Daily News Channel
A campaign by opponents of late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to get the song Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead to the top of the British pop charts to celebrate her death failed on Sunday (local time) although it did manage to reach second place. Thatcher, who died aged 87 last Monday, deeply divided Britons and while some have paid warm tributes to the achievements of her right-wing Conservative governments, others said her privatization of swathes of industry had destroyed communities.
Tunnel Sous La Manche? Last week the dream of a 3,000-mile sub-Atlantic railway seemed to grow ever so slightly less mad, as Britons and Frenchmen got down again to dealing seriously with their half-century-old project of driving a double-track tunnel under the English Channel, 21 miles across.
It was the final act in what Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper called “one of the biggest acts of civil disobedience in modern times.” Chafing under a court order that banned the press from naming a top player with an English soccer club who was alleged to have had an affair with a reality TV star, Britons took to Twitter. By May 21, details of the affair had been leaked so widely on the internet that over 50,000 users had tweeted the name of the player: Manchester United midfielder Ryan Giggs.
Some families, alas, are fatter than others. But for dieters continually at war with their genes, there’s good news in a study published in this week’s PLoS Medicine: they can burn off 40% of their genetic predisposition to obesity by exercising.
Two Britons were killed while vacationing in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa, the Foreign Office said early Sunday.
Millions of Britons will be watching tonight as the nation’s public broadcaster gives the controversial leader of a far-right party his first appearance on prime time political television. Anti-fascist protesters gathered outside the studios of the British Broadcasting Corporation ahead of a pre-taped appearance on “Question Time” by British National Party leader, Nick Griffin.
The remains of two bodies — possibly British hostages taken more than two years ago in Baghdad, Iraq — have been handed over to British authorities, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Saturday. “We know only that late last night we received the bodies of two hostages,” he said. He emphasized that British authorities had not yet identified the bodies but also said the country’s thoughts were with the families of five British men who were kidnapped in Baghdad in May 2007