A British MP had his Facebook account suspended in December after the popular social-networking site decided he wasn’t real. Steve Webb, of the Liberal Democrats, tried to log on but received a message saying his account had been disabled following complaints he didn’t exist.
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/ 25 October 2007
Britain’s Auditor General, the man charged with stopping government waste, announced he is stepping down on Thursday after criticism of his own lavish spending on foreign travel and top-notch restaurants. Sir John Bourn for 20 years served the British Parliament by making sure public money was not frittered away on frivolous projects.
Britain moved rapidly to contain an outbreak of foot and mouth, a highly infectious disease that devastated farming six years ago, by isolating a farm west of London on Saturday. Prime Minister Gordon Brown broke off his holiday to return to London and chair an emergency meeting of senior ministers.
Hundreds of thousands of Britons hit by the worst flooding in 60 years faced further misery on Thursday as forecasters predicted more rain in the areas most badly affected. Two people were found dead in a cellar in the west of England, raising to at least eight the number of people to have died as a result of record rainfall.
Police defused a car bomb packed with petrol, gas and nails outside a busy nightclub in the heart of London on Friday, foiling an attack that echoed an earlier al-Qaeda plot and could have killed or wounded scores of people. Possible bomb components were found in a second car hours later, police said on Friday evening.
British police defused a car bomb in central London on Friday and said the device, made up of petrol, gas cylinders and nails, could have caused significant loss of life. The bomb was left in a car parked outside a nightclub in the busy heart of London shortly after 1am local time, when ”hundreds” of people were in the vicinity.
In a corner room of Britain’s Royal Courts of Justice, law lords this week handed victory to David over Goliath. It may not be the last bout in a struggle by residents to return to Diego Garcia, a remote island in the Chagos archipelago turned into a strategic United States military base, but it certainly brought that prospect closer.
When ”Sweetgal”, a 29-year-old British Muslim from central England, began looking for a new husband last year, at first she didn’t know where to turn. The answer, it turned out, was on the internet. Over the past two years there has been a boom in the use of websites that introduce Muslim men and women who seek traditional marriage.
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/ 9 November 2006
Israeli newspapers were filled with a mixture of remorse and recrimination on Thursday, a day after the army shelled a town in the Gaza Strip, killing 18 civilians, including women and children. While some commentators said the attack called for national soul-searching, others said it was just the ”price tag” Palestinians should pay for having launched attacks on Israel.
Israel rejected a call by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on Wednesday to lift its air and sea blockade of Lebanon, saying it will only end the seven-week-old siege once all aspects of a ceasefire are in place. Israel also will not withdraw its troops fully from southern Lebanon until the full implementation of the ceasefire.