London

Veteran Irish-born actor Richard Harris has died at the age of 72 just as he had found a new generation of fans thanks to his screen portrayal of Harry Potter’s wise old mentor and professor.

Europe’s costly farm subsidies must be reformed because they damage the developing world, Tony Blair warned last night as Britain and France squabbled publicly over financing the EU enlargement.

What price silence? Six figures, as British musician Mike Batt found out to his cost when he included a one-minute silence on the latest album by his rock group, The Planets.

Doorbells and alarm clocks spelled deadly danger to Allan Todd for 40 years until doctors in Newcastle, northeast England, finally fitted a pacemaker to ensure his heart no longer stopped at unexpected noise, reports said Wednesday.

Armed with superior equipment and elaborate surveillance plans, UN disarmament experts arrive in Baghdad today, four years after they were forced to leave Iraq, to begin the most extensive and intrusive weapons inspection in modern history.

A UN panel has recommended freezing the assets of former Zimbabwean and UK millionaire John Bredenkamp, who was named by a UN report as a key arms trader who has made millions from illegally exploiting natural resources in the DRC and supplying Zimbabwe with military equipment.

The Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, set himself on an early collision course with the US and Britain yesterday by defiantly continuing to insist he has no weapons of mass destruction.

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could have a nuclear weapon in a matter of months if he can get his hands on enriched uranium or plutonium from abroad, a London-based think tank said on Monday.

Cane toads, which have become the plague of northern Australia, are now threatening one of the world’s last unspoilt wildernesses.

Black twins born to a white couple after an IVF (in vitro fertilisation) blunder should remain with them, a British judge said Monday, naming for the first time the hospital responsible for the fiasco.

Former South African president Nelson Mandela paid tribute late on Saturday to Diana, Princess of Wales, calling on people across the world to ”learn from her example and embrace her legacy”.

Some 35 000 overseas British citizen of Asian origin living in east Africa are to be granted the right to settle in Britain, Home Secretary David Blunkett told Wednesday’s Guardian newspaper.

Three North African men have been arrested and charged over an alleged plot to release cyanide gas in London’s Underground rail system.

Conservationists deplored a decision yesterday to allow Namibia, South Africa and Botswana to sell off up to 30 tons of their legally held ivory stockpiles.

Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state who has been accused of war crimes by his critics, was yesterday appointed by George Bush to head the investigation into the September 11 attacks.

America’s oldest senator ever, Strom Thurmond, who was born before aeroplanes and was considered too old to fight in the second world war, fulfilled his last ambition yesterday, celebrating his 100th birthday while still in office.

Disgraced British politician and best-selling novelist Jeffrey Archer, currently serving a four-year jail term for perjury, has struck a multi-million-pound deal to write three books.

The Iraqi National Congress was to meet Friday in London with former army officers, opponents of President Saddam Hussein and a US official to discuss ways of toppling his regime.

Helen has not heard from her parents for two years since they left El Salvador to work illegally in the United States. She has run away from her aunt’s house to live with a gang. ‘My parents think I’m a little angel,’ she says, making horns with her fingers above her head, ‘but really I’m a little devil.’ She is 13 and she has already killed a man.

President George Bush last night said he was confident that the vote will be held today on a UN resolution that would disarm Saddam Hussein by seeing the return to Iraq of the weapons inspectors as early as the week after next.

Police in South Africa raided homes of suspected white militants across the country yesterday in the biggest security sweep since terrorists started a bombing campaign to destabilise the government.

The Russian government may claim its use of fentanyl, a heroin-like chemical 100 times more potent than morphine, was unavoidable in the circumstances of the Moscow hostage crisis.

Iraq has military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, Britain said on Tuesday in a dossier of evidence about Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq stepped up its charm offensive towards the United Nations weapons inspectors yesterday by quickly letting them into one of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palaces when they turned up for a surprise search.

A little way off the Californian coast, near the island of San Clemente, the men of the USS Constellation’s squadrons were last week going through their paces to ready themselves for war.

Ariel Sharon’s minority government survived a series of no-confidence votes in the knesset last night, only to be confronted by a fresh challenge that left the hardline administration looking highly unstable.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard told BBC radio on Wednesday that Zimbabwe should be fully suspended from the Commonwealth.

SABMiller Plc, the world’s second-biggest brewer, said on Tuesday that earnings continued to grow despite some tough markets, giving its shares a boost, but brewing industry analysts were not all impressed.

Indonesian police have released sketches of three suspects believed to have planted the bombs that destroyed two nightclubs in Bali and killed nearly 200 people.

A Paris court yesterday cleared Michel Houellebecq, the enfant terrible of French letters, of provoking religious and racial hatred by calling Islam ”the most stupid of religions”.