Britain

What a farce. Europe has it's first president and foreign minister..

Hands up if you've ever heard of the. What no one ???

In a stitch-up between the two big blocs of the EU, the Centre Right fell in behind Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian Prime Minister, to take that job.

The centre-left Socialist leaders backed Baroness Ashton of Upholland, Britain’s Trade Commissioner, to be the first High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, as well as vice-president for external affairs.

The saving grace is that Tony B'Liar didn't get the job..

Bahrain's Olympic 1500m champion Rashid Ramzi has been stripped of his gold medal after testing positive for doping at the 2008 Beijing Games.

Ramzi, who was his country's first Olympic champion, was one of five athletes who tested positive in April for new blood-booster Cera.

The 29-year-old faces a two-year ban but is expected to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Kenya's Asbel Kipruto Kiprop, who came second, is set to be upgraded to gold.

Nicolas Willis of New Zealand could go from bronze to silver with France's fourth-place finisher Mehdi Baala getting the bronze.

Sex abuse by women on children soars
Publish Date: Monday,9 November, 2009, at 11:28 PM Doha Time

Reuters/London

Reports of women carrying out sex attacks on children have soared in the last five years, a charity said yesterday.

ChildLine said there had been a 132% rise in reports of female sex abuse made to its telephone helpline, compared to a 27% increase in abuse by men in the same five-year period.

“Most sex abuse calls to ChildLine come from girls saying they were assaulted by a male,” said Sue Minto, head of the helpline.

“But a growing number of callers now say they were sexually abused by a female. Many would find it shocking that any woman - let alone a mother — can sexually assault a child. But they do.”

Why're Bollywood actresses marrying married men?
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New Delhi, Nov 9: When Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty walks down the aisle to marry London-based businessman Raj Kundra this month, she will be following in the footsteps of Hema Malini, Sridevi and Raveena Tandon - actresses who famously entered into wedlock with men who had been married earlier.

Shilpa met millionaire Kundra, 34, shortly after she found fame in Britain by winning the international reality series "Celebrity Big Brother" two years ago. Now she is marrying him Nov 22 at a private ceremony to be attended by close friends and family.

"WASHINGTON (AFP) – Some 700 million people worldwide, or more than all the adults of North and South America combined, think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence and want to permanently move to another country, a poll showed Tuesday.
Residents of sub-Saharan African countries were the most likely to want to move abroad permanently, the polls conducted in 135 countries between 2007 and this year by Gallup showed.
On average, 38 percent of the adult population in sub-Saharan Africa, or around 165 million people, said they would up stakes and head for another country if they had the chance.
The most popular destination was the United States, where nearly a quarter of the 700 million -- around 165 million people -- said they would like to settle.

The United States has agreed to sell its embassy building in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, to Qatari Diar, the sovereign wealth-backed developer, for an undisclosed sum.

The US State Department said that it will sell the Chancery building, home to the US Embassy in Britain for almost half a century, to the property investment company owned by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).

The building was worth an estimated £500 million at the peak of the market in July 2007 when Qatari Diar was first linked with a possible purchase. However, the building is now thought to be worth less after a 45 per cent decline in commercial property values.

INDEPENDENT faith schools in the UK have been warned that differing types of voodoo must be taught with the same accuracy as their own brand of mojambo.

School inspectors found many teachers in faith schools used air-quotes when discussing rival theories and habitually ended lessons by making gestures by moving their hand while poking their tongue against the inside of their cheek.

Schools inspector, Tom Logan, said: "Unfortunately more than 80% of Britain's Catholic schools now display a poster of Archbishop of Canterbury sporting a crudely-drawn pair of satanic horns.

"Meanwhile, Muslim schools have altered their computer spellcheckers so that whenever a child writes 'Christian' or 'Buddhist' a little box appears saying 'it looks like you're trying to spell 'b*****d infidel'."

http://news.bbc.co.u...

Tamanna Rahman spent two months living on a Bristol housing estate for the BBC's Panorama programme Undercover: Hate on the Doorstep.

Here she explains her reasons for agreeing to take part in the programme and describes how it felt to be a daily target of racist abuse, both physical and verbal. Her report contains details of racial abuse.

In 2000, as a 16-year-old at my culturally and racially diverse Manchester secondary school, I was asked by a local television news team examining the hopes and aspirations of the first class of the new millennium if I felt that racism in Britain was a thing of the past.

Fresh-faced, naïve and optimistic, I answered yes; racism is dead.

At the centre of time

Without it international travel would be in turmoil and calling friends in faraway places at the right time impossible. Exactly 125 years after the Greenwich Meridian line was drawn, how and why did Britain become the centre of time?

At longitude 0° 0' 00", the arbitrary stroke on our maps that passes from pole to pole and bisects the UK, France, Spain, Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana divides the Earth into east and west, just as the Equator splits it into north and south.

This imaginary line now known as the Greenwich Prime Meridian not only allows us to navigate the globe but also keeps the world ticking to the same symbolic 24-hour clock.

But it has not always been so.

The cup of coffee that gives 'an instant facelift'

The coffee manufacturer Nescafe has developed a new product containing collagen, the beauty enhancing ingredient.

Collagen is the elastic material that helps give skin its shape Aimed at women, the coffee producer has started selling the sachets, that contain coffee, skimmed milk and 200mg of collagen – the protein found naturally in body tissue.

But health experts questioned how drinking collagen could boost levels in the skin because it would be simply broken down by the gut before being excreted.

It is used by cosmetic surgeons as a "filler'' to remove fine lines and is an ingredient in many anti-wrinkle creams.

The product has been launched in Singapore to rave reviews.