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Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee. Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of "self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width," after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.

As the nation settled down on Wednesday night to watch England play Croatia, I sensed an air of optimism in the land. A feeling that all would be well. I mean hey, England were holding their own against Brazil when Croatia didn’t even exist as a nation state. So what chance would these swarthy-looking Yugo-ruffians have? They were minnows in a tank of sharks. They weren’t going to be beaten. They were going to be eaten. Hmmm. I’m afraid I knew we were going to lose moments before the match began. I looked at our players mumbling their way through...

The mood of the crowd jammed into the meeting room was angry. Many had lost their homes to the forest fire that swept through the Sierra Nevada just south of Lake Tahoe. They said they were angry at bureaucrats and environmentalists who made cutting of trees and clearing of land difficult. There was always too much red tape, they said, and now it was too late. In all, a crowd of nearly 2,000 people descended on the South Tahoe Middle School auditorium Monday night, wanting to be heard in the face of their losses. And if there was an...

Contradictory messages about women's fertility are breeding like rabbits this week. In largely-Catholic Brazil, the government is subsidizing birth control pills so poor women can afford the contraceptive, despite a recent visit by Pope Benedict XVI, who mainly used his time to condemn abortion, contraception and sex outside marriage. In China, officials are rounding up rural, pregnant women and conducting forced abortions to enforce the mandatory one child policy. In Canada, on the other hand, I'm the problem. Thirty-something. Childless. And a threat to Canada's future economic well being. The nation's fertility rate has plummeted to 1.53 children per woman,...

Stroke patients at mercy of postcode lotteryCervical cancer vaccine is '98pc effective' One in six hospitals treat in mixed wardsTelegraph hospital guideBritish cancer patients are substantially more likely to die of the disease than those in other western European countries because of poor access to the latest drugs, according to an authoritative report to be published today.While more than half of patients in France, Spain, Germany and Italy have access to new treatments provided since 1985, the proportion in the UK is four out of 10.French women with cancer are 34 per cent more likely than those in the...

BERLIN -- Germany's population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2006 and recorded the biggest drop since the country's reunification in 1990, the government said Friday, days after launching financial incentives designed to stall falling birth rates. The number of births, meanwhile, was the lowest since World War II. At the end of 2006, the number of people living in Germany stood at an estimated 82.31 million, 130,000 below the total at the end of 2005, the Federal Statistics Office said. Germany's population grew in 2001 and 2002. But since then, a birth rate among the lowest in Europe...

Theodore Dalrymple: The Frivolity of Evil - When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society. This is absurd, of course: crime is not a matter of double-entry bookkeeping. You cannot pay a debt by having caused even greater expense, nor can you pay in advance for a bank robbery by offering to serve a prison sentence before you commit it. Perhaps, metaphorically speaking, the slate is wiped clean once a prisoner is released from prison, but the debt is not paid off. It would be just as absurd for me to...

Berlin (dpa) - Germany's population could fall to 69 million by 2050 with the proportion of elderly people sharply rising, a report by the Federal Statistics Office said Tuesday. Germany currently has 82.4 million people but declining birth rates will reduce the country's population to between 69 million and 74 million by 2050, said the report. "The population decline cannot be halted," said Walter Rademacher, the statistics office vice-president. Both the decline and ageing of Germany's population are expected to impact on the economy because there will be fewer people in the working age between 20 and 65 years. At...