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THE British government today rejected calls to tighten Britain's abortion laws after a poll showed a majority of women want changes to make it harder to end a pregnancy. A MORI poll in today's Observer newspaper showed 47 per cent of British women think the legal limit for abortion should be cut from 24 weeks and 10 per cent think it should be outlawed. Only 31 per cent of women and 35 per cent of men thought the current time limit was "about right". The poll has reignited a debate on the emotive issue which is particularly divisive in the...

BRITISH police had foiled a plot to kidnap Prime Minister Tony Blair's 5-year-old son Leo, The Sun newspaper reported today. Citing an unnamed security source, the tabloid newspaper said a group which campaigns for the rights of divorced fathers had planned to snatch the child and hold him for a short period. It said it had no details of how the group planned to carry out the kidnapping. A spokesmen for Mr Blair's office and London police had no immediate comment.

This year's Queen's honours list in Britain includes the rescue workers who braved the devastation after the London bombings in July But there were also awards for people involved in happier events. The emergency services, medical staff and transport workers are all honoured today after the terrible bomb attacks of July 7. Twenty-three awards in all for those who helped the injured, or coordinated the rescue operation. In sport there is an OBE for the England cricket captain Michael Vaughan after the Ashes triumph. The rest of the team become MBEs. There are knighthoods for the singer Tom Jones and...

THREE men have been arrested in northern Britain following the discovery of a dead cat in a microwave, police said today. The gruesome find was made at a house in the Blue Hall Estate, Stockton, Teesside, on Boxing Day, following a party. Cleveland Police took the female cat and the microwave away for examination and announced that three men had been arrested and bailed in connection with the incident. More arrests were expected. The cat's five kittens would be found new homes in the New Year.

BOB Geldof, the rock singer behind the Make Poverty History campaign and Live8 concerts, is to act as a consultant to Britain's main opposition Conservatives, the party announced today. Geldof, who led calls for the Group of Eight richest nations to act on debt, trade and poverty during July's Gleneagles summit, will work as an adviser to Tory leader David Cameron's new Globalisation and Global Poverty policy group. The move is likely to be seen as a coup for Mr Cameron, who was elected to the post earlier this month, and signals a move by Tories onto ground championed by...

LONDON (AP) -- Ancient tools found in Britain show that humans lived in northern Europe 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, at a time when the climate was warm enough for lions, elephants and saber tooth tigers to also roam what is now England. Scientists said Wednesday that 32 black flint artifacts, found in river sediments in Pakefield in eastern England, date back 700,000 years and represent the earliest unequivocal evidence of human presence north of the Alps. Scientists had long held that humans had not migrated north from the relatively warm climates of the Mediterranean region until half a...

AUSTRALIAN terrorist suspect David Hicks, held in the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has won his court battle for British citizenship, which could pave the way for his eventual release. The High Court handed down its decision in London. Hicks, 30, has spent four years at the jail after being arrested among Taliban forces in Afghanistan in the wake of the US-led invasion prompted by the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. His lawyers have said they will argue that as a Briton, Hicks should be freed, as has been the case with all other Guantanamo inmates...

BRITISH newspapers agreed today that Prime Minister Tony Blair's first-ever defeat in Parliament was a major watershed in his administration. Thanks to 49 rebel Labour MPs, the House of Commons voted down a proposal - championed by Blair in the wake of the deadly London bombings in July - to give police the power to hold terrorism suspects for 90 days without charge. Both The Times and The Daily Mail splashed Blair's setback on their front pages with the identical headline: "Beginning of the end?" "Mr Blair has looked invincible for the past eight years. But after yesterday, he no...

A HOSPITAL in Britain has stopped visitors cooing at other people's newborn babies for fear of trampling over the youngsters' human rights. Some new mothers at Calderdale Royal Hospital, in Halifax, said yesterday they had been "astonished" by the new rules, which stopped people asking questions about their babies or looking at them in maternity wards. However, hospital managers said the measure was necessary to prevent visitors gawping at new-borns or quizzing their mothers. Hospital neo-natal manager Debbie Lawson said even babies had a right to privacy. "Most people cannot resist cooing over new babies, but we need to respect...

THEY may be arch enemies on the sports field, but Australians still like Poms and Kiwis more than Yanks and other foreigners, a survey has found. Americans came third in the Crosby-Textor Mood of the Nation poll but fell short on questions of trust and worldliness. Indonesians did not fare very well – the close neighbours being ranked second last of the 15 nations respondents were asked about. The United Kingdom scored highest overall among Australians with a country index rating of 79, just ahead of New Zealand on 78.3 and the United States 63.4. Saudi Arabia ranked last with...

AN overwhelming majority of Britons believe that President George W Bush has mismanaged the response to Hurricane Katrina, a Sunday Times poll has found. Fully 86% of people said his handling of the crisis was “bad” or “very bad”, while 70% said he was a generally incompetent president. By almost three to one, 63% to 23%, people think the response to the hurricane would have been speedier and more effective if most victims had been white and middle class. By 67% to 19% they think race and class divisions in America are as bad as ever. The poll of a...

QUEEN Elizabeth II is planning to create an underground network to extract heat from the earth's natural warmth and cut energy bills at Buckingham Palace for centuries to come. She has inspired a fashion among the super-rich for drilling boreholes at their properties as the latest "green" status symbol. Advocates include pop star Elton John, tycoon Richard Branson and billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The Buckingham Palace system will provide a secure, free and inexhaustible energy supply from beneath the surface of the 1.6ha lake at the heart of the walled gardens. It will pump heating to the state rooms,...

BRITAIN might charge Islamic clerics with treason if they incited violence or praised suicide attacks as part of a security crackdown in the wake of the July London bombings, newspapers reported today. State prosecutors and senior police are due to meet this week to discuss what charges could be brought against preachers whose endorsement of the suicide attacks could incite further acts of terrorism, the Daily Telegraph reported. It said one option was to charge them with treason, which carries a life sentence in jail, or to deport them. On Friday, Prime Minister Tony Blair said he wanted sweeping new...

LONDON police chiefs are battling to boost stubbornly low numbers of Muslim officers, in a bid to bolster ties with local communities and help fight Islamist terrorists after the recent bombings. In the famously multicultural British capital, Dal Babu is an exception: the 42-year-old ethnic Indian, a superintendent in the east end district of Bethnal Green, is the only Muslim of his rank in the Metropolitan Police force. "I joined the Met in 1983. At that time, there was less than one per cent of officers from an ethnic minority. We are at seven percent now, the change has been...

eBay bans Live 8 sales Geldof ... blasted auction site By SUN ONLINE REPORTERONLINE auction site eBay has banned sales of Live 8 concert tickets after Sir Bob Geldof branded the site an "electronic pimp". More than 100 pairs of tickets won in the text lottery were being advertised on eBay and attracted bids of thousands of pounds. Live 8 organiser Bob Geldof branded the practice a “disgrace” and accused the sellers of “disgusting greed”, threatening to launch a High Court action against them.  He also called for a worldwide boycott of eBay. Sir Bob said: "The people who are selling these...

TWO people were injured by centipedes, and no fewer than 22 suffered mishaps involving nightwear. Britain is a perilous place in all sorts of unusual ways, according to new statistics on hospital admissions. The Department of Health data, reported in The Times newspaper, also included people requiring hospital treatment in Britain for accidents which happened overseas. Thus, of the near-million people seen by emergency hospital staff in the 12 months to April 2004, six had been stung by scorpions, 451 had been stung by hornets and 24 had been bitten by rats. The house was no haven, with nine needing...

STEALING toiletries and even bathrobes from hotels is one thing, but a British couple have taken pilfering to new heights after liking their hotel shower so much they took it home with them. The unusual theft came after the pair, a man in his 50s and a woman in her 20s, spent the night in a four-poster bed room at the 17th-century Globe Hotel in Topsham, near Exeter, southwest England, its owner said. After they checked out of the room, staff found the entire shower unit had been taken from the en suite bathroom. Hotel owner Liz Hodges said the...

TIM Berners-Lee, the man who invented and then gave away the World Wide Web, was picked today as epitomising the Greatest of Britishness – a quality finance minister Gordon Brown said was unique. His selfless act added to modesty and ingenuity were deemed by a panel of judges to make Berners-Lee the Greatest Briton of 2004 in the first of what organisers said they hoped would become an annual event. Mr Brown, who opened the glittering award ceremony, said Britons were a wonderful people and invoked the bulldog spirit of World War II leader Winston Churchill – which he said...