London

Doctors have said that 30 000 Britons a year might eventually die from smoking dagga and have called for a battle against the drug to mirror that belatedly waged against tobacco.

A new way of investing in gold will be on offer next week through buying and selling a security on the London Stock Exchange. Gold Bullion Securities will offer units of a tenth of an ounce, and the gold that investors buy will be stored in HSBC vaults and held in trust.

Countless reports are predicting double-digit growth for online advertising. And now Red Herring, one of the bibles of the industry during the dotcom boom, is being reborn under the direction of Frenchman Alex Vieux. Google share auction and the relaunch of Red Herring magazine point to a revival of the industry’s fortunes

The United States’s labour market has roared back to life, creating twice as many jobs as expected last month, government figures showed last week, prompting speculation that the US Federal Reserve could call a halt to its policy of rockbottom interest rates.

Protests greeted a hard-hitting campaign by a British children’s charity on Wednesday as it published newspaper advertisements showing a cockroach crawling out of a new born baby’s mouth. The advertisements, published on full pages in some newspapers, drew scores of protests to the watchdog body, the Advertising Standards Authority.

An 11km dam is being built across a small northern section of the shrunken Aral Sea in Central Asia, which is described as the world’s worst environmental disaster.
The saline inland sea been drying out for 25 years since the former Soviet Union began a vast irrigation scheme drawing water from its two tributary rivers to grow cotton and rice in the desert.

It can be somewhat disconcerting to walk down my main street. Men stroll past wearing United States-style gas station attendant shirts with round patches that say Ed, or Bubba. Or some have T-shirts that say: ”I Love Daytona Beach” or ”Eat at Jimbo’s BBQ”. But it’s not just the men.

If you live in a rich, English-speaking nation and your work involves a computer or a telephone, don’t expect to have a job in five years’ time. Almost every large British company that relies on remote transactions is starting to dump its workers and hire cheaper workers overseas — mainly in India.

A little of Pavlov’s dog is hiding in all of us, scientists said after an experiment in which they taught human volunteers to associate abstract computer images with ice cream. During an initial training period, 13 hungry volunteers were shown abstract computer images while being exposed to the smell of vanilla or peanut butter.

ExxonMobil has been holding a series of secret meetings with environmental and human rights groups worldwide in an effort to change its hard-nosed public image.
The moves have been seized on by the Stop Esso campaign as a sign that its boycott activities aimed at changing the company’s anti-Kyoto treaty views are working.

The tide of Jamaican women entering Britain with their stomachs full of cocaine is pushing the country’s already overcrowded female prison system to breaking point. An investigation has established that the long sentences being served by the 450 Jamaican couriers are stretching British resources to the limit.