| January 5, 2009 | - Scientists in Britain announced the discovery of a new antidote to poisoning and overdose, whereby a molecule named Bridion will bind itself to an unwanted substance in the bloodstream and neutralize it within three minutes; the treatment, it was suggested, could be used to cure a hangover.
| Source:
TelegraphUK
|
| December 3, 2008 | - It was reported that Barack Obama's grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by the British in 1949 during the Mau Mau uprising. “They would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods,” said Sarah Onyango, 87, called “Granny Sarah” by the president-elect. “That was the time we realized that the British were actually not friends.”
| Source:
The Times
|
| December 1, 2008 | - A survey found that among adult Britons sex was the most popular zero-cost activity.
| Source:
BBC
|
| November 25, 2008 | - A 56-year-old British man was sentenced to 25 life sentences for repeatedly raping his two daughters over 27 years, resulting in 19 pregnancies and seven children, all of whom suffer from genetic deformities.
| Source:
CNN
|
| November 9, 2008 | -
British researchers found that obesity may be socially contagious.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| October 22, 2008 | -
British atheists, furious about ads for Christianity that appear on London buses, were raising money in order to buy their own ads featuring the slogan “There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 20, 2008 | - The British Food Standards Agency recalled edible sex toys, including chocolate and strawberry body pens and a chocolate lotion, after the Chinese-made products were discovered to contain trace amounts of melamine, an industrial chemical that can cause kidney failure.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 22, 2008 | - Two British archaeologists claimed to have solved the mystery of Stonehenge, putting forth a theory that the stones had healing properties.
| Source:
CNN
|
| September 11, 2008 | - Researchers in England determined that women are up to 50 percent more likely than men to experience nightmares.
| Source:
BBC
|
| September 4, 2008 | - A British teenager's head swelled to the size of a soccer ball after she consumed a Baileys-chili-tequila-absinthe-ouzo-vodka-cider-and-gin cocktail.
| Source:
BBC
|
| September 3, 2008 | - Cambridge University, seeking to attract a more diverse student body and to shed its elitist image, asked the producers of leading British
soap operas to mention the school in their storylines.
| Source:
Southeast Missourian
|
| September 1, 2008 | - A new biography of writer Roald Dahl revealed that Dahl, in his work as a British spy, seduced many American women. “I think,” said Antoinette Haskell, whose father, Charles Marsh, introduced Dahl to influential Americans, “he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that was worth more than $50,000 a year.”
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| August 25, 2008 | -
Margaret Thatcher, revealed her daughter, has dementia and often forgets that she is no longer the British prime minister. “Oh,” she said in a lucid moment, “how I wish I could do it all again.”
| Source:
The Washington Post
|
| August 13, 2008 | -
British scientists unveiled Gordon, the world's first robot controlled by living brain tissue.
| Source:
Bretibart
|
| August 5, 2008 | - It was discovered that a woman who paid a South Korean company to create five clones of her pitbull Booger was Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who escaped British authorities in 1977 after abducting a Mormon missionary, securing him to a bed with mink-lined handcuffs, and raping him three times. “They are perfectly the same as their daddy,” said McKinney, in Seoul, of Booger's clones. “I am in Heaven here.”
| Source 1:
Salt Lake Tribune
Source 2:
Daily Mail
Source 3:
The Register
|
| August 1, 2008 | - A community of Welsh Cistercian monks who had been relying on a dial-up Internet connection opted to get a broadband connection. “Patience is one of the characteristics of monastic life,” said Father Daniel van Santvoort, “but even the patience of the Brothers was tested by our slow Internet.”
| Source:
Yahoo News
|
| July 11, 2008 | - The British retailer Marks & Spencer defended a policy of charging extra for bras that are bigger than size DD, saying the charge represented “a small premium for [necessary] specialist work,” while the protest group Busts 4 Justice derided the price increase as an unfair tax.
| Source:
BBC
|
| July 9, 2008 | - A British teenager who assumed that tremors in her bosom were caused by her vibrating mobile phone found a baby bat nestling in the padding of her 34FF bra.
| Source:
BBC
|
| July 4, 2008 | -
British
studies warned that eating junk food during pregnancy might cause lasting damage to the child, and that eating too much tofu could lead to dementia.
| Source 1:
BBCnews.com
Source 2:
BBCnews.com
|
| July 2, 2008 | - A poll revealed that a third of Welsh college students believe that a flirtatious or drunk woman is to blame for being raped, and a survey of the National Assembly for Wales found that 3 of the 8 legislators who responded had been raped but had not reported the crime.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| June 29, 2008 | - Gardeners across Britain were reporting a harvest of deformed, dangerous vegetables, traced back to the Dow AgroSciences herbicide aminopyralid, which can wind up in manure. It was “scandalous,” said a woman with a patch near Bushy Park in London, “that a weedkiller sprayed more than one year ago, that has passed through an animal's gut, was kicked around on a stable floor, stored in a muck heap in a field, then on an allotment site and was finally dug into or mulched on to beds last winter is still killing 'sensitive' crops and will continue to do so for the next year.”
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| June 28, 2008 | - Farmers in Britain, under attack by fuel-poaching
gangs, were creating secure collective fuel-storage compounds for their red diesel, which is used to power tractors. In West Sussex a man named Jon Ward put dogs in his garden and razor wire on his fences to keep thieves away from his heating oil. “Let the bastards try it now,” he said. “Shotgun is also at the ready.”
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| June 15, 2008 | -
British and American special forces were operating in Pakistan in an attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden before George W. Bush leaves office. “If he can say he has killed Saddam Hussein and captured Bin Laden,” a U.S. intelligence source told the “Times” of London, “he can claim to have left the world a safer place.”
| Source:
Times
|
| June 3, 2008 | - For the third year in a row, the consumption of oranges in Britain declined because people were too busy to peel the rind off the fruit.
| Source:
The Daily Mail
|
| May 30, 2008 | - At a literary festival in Wales, British columnist George Monbiot attempted a citizen's arrest of John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on charges of war crimes, but was obstructed by security guards.
| Source:
Democracy Now
|
| May 30, 2008 | -
British archaeologists discovered that Stonehenge was a cemetery for the elite.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 20, 2008 | -
Gough, an island in the South Pacific, was overrun by gangs of gigantic mice that attack and eat baby albatrosses; bird conservation groups planned to airdrop tons of poison onto the island.
| Source:
The Telegraph
|
| May 12, 2008 | - Cherie Blair revealed that her husband, ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, had announced her miscarriage to the press in order to deter speculation about an early invasion of Iraq,.
| Source:
Telegraph.co.uk
|
| April 27, 2008 | - In Basra, Iraq, a 17-year-old girl, Rand Abdel-Qader, was stomped, suffocated, and stabbed to death by her father, who accused her of having an affair with a British soldier. Local police arrested the father but released him without charge after two hours. “Not much can be done when we have an honor-killing case,” said police sergeant Ali Jabbar. “You are in a Muslim society and women should live under religious laws.” Rand's mother divorced the killer and went into hiding.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| April 18, 2008 | -
President Bush and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown met and discussed the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom. “If it wasn't a personal relationship,” said Bush, “I wouldn't be inviting the man to a nice hamburger or something. Well done, I might add.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| March 14, 2008 | - A British fan of Scarlett Johansson will pay $2,030 per minute to go on a date with the actress to the U.S. premiere of her new film “He's Just Not That Into You,” with proceeds going to the charity Oxfam.
| Source:
BBC
|
| March 12, 2008 | - It was reported that the richest man in Great Britain, the Duke of Westminster, was a client of the same high-end prostitution agency as Eliot Spitzer. The Duke allegedly haggled over pricing, requested sex without a condom, and bored prostitute Zana Brazdek with conversation “about the Army, going to Afghanistan, and bin Laden.”
| Source:
DailyNews
|
| March 9, 2008 | - ThruVision, a British firm, unveiled a surveillance camera, developed using research into dying stars, that can see through people's clothes. They claim that the technology does not reveal physical body details but could be used to detect materials such as explosives or cocaine by distinguishing among the low levels of electromagnetic radiation emitted by all things everywhere.
| Source:
Yahoo! News
|
| March 1, 2008 | - Prince Harry of Wales, once photographed dressed as a Nazi, was called home after press accounts revealed that he was serving as a British
Army forward air controller in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. “We ask God to enable our beloved brothers in Taliban to seize this priceless booty,” wrote user Sweeping Army on an Internet jihadist message board, “because nothing would break the heart of his grandmother [more] than if she lost him. My dear brothers in Allah, carry on provoking to kidnap this precious infidel.”
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| February 27, 2008 | -
British researchers hypothesized that a form of spongiform encephalopathy—akin to mad cow disease and transmitted by cannibalism—killed off the Neanderthals.
| Source 1:
Space.com
Source 2:
Discovery.com
|
| February 1, 2008 | - In Britain retail chain Woolworths withdrew from sale a bed for six-year-old girls called the Lolita Midsleeper Combi after receiving complaints from parents. “We had to look it up on Wikipedia,” said a store spokesman. “But we certainly know who she is now.”
| Source:
Shop pulls &lq;Lolita&rq; bed for young girls
|
| January 31, 2008 | -
British scientists announced that it would soon be possible to convert female bone marrow into viable sperm cells, hastening the obsolescence of men.
| Source:
Death of the father: British scientists discover how to turn women's bone marrow into sperm
|
| January 27, 2008 | - Leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, attempted to dispel a global mood of pessimism. “People have to keep in mind, throughout history we have always had cycles,” said JPMorgan CEO James Dimon. “Corporation,” said PepsiCo chief Indra K. Nooyi, “has soul.” “The good news about our world today,” said former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “is that idealism is the new realism and the reason for that is the interconnectedness.”
| Source:
CNN
|
| January 21, 2008 | -
British Conservative MP Hugh Walpole delivered a speech in Parliament against the creation of a permanent president of the European Council, a position said to be coveted by Blair. Such a consolidation of power, he said, would make it difficult for national governments to restrain dictates from Brussels “even if the European Commission proposed the slaughter of the first-born.”
| Source:
Parliament
|
| January 16, 2008 | -
British researchers determined that children universally dislike clowns, finding them “unknowable.”
| Source:
Reuters via Yahoo! News
|
| January 10, 2008 | - A British artist exhibited 55 “beautiful and delicate” canvases of his ejaculate sprinkled with carbon dust,
| Source:
Islington Gazette
|
| December 27, 2007 | - For the first time since the 1800s the average Briton was earning more than the average American, even though the pound was at an all-time low against the euro.
| Source:
Reuters UK
|
| December 2, 2007 | - A 3.3 pound truffle sold for $330,000 at an auction held simultaneously in Macau, London, and Florence. The winning bidder, Macau casino owner Stanley Ho, outbid the British artist Damien Hirst and Sheikh Bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi.
| Source:
Giant truffle sets record price
|
| November 30, 2007 | - In Khartoum, thousands of Sudanese protesters armed with clubs and knives called for the execution of Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher convicted of insulting Islam after she permitted her students to name their class teddy bear “Muhammad”; Gibbons, pardoned by the president of Sudan, was released from jail and fled to England.
| Source:
Thousands in Sudan Call for British Teddy Bear Teacher's Execution
|
| November 24, 2007 | - The Interfaith Rainbow Coalition Against Homosexuality in Uganda protested a summit of British Commonwealth leaders in Kampala. “I asked President Museveni to get us an island on Lake Victoria and we take these homosexuals and they die out there,” said Sheikh Ramathan Shaban Mubajje of an earlier meeting he had with Uganda's head of state. “If they die there, then we shall have no more homosexuals in the country.”
| Source:
365Gay
|
| November 22, 2007 | - The British government admitted that it had lost computer disks containing the personal information of more than one third of its citizens.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 15, 2007 | -
British scientists working with negative index metamaterials said that they were developing a technique that could someday be used to capture a rainbow.
| Source:
University of Surrey
|
| November 7, 2007 | - Voters in Great Britain decided that their most ridiculous law was one that makes it illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| November 4, 2007 | -
British police documents revealed that the DNA of suspects accused of crimes such as picking wildflowers or defacing coins will be stored for life in a national database.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| November 2, 2007 | -
Rudy Giuliani conceded that although his campaign's statistic for prostate cancer survival rates in Britain was seven years old and 30 points off, Americans should still be wary of “socialized medicine.” “If we ever got to Hillarycare in this country,” said Giulani, “Canadians will have nowhere to go for health care.”
| Source:
Reuters via Yahoo! News
|
| October 17, 2007 | - A British restaurant began serving gray squirrel pancakes.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| October 17, 2007 | - A British restaurant began serving gray squirrel pancakes.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| October 8, 2007 | -
British clergy were condemning the nomination of video game “Resistance: Fall of Man,” which features a fire-fight scene set in Manchester Cathedral, for an award. “For a global manufacturer to recreate one of our great cathedrals with photo-realistic quality,” said the Bishop of Manchester, “and encourage people to have gun battles in the building is beyond belief and highly irresponsible.”
| Source:
vnunet.com
|
| October 7, 2007 | - In England, American gray squirrels were bullying diminutive, mild-mannered indigenous red squirrels.
| Source:
NYT
|
| September 25, 2007 | -
British researchers studying intelligence announced that men were disproportionately represented in both the top and bottom two percentiles.
| Source:
Hindu
|
| September 18, 2007 | - A British man named Anthony Anderson was arrested for urinating on a 57-year-old woman as she lay dying of pancreatic failure. “This,” yelled Anderson as he was filmed, “is YouTube material.”
| Source:
BBC News
|
| September 16, 2007 | - A new British poll estimated that 1.2 million people had died so far in the war, and former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan wished that politicians would admit that the war was “largely about
oil.”
| Source 1:
Times
Source 2:
Guardian
|
| September 3, 2007 | - The British government complained that the Taliban was using weapons that had been made in China,.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| August 22, 2007 | -
Scientists in England determined that Tyrannosaurus rex would have been able to outrun a professional soccer player.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 19, 2007 | - It emerged that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will allow the National Security Agency to intercept telephone calls, emails, and other Internet communications made by British citizens across American networks.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| August 1, 2007 | - Seventy-six U.S. senators had visited Iraq, and 3 percent of Americans approved of how Congress was handling the war, which was costing the United States and Great Britain more than $4,000 each second.
| Source 1:
The Hill
Source 2:
Zogby
Source 3:
Daily Mail
|
| July 26, 2007 | -
Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Britain of “colonial thinking” for demanding the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, who is suspected of murdering former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| July 26, 2007 | - A 70-year-old British grandmother was convicted in the honor killing of her son's estranged wife.
| Source:
Reuters via Yahoo! News
|
| July 16, 2007 | - In Britain a six-year-old boy hanged himself with a skipping rope.
| Source:
The Sun
|
| July 15, 2007 | - Osama bin Laden's son Omar announced that he had taken a 51-year-old British grandmother as his second wife.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| July 12, 2007 | - The British military insisted that it had not released man-eating badgers in Basra.
| Source:
BBC
|
| July 2, 2007 | - In Nigeria, where the price of machetes has dropped by 50 percent since the end of the April elections, a kidnapped British three-year-old was released after four days.
| Source 1:
CNN.com
Source 2:
Reuters
|
| July 2, 2007 | - His successor Gordon Brown proposed stripping British prime ministers of the power to declare war.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| June 25, 2007 | - The Gaza kidnappers of British
journalist Alan Johnston released a video of Johnston wearing an explosives vest, which he says will be detonated if force is used to try to free him.
- The Gaza kidnappers of British
journalist Alan Johnston released a video of Johnston wearing an explosives vest, which he says will be detonated if force is used to try to free him.
| Source:
BBC
|
| June 22, 2007 | - Lydia Playfoot, a 16-year-old English schoolgirl, went to the High Court to protest her school's ban on wearing “purity rings” (used to symbolize chastity), which she characterized as discrimination against Christians.
- Lydia Playfoot, a 16-year-old English schoolgirl, went to the High Court to protest her school's ban on wearing “purity rings” (used to symbolize chastity), which she characterized as discrimination against Christians.
| Source:
BBCNews
|
| June 13, 2007 | - “Today's media,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, “hunts in packs. In these modes it is like a feral beast just tearing people and reputations to bits.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| June 13, 2007 | - A 13-year-old British boy ended his ten-year vow of silence, which began when his mother forced him to have his tonsils removed, with the words “thank you.”
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| June 12, 2007 | - Sony apologized to the Church of England after a gun-filled computer game set in a British cathedral prompted the church to accuse the company of “virtual desecration.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| June 4, 2007 | -
Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds banned the word “cock” from its website. “Tit” and “swallow,” however, were still permitted.
| Source:
News.com.au via Nerve.com
|
| June 2, 2007 | - A family in England claimed that they were being chased out of their neighborhood because they are redheads.
| Source:
BBC
|
| May 28, 2007 | - In Britain, anonymous sources close to Queen Elizabeth II reported that the monarch was “exasperated and frustrated” with the legacy of the outgoing prime minister; in particular, she was said to be deeply concerned about Blair's actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and the outlawing of fox hunting.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| May 10, 2007 | -
British prime minister Tony Blair announced that he will resign next month after ten years in power. Much speculation ensued about what the 54-year-old Blair would do next, and it was thought that he might establish a foundation to fight poverty in Africa. “[Blair] was the worst thing that ever happened to Africa,” said Bright Matonga, the deputy information minister of Zimbabwe. “We hope that the children of Iraq and Afghanistan he is killing everyday will haunt him for the rest of his life.”
| Source 1:
Daily Mail
Source 2:
The Australian
Source 3:
Guardian
|
| May 3, 2007 | - An Irish teenager, who has been told by doctors that her baby will not survive more than a few days after birth, appeared in the High Court in Dublin to apply for the right to travel to Britain for an abortion.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| May 3, 2007 | - A 68-year-old grandmother in England was the runner-up for “txt laureate” for writing a love poem to her husband. “O hart tht sorz,” she wrote, “My luv adorz, He mAks me liv, He mAks me giv, Myslf 2 him, As my luv porz.”
| Source:
The Register
|
| May 2, 2007 | - American officials denied reports of a plan to require entry visas for British citizens of Pakistani origin.
| Source:
Guardian Unlimited
|
| May 1, 2007 | -
British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he will announce his resignation next week.
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| April 16, 2007 | -
Britain banned the phrase “war on terror.”
| Source:
Sky News
|
| April 16, 2007 | -
Prince William broke up with his girlfriend via telephone.
| Source:
Daily Mirror
|
| April 4, 2007 | - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad released 15 abducted British
marines.
| Source:
Los Angeles Times
|
| April 4, 2007 | -
British
scientists were “baffled” by the discovery of five-footed frogs.
| Source:
Breitbart.com
|
| April 3, 2007 | - Durex, a contraceptive company located in Knutsford, England, began assembling a “massive” panel of volunteer testers for its condom and lubricant products.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 2, 2007 | -
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said that he was disgusted with Iran's treatment of 15 Royal Navy hostages.
| Source:
Spiegel Online
|
| March 26, 2007 | - The British Ministry of Defence found that a study which had placed Iraq's civilian death toll at 655,000 was “robust.”
| Source:
BBC
|
| March 23, 2007 | -
British troops pulled out of Basra; two days later, rival Shiite factions began battling over a government building that had been been evacuated by the military.
| Source:
CS Monitor
|
| March 23, 2007 | - In the Iraqi territory of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, Iranian forces captured and detained 15 members of the British Royal Navy.
| Source:
Reuters via Yahoo! News
|
| February 23, 2007 | - It was revealed that the British Ministry of Defense once hired psychics to find Osama bin Laden, and Defense Minister Des Browne announced that Prince Harry, the 22-year-old son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, who is third in line to the throne, would be deployed to Iraq.
| Source 1:
Daily Mail
Source 2:
Washington Post
|
| February 20, 2007 | -
British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he would bring home more than 1,600 of the 7,100 British troops in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney said that the withdrawal was “an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well”; he also said that breaking “the will of the American people” was Al Qaeda's strategy. “They win because we quit.” “Dick was always very realistic,” said Kenneth Adelman, an arms-control official in the Reagan Administration and friend to Cheney. “I don't really understand how month after month he gets briefings showing Iraq's getting worse and worse, and he engages in all this happy talk.”
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
Fox News
Source 3:
Washington Post
|
| February 14, 2007 | - After studying 21 industrialized nations, the U.N. concluded that Dutch children were the most happy, and British and American children the least.
| Source:
BBC
|
| February 8, 2007 | - And “farcical, saucy, and somewhat tragic, man-breasts” were deemed ideal “fodder” for the British tabloid media.
| Source:
Times online
|
| February 7, 2007 | - A British
Muslim high school was under criticism for using textbooks that depicted Jews as apes and Christians as pigs and predicted that all non-believers would be condemned to hellfire.
| Source:
This London
|
| February 3, 2007 | -
Britain's top female paraglider was mauled by eagles. “Eagles,” said a colleague, “are the sharks of the air.”
| Source:
NZPA via stuff.co.nz
|
| January 15, 2007 | - In England, Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, gave birth to a naturally conceived child.
| Source:
AP via Cnn.com
|
| January 6, 2007 | - A British man died of a heart attack when ambulance crews could not be dispatched because they were on an E.U.-mandated lunch break.
| Source:
The Sun
|
| December 14, 2006 | -
British
geneticists investigating the case of a 10-year-old Pakistani boy who could walk on burning coals announced that they had discovered a gene that influences the perception of pain. They could not examine the boy directly because he had died after leaping off a roof to impress his friends.
| Source:
NYT
|
| December 14, 200 |
