he was "absolutely confident" of uncovering detail of the attackers' methods and network. A Jeep containing gas cylinders driven into Glasgow Airport has been linked to two failed car bombs in London. Five people have been arrested - in Cheshire, Liverpool and at the airport. BBC correspondent Daniel Sandford said police were looking for one other suspect,...

Emma Dellaway, 25, from south London, likes to know that the money sitting in her current account is not doing harm. "I don't have much money, as I am just starting out on my career, but what I do have should not be used unethically," she says. "I hate to think of arms going to some African country funded, however indirectly, from my account." Ms Dellaway took an unusual step to follow through her ethical beliefs. She opened an Islamic current account. Global phenomenon Ms Dellaway is not alone in equating Islamic finance with ethical living. "Branches are reporting interest...

EU states are trying to understand why the birth rate is falling - and if anything can be done to stem the decline. All this week, the BBC News website is asking women in various countries how they feel about being asked to have more babies, and how easy or difficult it is to combine motherhood and work. Here, the BBC News website's Clare Murphy asks why governments are so concerned about the size of their populations. William The Conqueror was counting people nearly 1,000 years ago, and his European descendants are still at it. Small, today's politicians contend, isn't...

Last Sunday, an emergency session of the Turkish parliament dropped proposals to criminalise adultery as part of reforms of the country's penal code. The capitulation followed a meeting in Brussels between the European Union's Enlargement Commissioner, Gunter Verheugen, and Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan had initially warned the EU not to interfere in Turkey's "internal affairs''. He had argued that Turkish membership of the European Union did not mean it had to adopt the EU's "imperfect'' western morals. But Verheugen insisted that if the Turkish prime minister went ahead with plans to make adultery a criminal offence, the...