| June 29, 2030 | - Officials in Britain said that the number of new cases of swine flu in that country was doubling weekly and could reach 100,000 new cases per day by the end of August; Dr. Richard Jarvis, chairman of the British Medical Association's public-health committee, cited reports of people throwing “swine flu parties” to expose themselves to the virus and build their immunity. “I don't think it is a good idea,” he said.
| Source 1:
Hindustan Times
Source 2:
AP via Star-Tribune
Source 3:
BBC
|
| February 17, 2013 | -
French and British authorities acknowledged that nuclear submarines from the two countries collided earlier this month.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| November 16, 2009 | - Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a national apology for the country's role in the forced migration throughout the Commonwealth from the 1930s to the 1970s of 150,000 poor British children, whose relocation was intended to relieve social-service costs in Britain and improve the “good white stock” of the Empire.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| November 2, 2009 | -
British archeologists said that excessive logging of the Peruvian hurango tree probably caused the collapse of the Nazca society 1,500 years ago.
| Source:
BBC
|
| October 11, 2009 | -
British scientists reported that learning to juggle can permanently increase brain function, and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte returned to Earth, after a visit to the international space station, wearing a foam clown nose.
| Source 1:
New Scientist
Source 2:
CNN
|
| October 7, 2009 | -
British entrepreneurs launched Internet Eyes, a program that allows registered users to monitor live feeds from some of the United Kingdom's 4.2 million surveillance cameras in order to search for a crime in progress, with cash prizes for viewers who spot the most criminals.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| October 2, 2009 | - A British study found that children who are given too many sweets risk becoming violent adults, possibly because they never learn patience.
| Source:
time.com
|
| September 30, 2009 | - It was revealed that a young Afghan girl was killed last summer when a box designed to break open in mid-air and scatter public information leaflets fell intact from a British plane and landed on her.
| Source:
The Australian
|
| September 26, 2009 | - President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy revealed that Iran had a secret uranium-enrichment facility. The announcement, based on previously classified intelligence, came soon after the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. “What business is it of yours,” countered Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “to tell us what to do or not?” Ahmadinejad previously said that he wanted nuclear materials only for “medicinal purposes.”
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
Washingtpon Post
Source 3:
CNN
|
| September 24, 2009 | - Terry Herbert, a 55-year-old British man living on welfare, uncovered with his metal detector a treasure trove of 1,500 gold and silver Anglo-Saxon artifacts worth 1.6 million dollars.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 11, 2009 | - A British water park requested that male visitors not wear Speedos, which the management deemed “more suited to Spain than Staffordshire.”
| Source:
Coventry Telegraph
|
| August 3, 2009 | - A researcher found evidence that haggis is English, not Scottish.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| July 23, 2009 | -
British Children's Secretary Ed Balls put forth a plan to monitor 20,000 “problem families” with 24-hour video surveillance, or “sin bins,” at a cost of $677 million.
| Source:
Daily Express
|
| June 19, 2009 | - Young girls in Zimbabwe were trading sex for food, three boys in Dorset, England, stomped a baby deer to death, a 16-year-old boy in California was running for city council, and a 14-year-old boy in Germany was hit by a meteorite.
| Source 1:
BBC
Source 2:
BBC
Source 3:
NBC
Source 4:
Telegraph
|
| June 17, 2009 | - A mother in Squamish, British Columbia, fought off a cougar that attacked her three-year-old daughter, who then asked: “Why didn't the kitty play nice?”
| Source:
CBC News
|
| June 1, 2009 | -
British scientists found that cats, like babies, have a poor understanding of the relationship between cause and effect.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| May 23, 2009 | - In Britain MP Peter Viggers admitted that he had attempted to seek state reimbursement of $2,600 spent at his country estate for a duck hut. “I am ashamed and humiliated, and I apologize,” said Viggers, who sought $47,660 for gardening expenses over three years. “As has been reported, my claim for the duck house was rightly 'not allowed' by the Fees Office. I paid for it myself, and in fact it was never liked by the ducks.”
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 14, 2009 | - Venetia Phair, nee Burney, who as an 11-year-old girl in 1930 named the newly discovered planet Pluto, died at age 90. “In the year 4,000 A.D., when Pluto is hollowed out and millions of people are living inside,” said an amateur astronomer, “the name of Venetia Burney may be the only thing that Great Britain is remembered for.”
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 9, 2009 | -
Britain's top antiterrorism official was forced to resign after reporters photographed him holding confidential documents that detailed covert operations.
| Source:
NPR
|
| April 5, 2009 | - A British soccer player was given a yellow card for passing gas during the opposing team's penalty shot.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| April 5, 2009 | - Two British boys, aged 10 and 11, were arrested for nearly killing two other boys, beating them with a brick, slashing them with a knife, and burning them with cigarettes.
| Source:
BBC
|
| March 27, 2009 | -
British scientists delivered electric shocks to hermit crabs to see if they were able to feel and remember pain, and determined that they could.
| Source:
CNN
|
| March 22, 2009 | - 27-year-old British reality-TV star Jade Goody died of cervical cancer. “She was a courageous woman,” said Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| March 22, 2009 | - The United Kingdom released documents showing that, between 1987 and 1993, it was officially concerned with UFOs; one document described a woman meeting an extraterrestrial with a slight Scandinavian accent.
| Source:
Radio Netherlands
|
| February 26, 2009 | -
British researchers identified the oldest words in English as “I,” “we,” “two,” and “three,” and predicted the death of “bad.”
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 25, 2009 | - A study of 1.3 million British women found that a single drink per day increases the risk of cancer of the breast, liver, and rectum.
| Source:
The Washington Post
|
| February 23, 2009 | - Obama announced that 17,000 more troops would be sent to Afghanistan, an increase of 50 percent, partly to help secure the border with Pakistan. General David D. McKiernan said he would like yet another 10,000 troops, adding that it was “very unhealthy” to compare the current war to British and Russian debacles in Afghanistan. “You can't look like the likely loser of the war,” explained Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations. “No warlord is going to change sides to join the loser.”
| Source 1:
LAT
Source 2:
The New York Times
Source 3:
The New York Times
Source 4:
The New York Times
Source 5:
AFP via Google
|
| January 28, 2009 | - Thirty-four years after first reporting on the medical condition termed “cello scrotum,” an irritation caused by playing the cello, the
British Medical Journal was forced to acknowledge that the ailment does not exist. “Anyone who has ever watched a cello being played would realize the physical impossibility of our claim,” said Baroness Elaine Murphy, who, with her husband, created the hoax.
| Source:
BBC
|
| January 21, 2009 | - a former KGB agent bought Britain's
Evening Standard,
| Source:
Reuters via Google News
|
| January 16, 2009 | - “My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow,” said Sir Gerald Kaufman, a British MP who was raised as an Orthodox Jew. “A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers.”
| Source:
UK Jewish lawmaker: Israeli forces acting like Nazis
|
| 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, 2006 | - The British police concluded that Princess Diana's death was an accident.
| Source:
NYT
|
| November 21, 2006 | -
British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that state-sponsored supernannies would be dispatched to deal with the United Kingdom's problem children. “Life isn't normal if you've got 12-year-olds out every night,” said Mr. Blair, “drinking and creating nuisance on the street with their parents not knowing or even caring.”
| Source:
Guardian
|
| November 17, 2006 | - Forty firefighters in the United Kingdom carried out a two-hour rescue operation to bring a sheep down from a ledge.
| Source:
Sky News
|
| November 14, 2006 | - A British man testified that he picked up his ten-month-old niece by the ankles and smashed her to death because there was within him a “beast that shows his ugly head every now and then.” The beast, he said, told him to make her feel “a little bit of pain.”
| Source:
BBC News
|
| November 12, 2006 | - Three U.S. soldiers, four British soldiers, and 159 Iraqis were killed on a Sunday.
| Source 1:
Aljazeerah.info
Source 2:
The Toronto Star
|
| November 2, 2006 | - Channel 4, Britain's second largest television network, announced that Google's U.K. advertising revenues would outstrip the broadcaster's own by some hundred million pounds this year. “People need to wake up and realize that this is not just a cyclical issue,” said the network's chief executive. “There is deep structural change, rather like global warming.”
| Source:
Times of London
|
| November 1, 2006 | - Iran criticized Australia, Bahrain, Britain, France, Italy, and the United States for carrying out a practice naval exercise in the Persian Gulf, then announced ten days of “Great Prophet II” war games.
| Source 1:
AP via International Herald Tribune
Source 2:
Breitbart
|
| November 1, 2006 | - Two of the suspects arrested in Britain in August for plotting to blow up U.S.-bound airplanes were released due to insufficient proof.
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
CNN
|
| October 26, 2006 | -
England's
Queen Elizabeth II strained her back.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 23, 2006 | - In Basra, Prince Philip of Britain assured the troops “at the sharp end” that “a great many locals do very much appreciate what you are trying to do for them.”
| Source:
New Zealand Herald
|
| October 17, 2006 | - A Gypsy pressure group filed suit to stop British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's latest film from being shown in Germany. The group accuses him of antiziganism, or hostility to gypsies; Cohen's fictional alter-ego Borat claimed that Gypsies had molested his horse.
| Source 1:
Reuters via Yahoo
Source 2:
Wikipedia
|
| October 17, 2006 | - Scotland Yard and the British Home Office misplaced two “extremely dangerous” terrorism suspects. One escaped from a secure psychiatric unit, and neither can be named for legal reasons.
| Source:
Guardian online
|
| October 16, 2006 | - Americans were claiming political asylum in Britain.
| Source:
Sun Online
|
| October 8, 2006 | - A study suggested that an increasing number of British students are working as prostitutes in order to pay their university tuition.
| Source:
timesonline.co.uk
|
| October 4, 2006 | - The British Minister of State for Public Health said that pregnant British teens, seeking to ease their labor pains, were smoking to reduce the birth weight of their babies.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| October 4, 2006 | -
Britain's Prince William played bingo.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| September 22, 2006 | - A British major described the Royal Air Force as “utterly, utterly useless.”
| Source:
The Independent
|
| September 20, 2006 | -
British Home Secretary John Reid declared that England's “fight is not with Muslims generally.”
| Source:
BBC News
|
| September 20, 2006 | - A pedigree bull mastiff deefer from Nottingham, England, underwent emergency surgery to have two pairs of ladies' underwear removed from his small intestine.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| September 17, 2006 | - A British man died when he fell off a cliff while flying his kite.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| September 13, 2006 | - Fertility clinics in Britain were low on sperm.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| September 5, 2006 | -
Britain's Royal Preston Hospital unveiled the “Inter-Faith Gown,” a hospital garment modeled on the Muslim burka.
| Source:
Breitbart.com via the Drudge Report
|
| September 5, 2006 | -
English
scientists were conducting experiments to determine whether sea horses could be tempted into adultery.
| Source:
New York Post via Nerve.com
|
| September 3, 2006 | - A British professor announced that five-year-old girls were worried about their weight.
| Source:
AFP via Breitbart
|
| August 31, 2006 | - Miss England, an Uzbek-born Muslim, declared that stereotyping leads to terror.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| August 30, 2006 | - It was reported that the average British woman spends two and a half years on her hair during her lifetime.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| August 28, 2006 | - At least 200 Iraqis were killed in bombings, rocket attacks, and shootings, as were 19 American and British soldiers.
| Source 1:
CNN
Source 2:
NPR
|
| August 24, 2006 | - An English woman capable of climaxing forty times per day was convicted of benefit fraud.
| Source:
The Times of London
|
| August 22, 2006 | - In Diss, England, Gwen Dorling, 102, enjoyed the services of a stripper for her birthday.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 10, 2006 | - Under pressure from U.S. officials, authorities in the United Kingdom announced the discovery of a terrorist plot to blow up as many as ten passenger planes in the air, possibly by using explosive liquids hidden inside sports-drink bottles. Twenty-one suspects were arrested. Britain raised its threat level to “critical”; the United States raised its threat level “for all commercial flights flying from the United Kingdom to the United States” to “red.” Carry-on luggage was banned on flights in and out of Heathrow airport, and classical and traditional musicians, who normally keep their fragile instruments with them while traveling, were forced to check them as baggage and risk damage. “These restrictions,” said a cellist, “are a disaster for me.” Bagpipers planning to attend the World Pipe Band Championships were particularly worried about the effects of the ban. Prime Minister Tony Blair, on vacation in the Caribbean, thanked U.K. security services for their “hard work,” and President George W. Bush, who had been monitoring the progress of the investigation while on vacation in Crawford, Texas (where he was reading The Stranger, by Albert Camus), flew to Wisconsin and called the arrests “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists.”
| Source 1:
The New York Times
Source 2:
BBC News
|
| August 2, 2006 | -
England's Alton Towers theme park canceled “National Muslim Fun Day.”
| Source:
Reuters
|
| August 1, 2006 | -
English Prime Minister Tony Blair said there was an “arc of extremism” stretching across the Middle East that could be defeated, he proposed, by “an alliance of moderation.”
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 1, 2006 | - An English paleobiologist announced that the crests of giant prehistoric flying reptiles signified sexual maturity, much like a “giant cockerel's comb.”
| Source:
BBC
|
| July 31, 2006 | - A British jockey apologized for headbutting his horse.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| July 29, 2006 | -
President George W. Bush apologized to British Prime Minister Tony Blair for improperly shipping bombs to Israel via Scotland.
| Source:
BBC
|
| July 29, 2006 | -
Baboons were harrassing construction workers in Liverpool.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| July 25, 2006 | -
Britain considered legislation to establish $1,859 fines for cyber-bullying.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| July 23, 2006 | - Two people in England were killed by a giant inflatable sculpture named Dreamscape.
| Source 1:
USAgNet.com
Source 2:
AFP via Taipei Times
Source 3:
Cape Times
Source 4:
local6.com
Source 5:
local6.com
Source 6:
BBC
|
| July 19, 2006 | -
Scientists learned that Britain's wealthy neighborhoods may cause cancer in children.
| Source:
Washington Post and Cruises.about.com
|
| July 19, 2006 | -
Scientists learned that Britain's river fish are undergoing sex changes.
| Source:
EITB24.com via Google News
|
| July 18, 2006 | -
British stage actor Frank Harrison, 70, was fined $919 for lightly spanking an actress. “All pretty little girls,” said Harrison, “deserve to be spanked once a day.”
| Source:
BBC
|
| July 8, 2006 | -
British
scientists found that playing with dolls can help improve Alzheimer's patients' communication abilities.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| July 5, 2006 | - A British military report concluded that Trident nuclear missiles, which are regularly transported on public highways in the United States and Britain, are vulnerable to terrorist attacks or even severe traffic accidents that could trigger a nuclear explosion.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| June 29, 2006 | - It was
announced that the Royal Family
cost U.K. taxpayers about $68 million
last year. “Our key aim,” said the Keeper of the Privy Purse,
“is not to try and achieve a low-cost
monarchy.”
| Source:
Scotsman
|
| June 28, 2006 | -
English
soccer fans, said German breweries, were endangering the German
beer supply.
| Source:
Mirror.co.uk
|
| June 26, 2006 | - A three-foot-long escaped porcupine named Twinkle was captured in Langwathby, England.
| Source:
BBC
|
| June 25, 2006 | - In Britain the wives of soldiers serving in Iraq were receiving strange phone calls from Iraqi militants.
| Source:
Telegraph.co.uk
|
| June 24, 2006 | - Lance Corporal William Windsor, a billy goat in the British army, was demoted for “lack of decorum.”
| Source:
BBC
|
| June 21, 2006 | - Twenty-five of Britain's 4,000 beetle species were missing.
| Source:
BBC
|
| June 18, 2006 | - The Lakeland, Florida, English
swan population, which is descended from swans given to the city by the Queen of England in 1957, was being eaten by alligators at three times the normal rate.
| Source:
NewsNet5.com
|
| June 7, 2006 | -
British special forces were being trained to use strap-on “batwings” rather than parachutes; the lightweight carbon wings permit the soldiers to be dropped at high altitudes and then glide for more than 100 miles before landing.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| June 4, 2006 | -
British
scientists claimed that men drink heavily at sporting events in order to compensate for their masculine shortcomings.
| Source:
Economic & Social Research Council
|
| June 2, 2006 | -
British police were patrolling seaports and airports in order to prevent football hooligans from attending the World Cup in Berlin.
| Source:
This is London
|
| June 1, 2006 | -
British
scientists powered a small fan by feeding chocolate to bacteria.
| Source:
New Scientist Tech
|
| May 29, 2006 | - It was reported that, since 2003, 8,600 British troops had gone AWOL in Iraq; 929 were still missing.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| May 26, 2006 | -
British MP George Galloway said that an assassin would be "morally justified" in killing Prime Minister Tony Blair.
| Source:
Chron.com
|
| May 26, 2006 | - A study found that most British men are cry babies.
| Source:
Yahoo! News
|
| May 19, 2006 | - About 2,000 gallons of Sunny D concentrate leaked into a river in England, killing fish and turning the water bright yellow.
| Source:
Daily Mail
|
| May 16, 2006 | - In Louth, England, a group of youths kicked a pet rabbit to death.
| Source:
LouthToday
|
| May 16, 2006 | - A British-Ugandan team of scientists said that the glaciers of the Rwenzori Mountains in East Africa, which the Greek geographer Ptolemy called "the mountains of the moon," could melt within the next two decades.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| May 15, 2006 | -
Snoop Dogg was banned for life from the United Kingdom.
| Source:
FemaleFirst.co.uk
|
| May 12, 2006 | - A Baptist church in Britain was planning to wash cars with baptismal-font water.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| May 12, 2006 | - and a British
inventor claimed to have created a car that gets 8,000 miles per gallon, improving on his previous record of 6,603 miles per gallon.
| Source:
AFP via Yahoo! News
|
| May 8, 2006 | - A British helicopter was shot down over Basra, killing all five crew members.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| May 3, 2006 | - A study found that white middle-aged Britons were, on average, healthier than white middle-aged Americans.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| May 2, 2006 | - In England the Archbishop of York played African drums and led a conga line as he wore a hoodie.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 29, 2006 | - A Liverpool, England, man was sentenced to 100 hours of community service for getting drunk and singing "YMCA" on a flight from Florida to Manchester while his wife wept and comforted their three children. "He makes no excuses," said the man's lawyer, "for his loutish, idiotic behavior."
| Source:
Mirror.co.uk
|
| April 19, 2006 | -
British
doctors criticized China for harvesting organs for transplant from thousands of executed prisoners.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 18, 2006 | - In England a man drowned after diving into the river Ouse to rescue his girlfriend's shoes.
| Source:
Mail & Guardian Online
|
| April 13, 2006 | - Scientists in Britain
found that human fetuses cannot feel pain.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 1, 2006 | -
Britain assigned 4,000 officers to the new Serious Organised Crime Agency, an elite and secretive organization intended, according to a former detective, to "catch people in the highest echelon of organized crime."
| Source:
BBC News
|
| March 31, 2006 | -
British scientists found that the air temperature in Antarctica was rising three times faster than in the rest of the world.
| Source:
The Times
|
| March 30, 2006 | - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited England but cancelled a visit to a mosque there in order to avoid protesters. Rice and British foreign minister Jack Straw then visited Iraq, where they told the Iraqi leadership that it must form a unified government immediately.
| Source 1:
BBC News
Source 2:
The New York Times
|
| March 7, 2006 | -
Britain planned to kill one third of its wild badger population--about 100,000 badgers--in order to slow the spread of bovine
tuberculosis; critics of the plan argued that slaughtering badgers will speed the spread of bovine tuberculosis.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| March 7, 2006 | - Two British preschools were criticized for having children sing "Baa baa rainbow sheep." "There are much better ways," said a representative of another preschool, "of addressing these issues."
| Source:
BBC News
|
| March 2, 2006 | - A British
astronomer named Gerry Gilmore predicted that ground-based telescopes would be useless within 40 years because of climate change and jet contrails. "You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca," he said, "or you give up astronomy."
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 16, 2006 | - A British nurse was in trouble for slapping her co-workers with a frozen
trout.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| January 26, 2006 | - In Manchester, England, the BBC was planning an Easter tribute in which Jesus Christ will sing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division before joining Judas in a duet of "Blue Monday" by New Order. Later, as Roman soldiers flay him, Jesus will sing "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" by The Smiths.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| January 23, 2006 | -
Russia accused the U.K. of spying in Moscow, and offered a data-transmitting fake spy rock as evidence.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| January 15, 2006 | -
Tony Blair's government was planning to lift a 40-year prohibition against spying on members of Parliament. British officials, including the Secretary of State for Defense, were opposed to the plan.
| Source:
The Independent
|
| January 15, 2006 | - In Aberystwyth, Wales, a woman was banned from the local seafront after she repeatedly attempted to drown herself.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| January 13, 2006 | -
British researchers were hoping to fuse human cells with rabbit eggs in order to generate stem cells. “The fertility of rabbits,” noted a researcher, “is legendary.”
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| January 6, 2006 | -
British MP George Galloway announced that he would be appearing on the reality TV show “Big Brother.”
| Source:
Reuters
|
| January 6, 2006 | -
Pet
obesity was on the rise in Britain.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| December 30, 2005 | - An airplane flying from England to Spain made an unscheduled stop in Porto Santo, a 10-mile-long, three-mile-wide island, to eject a disruptive passenger.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| December 30, 2005 | - A British woman married an Israeli
dolphin after fifteen years of courtship. “I am just waiting for everyone to leave,” said the woman, “so we can have a private moment.”
| Source:
NBC10.com
|
| December 20, 2005 | - In the Isle of Wight, England, authorities were looking for Toga, a three-month-old Jackass penguin that they believe was stolen so that it could be given as a Christmas present. "Toga," said a zoo manager, "is very, very vulnerable."
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| December 19, 2005 | -
British scientists discovered that little girls like to torture their Barbie dolls by scalping, decapitating, burning, breaking, and microwaving them. “Girls,” explained a researcher, “feel violence and hatred towards their Barbie.”
| Source:
Times Online
|
| November 27, 2005 | - The British government was investigating reports that up to 50 babies each year survive being aborted.
| Source:
Times Online
|
| November 25, 2005 | - Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, governor of Bayelsa State, Nigeria, denied that, in order to avoid money-laundering charges, he had fled from the U.K. disguised in a dress.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| November 22, 2005 | - It was reported that President George W. Bush had, on April 16, 2004, revealed to British Prime Minister Tony Blair a plan to take “military action” against the headquarters of the Al Jazeera news network in Doha, Qatar. According to a leaked transcript, Blair talked Bush out of attacking the television station. The White House called the report “outlandish and inconceivable,” and Blair called the report a “conspiracy theory.” David Keogh, a former U.K. Cabinet Office official, was charged under the Official Secrets Act with leaking the memo, and U.K. Attorney General Lord Goldsmith warned British media that any further reporting based on the leaked memo could be subject to criminal charges. Al Jazeera demanded an inquiry.
| Source 1:
The Daily Mirror
Source 2:
The Toronto Star
Source 3:
The Guardian
Source 4:
News.Telegraph
|
| November 20, 2005 | - In Basra two British-trained policemen had tortured at least two civilians to death with electric drills.
| Source:
The Statesman
|
| November 17, 2005 | - A former student at Oxford University was in trouble for calling a policeman's
horse “gay.” “Sam was adamant,” said an eyewitness, “his equine gaydar was accurate.”
| Source:
The Oxford Student
|
| November 13, 2005 | - A man in Britain appeared to have cured himself of HIV.
| Source:
Times Online
|
| November 10, 2005 | - In Britain a man named Tommy Kimpton was found not guilty of murder for using a pool cue to kill a boy who called him “dumbo ears” and “tank ass.” Kimpton was instead sentenced to life in prison for manslaughter and will serve a minimum four-year sentence.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| November 5, 2005 | - Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to the United States, said that the Iraq war was inspiring acts of terrorism: “God,” he said, “it does not look good.”
| Source:
BBC News
|
| October 28, 2005 | -
Beavers were re-introduced to the British countryside for the first time in 500 years by a millionaire beaver enthusiast.
| Source:
Times Online
|
| October 12, 2005 | - An overaffectionate English baboon licked all of the hair off her son's head.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| October 6, 2005 | - A British reverend told a group of 12-year-olds that Harry Potter was “not the only gay in the village”.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| October 5, 2005 | -
Britain accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guard of providing Iraqi Shiite groups with the technology to carry out bombing attacks.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| October 5, 2005 | - The Church of England confirmed Dr. John Sentamu, who was born in Uganda, as the 97th Archbishop of York.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| October 3, 2005 | -
British scientists found that watching television slows the development of children's brains.
| Source:
The Age
|
| October 1, 2005 | - In England three teen girls were convicted of manslaughter for bullying to death a girl with a heart condition.
| Source:
Science Daily
|
| September 21, 2005 | - The skeleton of a schizophrenic man was found in Wales; he had handcuffed himself to a tree. Deep scuff marks on the tree made it clear that the man had tried to free himself.
| Source:
Liverpool Daily Post
|
| September 6, 2005 | - Passport applicants in Britain were being told not to smile for their pictures, because smiles confuse security equipment.
| Source:
The Jamaica Observer
|
| August 31, 2005 | - A British man died when he fell into a giant blender.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| August 29, 2005 | - The world bog snorkeling championship was held in Wales.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| August 14, 2005 | - Approximately 2,000 dolphins gathered off the coast of Wales, but no one knew why.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| August 9, 2005 | - A British puppeteer was ordered to stop using a Saddam Hussein
puppet as the sausage-stealing villain in his Punch and Judy show.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| August 5, 2005 | - A man in Yorkshire, England, filmed his own suicide on his mobile phone and beamed it to his girlfriend.
| Source:
Sky News
|
| August 5, 2005 | - A British man was in trouble for attacking his wife with a pike. He later fed the pike to his cats and dogs.
| Source:
Mirror.co.uk
|
| August 2, 2005 | - A British man was ordered to stop committing anti-social acts after he was witnessed throwing furniture through his windows, setting bonfires in the morning, and going out in public naked save for a hat and a padlock on his penis.
| Source:
Worcester Standard
|
| July 31, 2005 | -
British police had arrested nineteen people believed to be connected to the London bombings.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| July 19, 2005 | - Members of the British government said that the bombings on the London tube were not related to the war in Iraq, but only 28 percent of British people agreed.
| Source:
Common Dreams
|
| July 19, 2005 | - A British court, acting under the legal principle of “universal jurisdiction,” convicted a man named Faryadi Zardad on torture charges for events that took place while Zardad lived in Afghanistan, where he would often unleash a “human dog”--a crazed man he kept in a hole--on captives he was holding for ransom. In London, where he has lived since 1998, Zardad ran a pizza parlor.
| Source:
GlobeAndMail.com
|
| July 18, 2005 | - Former British Prime Minister Edward Heath died.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| July 8, 2005 | -
British MP George Galloway said that “London has reaped the involvement of Mr. Blair's involvement in Iraq.”
| Source:
Democracy Now!
|
| July 5, 2005 | - Cedric, a seventy-year-old turtle prone to attacking drainpipes and lawn mowers, was wandering loose in Borrowash, Derbyshire.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| June 30, 2005 | - The estimated number of hedgehogs in Britain was found to have dropped 20 percent since 2001, probably because tidy gardens alienate hedgehogs.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| June 28, 2005 | - The Association of British Insurers estimated that global warming will result in $27 billion worth of storm damage annually by 2080.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| June 23, 2005 | -
British taxpayers were each paying the equivalent of $1.12 yearly to support the royal family. “We believe,” said the keeper of the privy purse, “this represents a value-for-money monarchy. We're not looking to provide the cheapest monarchy.”
| |
| June 21, 2005 | - A member of Britain's parliament identified himself as a Jedi.
| Source:
Parliamentary Record
|
| June 21, 2005 | - Twenty-one thousand people gathered at Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice.
| Source:
The Age
|
| June 16, 2005 | - A British man was sentenced to twenty-seven months in prison for making his friend Ernest dress in a skirt, forcing him to strip, shaving him all over, and painting him green so he would look like Shrek.
| Source:
The Sun
|
| June 16, 2005 | - In Britain a ten-year-old boy began to bang his head into a car dashboard. “It's eating me, it's eating me,” he yelled as blood trickled down his face. Doctors later removed a hornet (or possibly a horsefly) from his inner ear.
| Source:
ICBerkshire.co.uk
|
| June 14, 2005 | - A British man pleaded guilty to unloading a fire extinguisher into his friend's anus. “It was just horseplay that went wrong,” said the man's lawyer.
| Source:
The Daily Record
|
| June 9, 2005 | -
British pranksters kidnapped a Dalek from Wookey Hole Caves.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| June 3, 2005 | - A British man, happily married for eighty years, was asked for the secret to marital bliss. “'Yes, dear',” he explained.
| Source:
Mail & Guardian
|
| May 31, 2005 | - The British children's home Strawberry Field, which inspired the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” closed.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 23, 2005 | - In Britain, Ford Motor Company suspended seven workers when they were caught looking at woman-on-octopus pornography on company computers. “Management,” said an employee, “didn't see the funny side.”
| Source:
The Sun
|
| May 18, 2005 | -
British MP George Galloway went to Washington, D.C., to respond to allegations that he profited from the U.N.-managed Iraq oil-for-food program. “I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him,” said Galloway. “The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target those guns.”
| Source:
Guardian
|
| May 13, 2005 | -
British doctors implanted five devices into a stroke victim's unusable arm to help it work again.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| May 10, 2005 | -
British archaeologists dug up a two-thousand-year-old shoe. It was either a size nine or ten, they said.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| May 8, 2005 | - It was the 60th anniversary of VE Day. The German ambassador to London called on Britain to change its attitude towards Germany. “They continue to see us as Nazis,” he said, “as if they have to refight the battles every evening.”
| Source:
The Independent
|
| May 8, 2005 | -
England's Prince Harry entered the Army.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| May 5, 2005 | - Two grenades went off outside the British consulate in New York City, damaging a flower planter,
| Source:
Bloomberg
|
| May 4, 2005 | - A papyrologist at Oxford University announced that new techniques in spectral imaging, which make it possible to decipher previously illegible ink on papyrus fragments, have yielded parts of a lost tragedy by Sophocles, a novel by Lucian, and an epic poem by Archilochos; researchers also applied the technique to third- and fourth-century manuscripts of the Revelation of Saint John and discovered that the number of the beast, contrary to popular belief, is 616, the area code of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
| Source:
National Post
|
| May 1, 2005 | - A secret British memo from July 2002, summarizing a meeting between Tony Blair and his security advisors, was made public. The memo implied that President Bush had already made up his mind to go to war in Iraq, despite his claims to the contrary, and that intelligence and facts about Iraq would be “fixed around the policy.”
| Source:
Common Dreams
|
| April 17, 2005 | -
Britain stopped importing United States
corn after discovering that the United States had been sending banned, genetically modified corn to the U.K. for the past four years.
| Source:
The Independent
|
| April 15, 2005 | - In Wales, a drunken man stood before an open window, dropped his trousers, and cried out, “who wants some of this?” before he fell from the window, impaled himself on a railing, and died.
| Source:
Daily Record
|
| April 9, 2005 | -
Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 4, 2005 | -
Britain announced that it will pull 5,500 troops from Iraq and increase its presence in Afghanistan, to help with the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| April 1, 2005 | - A British
sex festival was cancelled because not enough people wanted to go.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| March 30, 2005 | - Developers in England were about to start construction on Dickens World, a $113 million theme park that will offer an Ebenezer Scrooge ride and Dickens characters on ice.
| Source:
SEEDA
|
| March 12, 2005 | - A twelve-year-old British boy who raped his special-needs teacher was sentenced to life in prison.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| March 7, 2005 | -
Sony made a Welshman its chairman.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 3, 2005 | - A 13-pound, 13-ounce baby boy was born in Britain; the boy's mother credited the boy's size to her steady diet of cockles, herring, mussels, and crab claws, provided by her fishmonger husband.
| Source:
News & Star
|
| March 2, 2005 | -
Bill Gates was knighted.
| Source:
ABC News
|
| February 28, 2005 | - In the U.K., Bournemouth University announced that it has developed two artificial mass graves, each containing about thirty fake skeletons, to be used to train Iraqi
war-crimes investigators.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| February 25, 2005 | -
Britain's Labour party was forced to drop Christine Wheatley as a candidate for Parliament after it was revealed she had once worked as a prostitute in Paris. “It was usually only three minutes,” said Wheatley.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| February 21, 2005 | - The British Navy was actively seeking gay recruits.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| February 18, 2005 | - The ban on fox hunting went into effect in England and Wales and was expected to be widely ignored.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| February 17, 2005 | - In England, a nuclear power plant was unable to account for nearly thirty kilograms of plutonium, enough to make seven nuclear bombs; the discrepancy was said to exist only on paper.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 10, 2005 | - One out of six British secondary-school students identified Winston Churchill as an insurance salesman.
| Source:
The Sun
|
| February 1, 2005 | - Two British
terrorism detainees chose to remain in prison rather than accept house arrest.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| January 20, 2005 | - A poll of thousands of people in 21 countries revealed that just 26 percent consider Bush a positive global force. Three quarters of respondents in France and Germany and 64 percent of Britons felt that U.S. actions would have a negative impact on the world, and for the first time it appeared that an international dislike of Bush is metamorphosing into a dislike of Americans in general. The three countries that approved of Bush's reelection were the Philippines, Poland, and India.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| January 17, 2005 | - Sir David King, the Chief Scientific Advisor to the United Kingdom, was under attack by American lobbyists for saying that global warming is a problem.
| Source:
The Independent
|
| January 13, 2005 | - Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne, was revealed to have gone to a party dressed as a Nazi.
| Source:
New York Timesimes
|
| January 12, 2005 | - E! Television and Britain's BSkyB announced plans to broadcast 30-minute dramatizations of Michael Jackson's child
molestation
trial, based on the testimony from the previous day, in order to get around a ban on cameras in the courtroom.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| December 16, 2004 | - the British House of Lords said the indefinite detention of foreign terrorism suspects violates EU human rights laws,
| Source:
Bloomberg
|
| December 8, 2004 | - The notoriously outdated London Underground conceded that some of its spare parts were purchased on eBay.
| Source:
Agence France Presse
|
| December 3, 2004 | - A survey found that about half of Britons have never heard of Auschwitz.
| Source:
The Independent
|
| October 28, 2004 | - Four British citizens who were held without charges in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, filed suit against Donald Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials, and claimed that they were tortured while in custody. The Pentagon responded that the men were "enemy combatants" and thus had no right to sue.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| October 28, 2004 | -
Britain's House of Commons voted to stop calling visitors "strangers."
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| October 6, 2004 | -
Britain suspended the license of the factory in Liverpool that was supposed to manufacture almost half the American supply of this year's flu vaccine.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 16, 2004 | - The British House of Commons voted to outlaw fox hunting with dogs after pro-hunting protesters broke into the chamber and insulted the rural affairs minister.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| August 29, 2004 | - It was reported that a janitor at Tate Modern in London threw out a work of art because he thought it was just a bag of garbage; the artwork, entitled "Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art," was in fact a bag of garbage.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| August 8, 2004 | -
Prozac was found in Britain's drinking water.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| August 6, 2004 | -
Britain banned toothy smiles from passport photos.
| Source:
Agence France-Presse
|
| July 22, 2004 | -
Great Britain announced that it will reduce the size of its armed forces by 15,000.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 6, 2004 | - The British House of Lords voted to limit the right of parents to spank their children.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 12, 2004 | -
Britain's Labour Party suffered huge losses in local elections and came in third behind the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 28, 2004 | - A British journalist who was arrested in Israel for talking to Mordechai Vanunu, the scientist who exposed Israel's nuclear weapons program, was released from custody and complained that he had been stuck in a dungeon with excrement-covered walls; Vanunu was released last month after 18 years in prison and has been ordered not to talk with foreigners.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| May 21, 2004 | -
British investigators who studied samples of human biopsies estimated that almost 4,000 Britons could have mad cow disease prions in their tonsils.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| May 21, 2004 | -
British intelligence agents in World War II at one point planned to train pigeons to carry bombs or biological weapons. "Pigeon research," said one memo, "will not stand still; if we do not experiment, other powers will."
| Source:
BBC
|
| May 19, 2004 | - Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain was pelted in the back with condoms filled with purple flour as he was speaking in front of Parliament during a question-and-answer session.
| Source:
BBC
|
| May 7, 2004 | - Sheikh Abdul-Sattar al-Bahadli, an aide to Moktada al-Sadr, offered rewards for the capture or killing of British soldiers; he said that female soldiers could be kept as slaves.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| May 1, 2004 | - Photographs were published of British troops beating an Iraqi man and urinating on him; the pictures also showed a soldier striking the man in the genitals with a rifle; the victim's jaw was reportedly broken and his teeth were smashed before he was thrown off the back of a moving truck.
| Source:
Daily Mirror
|
| April 26, 2004 | -
China announced that Hong Kong will not be allowed to elect its next leader in 2007, contrary to the city's Basic Law, which was enacted when Britain turned over the territory in 1997; China's Standing Committee of the National People's Congress said that an election would create social and economic instability. Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong's current chief executive, called on the people to remain "calm and rational."
| Source:
BBC
|
| April 26, 2004 | - Fifty former senior British diplomats signed a letter denouncing Tony Blair for following American policies in Iraq and Israel that are "doomed to failure."
| Source:
Financial Times
|
| April 21, 2004 | - Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain announced a referendum on the proposed European constitution.
| Source:
BBC
|
| April 11, 2004 | - The British government proposed jailing people for merely associating with terror suspects.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| April 8, 2004 | - A Russian scientist was sentenced to 15 years for selling unclassified material to a British company that Russian authorities claim was a CIA front.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 8, 2004 | -
British researchers discovered a previously unknown prion disease among sheep.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| April 3, 2004 | - The Department of Homeland Security announced that visitors from Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, Australia, and 21 other countries will be photographed and fingerprinted when they enter the United States.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 15, 2004 | -
Great Britain approved the commercial cultivation of genetically modified maize.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| March 14, 2004 | - The British government was fighting in court for the right to charge people who have been wrongly convicted of crimes for the cost of keeping them in jail.
| Source:
Sunday Herald
|
| March 11, 2004 | - The United States released five British citizens from the camps in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Britain held the men for less than a day before releasing them.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| March 5, 2004 | -
British
children found a three-headed frog with six legs.
| Source:
BBC
|
| February 26, 2004 | - The British government declined to prosecute Katharine Gun, the linguist who leaked a United States National Security Agency memo asking British intelligence to spy on United Nations diplomats before the invasion of Iraq; there was speculation that the government was trying to avoid another embarrassing debate about the legality of the war.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 26, 2004 | - Clare Short, a Labor member of parliament who resigned from the Blair cabinet over Iraq, charged that British agents had spied on United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan just before the invasion of Iraq, and said that she had seen transcripts of Annan's conversations.
| Source:
Independent
|
| February 26, 2004 | -
Britain's top law-enforcement minister called for an expansion of domestic surveillance to combat terrorism.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 21, 2004 | - A red-bellied piranha was found dead in a boat moored on the Thames River in England.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 11, 2004 | - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that he did not recall British Prime Minister Tony Blair's prewar claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. "I don't remember the statement being made, to be perfectly honest." The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Richard Myers, didn't remember it either.
| Source:
Sydney Morning Herald
|
| February 11, 2004 | - The British Medical Association reported that smoking increases the risk of impotence, infertility, cervical cancer, miscarriage, stillbirth, sudden infant death syndrome, low birth weight, placental complications, and cleft palate.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| February 6, 2004 | - A new study found that many organic food products sold in the UK contain genetically modified ingredients.
| Source:
Nature.com
|
| January 29, 2004 | - A Canadian soldier was killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan, as was a British peacekeeper.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 26, 2004 | - Skepticism was growing that the United States will succeed in handing power over to an Iraqi client regime before the presidential election, and the head of the occupying authority's Tribal Affairs Bureau admitted that he had been relying on a 1918
British report in his attempts to make sense of local politics.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 23, 2004 | -
Britain's naked rambler completed his 900-mile journey and put on some clothes.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| January 16, 2004 | - One hundred seventy-five members of the British
parliament, including five former law lords, also filed a brief attacking the administration's detainment policy. "The exercise of executive power without the possibility of judicial review," they wrote, "jeopardizes the keystone of our existence as nations, namely the rule of law."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 8, 2004 | -
Britain released plans for new emergency powers that will permit government authorities to ban public gatherings and to destroy or confiscate private property without compensation.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 6, 2004 | - It was reported that 18 people died of variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease, last year in Britain, one more than died in 2002.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 5, 2004 | -
Britain's transportation minister warned that terrorism-related delays could be expected "for many years to come."
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| December 30, 2003 | -
Britain's Office of National Statistics said that the country is worth $8.8 trillion.
| Source:
Agence France-Presse
|
| December 28, 2003 | - Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed in a Christmas message to the British military that the Iraq Survey Group had found "massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories"; L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, dismissed Blair's claim as a "red herring."
| Source:
Guardian
|
| December 25, 2003 | -
Britain's Beagle 2 spacecraft apparently landed on Mars, though it failed to transmit its nine-note homing signal, which was composed by a pop band called Blur.
| Source:
Daily Telegraph
|
| December 22, 2003 | -
British health officials reported the first possible transmission of mad cow disease to a human via blood transfusion.
| Source:
Nature.com
|
| December 21, 2003 | -
British police asked the government to grant them the power to stop cars by using remote control.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| December 12, 2003 | -
Mick Jagger accepted a knighthood; Keith Richards was disgusted and said it was a disgrace: "It's not what the Stones is about, is it?"
| Source:
Associated Press, Reuters
|
| December 5, 2003 | -
Sudden oak death was confirmed in four trees in England.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| November 21, 2003 | - President George W. Bush traveled to Great Britain, along with 650 companions, including five personal chefs, but was unable to move freely in the country because of massive protests. At Buckingham Palace the president dined on roasted halibut with herbs, free-range chicken, potatoes cocotte, salad, and a sorbet bombe but presumably skipped the Puligny-Montrachet and the Veuve Clicquot, Gold Label, 1995. Truck bombs blew up the British Consulate and a British bank in Istanbul, killing at least 27 and wounding hundreds. Bloody victims ran screaming through the streets. Two hotels in Baghdad used by Westerners were bombed as was the headquarters of a pro-American Kurdish group in Kirkuk.
| Source:
New York Times, Daily Telegraph
|
| November 18, 2003 | -
London banned the feeding of pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| November 15, 2003 | - Newly declassified files from MI5, the British intelligence agency, revealed that in 1940 German
saboteurs had planned to attack Buckingham Palace with exploding cans of French peas.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 8, 2003 | -
Prince Charles denied the latest rumor about his sexual proclivities but failed to mention what he was accused of doing. Newspapers in Britain, where libel laws are very strong, have been unable to print the substance of the rumor, though they have repeatedly run the same photograph of Prince Charles standing alone in a field with another man.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 27, 2003 | - New research estimated that British people collectively stand in line for 1.3 billion hours a year.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| October 23, 2003 | - Six English schoolboys were hospitalized after it was learned they had taken Viagra during lunch; "by the the time the afternoon lessons began," said a source, "there was no hiding what they had done."
| Source:
Reuters
|
| October 20, 2003 | -
Tony Blair was hospitalized with heart palpitations and was told to take it easy.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| October 10, 2003 | -
Sting was made a commander of the British Empire, and Roger Moore, a former James Bond, was made a knight.
| Source:
St. Petersburg Times
|
| September 19, 2003 | - A new report from the British government claimed that Britons are the worst binge drinkers in Europe,
| Source:
Reuters
|
| September 11, 2003 | - A British parliamentary report concluded that the Blair government did not intentionally lie in its controversial dossier on Iraq's military threat; the report did criticize the government, however, and said that its false claim that Iraq was capable of launching weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes was "unhelpful," and that the dossier should have made clear that Iraq was not, in the opinion of the intelligence services, an imminent threat to Great Britain.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 29, 2003 | - Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain testified before the Hutton inquiry and denied the BBC's claim that his aides had "sexed up" his dossier on Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction; Blair said he would have resigned if the story had been true.
| Source:
Guardian, BBC, New York Times
|
| August 26, 2003 | -
British health officials apologized for telling a black woman whose lower leg was scheduled to be amputated that she would have to pay $4,700 if she wanted her prosthesis to match her skin color; a white limb, she was told, would be covered by the National Health Service.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| August 15, 2003 | - and government workers in Bristol, England, were told to stop calling people "dear" and "love."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 22, 2003 | - Officials in England unveiled a new system of "restorative justice," in which criminals may avoid court by apologizing to their victims.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| July 18, 2003 | -
British prime minister Tony Blair addressed the United States Congress and predicted that history will "forgive" him even if weapons of mass destruction are never found in Iraq.
He received 19 standing ovations; after the first one he responded: "This is more than I deserve and more than I'm used to, frankly."
| Source:
Guardian
|
| July 18, 2003 | -
Dr.
David Kelly, a British Ministry of Defense scientist who was accused of being the source of news reports that the British government had doctored its intelligence on Iraq, was found dead two days after he was interrogated by a parliamentary committee.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| July 17, 2003 | -
British
scientists built a better, baitless mousetrap that uses plastic mixed with a high concentration of chocolate essence.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| July 16, 2003 | -
British officials instituted a National Foreplay Day after a study found that many Britons were avoiding it.
| Source:
Ananova
|
| July 16, 2003 | - Newly declassified documents revealed that during the Cold War British
scientists planned to bury ten nuclear land mines in Germany.
The plan, code-named Blue Peacock, was abandoned in 1958, after it was judged to be "politically flawed."
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| July 14, 2003 | -
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that the president's discredited claim was still technically a true statement: "The British government did say that."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 11, 2003 | -
Britain proposed giving transsexuals the right to get married in their adoptive sex.
| Source:
Daily Telegraph
|
| July 11, 2003 | - A giant flyborg, an artificially intelligent robot balloon, escaped from the Magna Science Adventure Centre in Britain.
| Source:
BBC
|
| July 4, 2003 | -
Britain's chief medical officer called for a nationwide ban on smoking in public places.
| Source:
UPI
|
| July 1, 2003 | - The British House of Commons voted to ban fox hunting with dogs.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 9, 2003 | -
Britain's honorary astronomer royal estimated the odds of an apocalypse to be 50 percent, up from 20 percent 100 years ago.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| June 9, 2003 | - The British government admitted that Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's director of communications, wrote a letter to the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service apologizing for a report, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation," which contained material that was plagiarized from an old out-of-date term paper found on the Internet.
Campbell promised to take "greater care" in the future.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 8, 2003 | - A growing number of weapons experts, engineers, chemists, and other scientists said that the "germ trailers" trumpeted by the Americans are not at all what one would expect from a mobile weapons lab and that the units appear to be designed to produce hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, which is what Iraqi scientists have claimed.
It was reported that the British sold such a system to Iraq in 1987.
| Source:
Observer
|
| June 2, 2003 | -
Great Britain sent a spaceship to Mars.
| Source:
Daily Telegraph
|
| May 30, 2003 | - "The time has come when the British government needs to concede that we did not go to war because Saddam was a threat to our national interests," said Robin Cook, the former British foreign secretary who resigned over the Iraq war.
"We went to war for reasons of U.S. foreign policy and Republican domestic politics."
| Source:
Independent.co.uk
|
| May 29, 2003 | - A senior British official claimed that his government had "transformed" an intelligence report on Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction to make it "sexier." "The classic example," he said, "was the statement that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes."
| Source:
BBC
|
| May 29, 2003 | - Prime Minister Tony Blair denied fabricating the report but Labour MPs were threatening to report him to the Speaker of the Commons for misleading parliament.
"No weapons means no threat," said one MP.
"Without WMD, the case for war falls apart." "I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us," said another.
"The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain."
| Source:
Independent.co.uk
|
| May 13, 2003 | - The British government issued a special set of stamps bearing the face of Prince William, who turned 21.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 1, 2003 | - A suicide bomber, who turned out to be a British citizen, responded to the confirmation of Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister by blowing up a nightclub in Tel Aviv, leaving body parts scattered along the shore.
| |
| April 30, 2003 | -
Researchers in England discovered that wood mice construct signposts out of leaves and twigs to keep themselves from getting lost.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| April 8, 2003 | -
Britain's Home Office declared that people who subvert the vital interests of the United Kingdom can be stripped of their citizenship.
| |
| April 1, 2003 | -
President George W. Bush declared that he was satisfied with the war and said that “the Iraqi people have got to know that they will be liberated and Saddam Hussein will be removed, no matter how long it takes.” Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain traveled to Camp David to discuss the war with the president and urged him to make peace with Europe.
| |
| March 25, 2003 | -
Just before his speech began, Bush gave a little shake of his fist and said: “Feel good.” A coalition of nations, including Bulgaria, Mongolia, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands, joined the United States and Britain in what was christened Operation Iraqi Freedom, though most members of the “coalition” were unable to commit actual troops.
| |
| March 4, 2003 | -
The United States, Britain, and Spain asked the United Nations Security Council to affirm in a new resolution that Iraq had missed its last chance to disarm.
| |
| March 4, 2003 | -
“I think it would be great.” A panel of experts assembled by the National Academy of Sciences denounced the president's proposed research plan on the dangers of global warming; the plan, the experts said, lacks “a guiding vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring progress, an assessment of whether existing programs are capable of meeting these goals, explicit prioritization, and a management plan.” Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that by 2050 Britain will reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases by 60 percent; Blair also criticized the United States for refusing to fight global warming.
| |
| January 28, 2003 | -
A Muslim cleric who has advocated the use of nuclear and chemical weapons on nonbelievers and once said that the bodies of dead nonbelievers could be burned for electricity went on trial in Britain for inciting racial hatred.
| |
| December 31, 2002 | -
Iraq shot down an American Predator drone, and allied jets bombed a command-and-control post near Tallil.
“The evil criminals in the evil American administration and its humble servant Britain added a new crime to their black record against civilization and humanity and the houses of God,” said the official Iraqi news agency.
| |
| December 17, 2002 | -
Britain proposed to grant transsexuals the right to marry under their chosen sex.
| |
| December 10, 2002 | -
Britain's
Broadcast Advertising Clearance Center banned an advertisement for a comedy program that depicts George W. Bush putting a videotape into a toaster.
| |
| December 3, 2002 | -
Plastic surgeons in Britain were debating whether face transplants, which will be technically possible within the next few months, are ethically permissible.
| |
| October 15, 2002 | -
New documents were declassified concerning tests of biological and chemical warfare agents that were conducted by the United States government on its own soldiers in Alaska, Maryland, Hawaii, Canada, and Britain during the Cold War.
| |
| October 15, 2002 | -
Ian Duncan Smith, the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, told his fellow Tories that it was time to reinvent their party, “and to those who want to live in the past, I simply say: You stay in the past.
| |
| October 8, 2002 | -
After receiving pressure from America and Britain, Blix agreed to delay inspections until the Security Council adopts a new resolution on the issue.
| |
| October 8, 2002 | -
Britain ordered warplanes into the London skies to escort a flight from Baltimore after an eavesdropping passenger overheard the words “planning for six months” but not the words “family reunion.” A mob of children in Milwaukee beat a man to death.
| |
| July 30, 2002 | -
Some people in Britain were trying to block a planned cleanup of a Manchester canal to keep it from losing its trademark tomato-soup color.
| |
| July 16, 2002 | -
Britain all but legalized the possession and use of small amounts of pot.
| |
| July 9, 2002 | -
A shipload of weapons-grade plutonium left Japan for Britain protected by little more than a few deck-mounted machine guns; environmentalists and some members of Congress were worried that terrorists might hijack the ship, get the plutonium, and make bombs with it.
| |
| July 2, 2002 | -
“At times I think he is talking about Switzerland and not about the Middle East.” Britain's foreign secretary Jack Straw criticized Bush's ultimatum, saying it was up to the Palestinians to choose their own leader.
| |
| July 2, 2002 | -
Britain's Tate Modern revealed that it had paid 22,000 pounds for a limited-edition can of shit created in 1961 by the late Italian artist Piero Manzoni. “What we are doing with this work was looking at a lot of issues that are pertinent to 20th century art, like authorship and the production of art,” said a spokesman. “It was a seminal work.”
| |
| June 11, 2002 | -
Experts said that many more cases will probably be discovered since Israel has for many years imported cattle feed containing rendered animal carcasses from Britain and other European countries.
| |
| June 4, 2002 | -
Punch, the English satirical magazine, published its last issue after 161 years. “The market for sophisticated political satire,” said a representative of the publisher, Mohammed al-Fayed, whose son Dodi died in a car crash with Princess Diana, “has diminished.”
| |
| March 5, 2002 | -
Prince Philip of Great Britain asked some Australian aborigines whether they “still throw spears at each other.” President Bush was still trying to privatize Social Security.
| |
| February 26, 2002 | -
Britons, who waste an estimated 286 million work hours every week, celebrated National Slacker Day.
| |
| February 26, 2002 | -
Britain accidentally invaded Spain.
| |
| December 18, 2001 | - There was a report that British prime minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, recently underwent a “rebirthing ritual” in a Mexican steam bath; the ritual was said to include primal screams and the smearing of mud and fruit all over their bodies.
| |
| December 18, 2001 | -
Greece dropped spy charges against a group of British tourists who enjoy “plane spotting.” Federal officials arrested 35 people for smuggling cocaine using infants rented from poor families in Chicago.
| |
| December 18, 2001 | - The artist Martin Creed won Britain's prestigious Turner Prize for exhibiting a room empty except for a few flickering lights; another artist, annoyed that a gimmick had again taken the prize, threw two eggs at the installation and was arrested.
| |
| December 11, 2001 | - Half the smokers in Britain believe smoking is safe because the government continues to permit the habit.
| |
| December 4, 2001 | - Northern Alliance soldiers, aided by American and British troops, killed hundreds of Taliban prisoners who tried to escape from a makeshift prison in an old fortress. Amnesty International and other human-rights groups called for an investigation, saying it appeared that war crimes had been committed.
| |
| December 4, 2001 | - Greek policemen, believing them to be spies, arrested a group of British plane-spotters who traveled to Greece to practice their hobby, which is unknown in most of the world.
| |
| November 27, 2001 | -
Scientists at Oxford University said up to 1,500 British
sheep could have been infected with the disease.
| |
| November 27, 2001 | - A British vicar banned yoga from his church hall to protect his flock from the temptations of Eastern mysticism.
| |
| November 20, 2001 | - Retreating Al Qaeda
terrorists in Afghanistan left behind nuclear designs written in Arabic, German, Urdu, and English; foul-smelling liquids; and a recipe for building a nuclear bomb that included detailed descriptions of how TNT can cause plutonium to begin its deadly chain reaction.
| |
| November 13, 2001 | - The Taliban proposed that President Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Mullah Mohammad Omar fight a duel.
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| October 30, 2001 | -
British women have the largest breasts in Europe, a study found, though they are not the fattest.
| |
| October 30, 2001 | - Italians who were deprived of their cell phones reported sexual dysfunction, researchers found, and most Britons sleep naked.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | - It was revealed that in 1944 Britain manufactured 5 million anthrax
cattle cakes that were to be airdropped (in “Operation Vegetarian”) over Germany; the expectation was that the disease would kill all the cattle and then kill all the Germans.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | -
British soldiers found a 130-pound homemade bomb near Omagh, where the Real IRA killed 29 people in a 1998 bombing.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | -
Britons were having more sex to keep their minds off the war.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | - A cleaning man at London's Eyestorm Gallery tossed out an installation by “young British artist” Damien Hirst a day after it was assembled because he thought it was just a pile of garbage; the artwork, which was largely composed of cigarette butts, empty beer bottles, candy wrappers, and newspapers thrown about on the floor, was re-created by gallery staff based on photographs of the original.
| |
| October 16, 2001 | - U.S. forces dropped over 100,000 yellow ration packets into Afghanistan, where there are thought to be 7.5 million people facing starvation. Each packet, decorated with an American flag, contains one day's worth of food, a book of matches, and a Moist Towelette: “Here is your Moist Towelette,” the packet says in English. “It will clean and refresh your hands and face without soap and water. Self-dries in seconds, leaving your skin smooth and soft.”
| |
| October 9, 2001 | - America and Britain fired cruise missiles and dropped bombs on targets in Afghanistan.
| |
| October 9, 2001 | - The son of British prime minister Tony Blair was mugged in London.
| |
| October 9, 2001 | -
British people are more depressed than other Europeans, researchers found.
| |
| October 2, 2001 | -
Britain was planning to institute a national ID card, a scheme that has the support of 85 percent of the population.
| |
| October 2, 2001 | - Beef prices in Japan were dropping after a British lab confirmed a case of mad cow disease near Tokyo, by which time the diseased carcass had been lost.
| |
| October 2, 2001 | - The British Potato Council was embarking on an advertising campaign to make potatoes sexy; the ad agency Naked Communication was retained to promote the potato's qualities as an aphrodisiac.
| |
| October 2, 2001 | -
British
scientists revealed that Viagra makes men breathe easier at high altitudes.
| |
| September 25, 2001 | - One Afghan diplomat scoffed at President Bush's threats: “So the only master of the world wants to threaten us. But make no mistake: Afghanistan, as it was in the past, the Great Britain, he came, the Red Army, he came. Afghanistan is a swamp. People enter here laughing, are exiting injured.”
| |
| September 11, 2001 | -
Scientists were attempting to discover, using objective criteria, the funniest joke in Britain.
| |
| September 11, 2001 | -
British
scientists found that a marijuana spray applied under the tongue helped people with chronic pain.
| |
| September 11, 2001 | - One million British
schoolchildren jumped in unison for a minute in a failed attempt to create a minor earthquake.
| |
| September 11, 2001 | - United Airlines was being sued after a flight crew forced a British transvestite to get off a plane and change into proper men's attire.
| |
| September 4, 2001 | - Historians in Britain brewed a 5,000-year-old recipe for beer flavored with animal feces.
| |
| August 28, 2001 | - Residents of Belper, England, banished from their town square a giant Mr.
| |
| August 21, 2001 | - Ireland's deputy arts minister said that the Irish are “among the biggest boozers on the planet.” Citizens of Sierra Leone were asked to stop throwing stones and jeering at former dictator Valentine Strasser, who was recently deported from Britain, as he wanders around the streets of Freetown.
| |
| August 21, 2001 | - A baked potato exploded backstage at the Royal Opera House in London; the audience was evacuated safely.
| |
| August 14, 2001 | - A German businessman was planning to sell toilet paper in Britain printed with images of the Queen and Margaret Thatcher.
| |
| August 14, 2001 | - Syngenta, a Swiss biotech company, denied that it was testing “terminator technology,” which prevents plants from reproducing without the application of special chemical triggers, in British fields.
| |
| August 14, 2001 | -
Britain briefly suspended the government of Northern Ireland after Protestants refused to accept a new disarmament offer from the IRA.
| |
| August 7, 2001 | - Some British and Indian
scientists claimed that they had positively identified alien bacteria entering Earth's upper atmosphere from space, which would tend, they said, to confirm the Panspermia theory of life's origin.
| |
| August 7, 2001 | - Chris Morris, a British comic, tricked several politicians and celebrities into saying absurd things on television about the Internet and pedophilia. “Using an area of the Internet the size of Ireland,” a Labour member of parliament said, “pedophiles can make your keyboard release toxic vapors that can make you more suggestible.”
| |
| July 31, 2001 | - A British
study found that 80 percent of women fake orgasms during intercourse.
| |
| July 31, 2001 | - A 511-million-year-old crab was found in England.
| |
| July 24, 2001 | - Three days earlier, British prime minister Tony Blair declared that people have been “far too apologetic” toward demonstrators who disrupt gatherings of world leaders, noting that “if the public knew their views, they'd disagree with them.” Hundreds of thousands of semi-naked youths were gyrating in the streets of Berlin during its eleventh annual Love Parade.
| |
| July 24, 2001 | - A British judge was trying to decide whether a ban on public cavorting with inflatable sex dolls contravenes European Union human-rights legislation.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | - The White Witches of Britain cast a spell on Warner Brothers to protest a depiction of Harry Potter, the popular fictional character, riding a broomstick with the brush behind him.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | - A 15-year-old boy won the world open pea-shooting championship in Witcham, England, for the third year in a row with a homemade laser-sighted peashooter.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | - A British
family whose home is infested with 300 bats was told by authorities that the bats cannot be moved because they are protected wildlife.
| |
| July 17, 2001 | -
Race riots continued in England.
| |
| July 10, 2001 | -
Britain claimed that the burning of slaughtered animals infected with foot-and-mouth disease, which released dioxins into the atmosphere, posed no health risk.
| |
| July 10, 2001 | -
English students at Cambridge University were asked in a final exam to analyze the following lines from a 1979 Bee Gees song: “It's tragedy . . . Tragedy when you lose control and you got no soul, it's tragedy.” Professor John Kerrigan, chairman of the examination board, defended the inclusion of the Bee Gees: “There are elements to the Bee Gees songs that could have directed you to the great central canonical texts,” he said. “The line in the Bee Gees song where he sings 'the feeling's gone and you can't go on' is a fair summary of the end of King Lear.”
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| July 3, 2001 | - American and British warplanes bombed Iraq again, killing three people.
| |
| June 26, 2001 | - Iain Duncan Smith, who hopes to become the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, has written a novel that includes descriptions of gay sex; according to his agent the book is “quite fruity, although not pornographic.”
| |
| June 26, 2001 | - Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the ten-year-old English boys who kidnapped, tortured, and murdered two-year-old James Bulger eight years ago, were released on parole with new identities to protect them from the public.
| |
| June 26, 2001 | -
British restaurants, hotels, and clubs were banning “hen nights” because gangs of drunken women (a.k.a. “ladettes”) were proving to be even more difficult to handle than the traditional male yob.
| |
| June 26, 2001 | - Tasmania refused to allow a British
scientist to take home samples of prehistoric excrement attributed to the extinct marsupial carnivore known as the Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus).
| |
| June 19, 2001 | - Prime Minister Tony Blair, freshly reelected, gave himself a $65,000 raise.
| |
| June 19, 2001 | -
British supermarkets were working on a technique, developed by a Texan, to carbonate fruit; the technique works on any fruit but bananas, which explode.
| |
| June 12, 2001 | -
Britain's Labour Party defeated the Tories; William Hague, the Conservative leader, resigned.
| |
| June 12, 2001 | - Documents revealed that for thirty years, beginning in the 1950s, the United States and Britain imported the cremated bones of Australian babies to test them for strontium 90, an indication that radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests had penetrated their bones.
| |
| June 5, 2001 | -
Race riots broke out in Oldham, England; firebombs were thrown, cars were burned.
| |
| May 29, 2001 | - There were new cases of foot-and-mouth disease in England.
| |
| May 29, 2001 | - Someone threw a haggis through the window of a Scottish woman living in England; police said they were treating the incident as a “racially-motivated hate crime.”
| |
| May 29, 2001 | -
Scientists found signs of syphilis in the bones of a medieval girl from Essex, England; the find may prove that Christopher Columbus did not carry syphilis to Europe from the New World as was previously thought.
| |
| May 22, 2001 | - One in ten British
children was found to be carrying antibiotic-resistant microbes.
| |
| May 1, 2001 | - The Food and Drug Administration warned people not to eat Autumn Monkshood, a poisonous plant that nurseries in Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia had been selling with a label reading “tasty in soup.” Three Britons were thought to be infected with foot-and-mouth disease, including a “slaughterman” who, according to a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair, caught the disease while he “was moving a decomposing carcass of a cow, when that carcass exploded, and the fluid went into his mouth”; the slaughterman was later found to have a different virus.
| |
| May 1, 2001 | -
Britain's Ministry of Defense admitted that the British army had paid for a number of female soldiers to have breast augmentation surgery: “This is not done purely on cosmetic grounds, but as a last resort,” a spokesman said.
| |
| May 1, 2001 | - A British man admitted to pushing an elderly woman off an express train going 88 mph because she was bothering him with her endless chitchat. She died.
| |
| April 24, 2001 | -
Britain banned human cloning.
| |
| April 24, 2001 | - A new survey discovered that some English drivers believe that a road sign warning of a toad crossing signifies the presence of a French restaurant.
| |
| April 24, 2001 | - The British Flying Saucer Bureau closed its doors.
| |
| April 3, 2001 | -
Britain was burying hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle that have been killed in an attempt to control the spread of foot-and-mouth disease; scientists were trying to figure out whether the disease can be transmitted via the smoke of burning animals.
| |
| March 27, 2001 | - Foot-and-mouth disease spread to the Netherlands and Ireland.
Britain was planning to destroy over 500,000 cows. American researchers suggested using napalm.
| |
| March 20, 2001 | -
England's Princess Ann, the daughter of Queen Elizabeth II, pled guilty to driving 93 mph in a 70 mph zone last summer; the princess just kept driving after she saw the police car flashing its lights at her speeding Bentley, assuming, she said, that it was offering to escort her.
| |
| March 20, 2001 | - Coca-Cola's chief executive officer told a British newspaper that he would not be happy until people can turn on their taps and get Coke instead of water.
| |
| March 20, 2001 | - Epidemiologists think the current hoof-and-mouth epidemic in England may have started with contaminated swill fed to pigs in Heddon-on-the-Wall; leftover airline food from a country affected by the disease might have been in the swill.
| |
| March 6, 2001 | -
British and French governments were slaughtering tens of thousands of sheep and cattle in an increasingly futile attempt to control the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, a virus that is about as severe as the common cold.
| |
| March 6, 2001 | -
British authorities cancelled all horse races because of the disease; Ireland called off St. Patrick's Day celebrations.
| |
| March 6, 2001 | - Sir Richard Doll, the British epidemiologist who discovered the link between smoking and lung cancer, has concluded that it is true: children (and possibly adults) who live near electrical power lines are more likely to get leukemia.
| |
| February 27, 2001 | - American newspapers and other content providers were still ignoring growing evidence, reported in the British press, of George W. Bush's electoral coup, including new evidence that thousands of black Floridians were improperly removed from the list of approved voters.
| |
| February 27, 2001 | -
Britain banned all exports of live animals, milk, and meat, after foot and mouth disease was discovered among some pigs and cattle; Britons were asked to stay away from the countryside; Ireland stationed extra troops along its border to keep out wayward British cows.
| |
| February 13, 2001 | - A British hospital apologized to plastic-surgery patients for selling their surplus skin to the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency for chemical-weapons research.
| |
| January 23, 2001 | -
Great Britain's
House of Commons
voted to outlaw fox hunting; one prominent fox hunter was heard to say: “I will break Blair's
law.
| |
| January 23, 2001 | - I will be Blair's political prisoner.” The British post office changed its name to Consignia.
| |
| January 16, 2001 | -
British prime minister Tony Blair got hit with a tomato by a protestor upset about the continued sanctions on Iraq, which was bombed again by the United States and Britain.
| |
| January 2, 2001 | - A new British
study found that women were more likely to mate with men who show off and take risks.
| |
| 0, 2000 | - Thousands of people signed a petition asking the British government to issue an apology for how it treated gay mathematician Alan Turing.
| Source:
BBC
|
| 0, 2000 | -
British apocalypse scientists found that mixotrophs--organisms that derive energy from dead organic matter--can live for six months in total darkness.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| 0, 2000 | - It was revealed that a British investigation into sex trafficking that lasted six months and involved every police force in the country failed to find anyone who had forced anybody into prostitution.
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| 0, 2000 | -
Britain replaced its Law Lords with a new Supreme Court whose justices wear no wigs.
| Source:
The Wall Street Journal
|
| 0, 2000 | -
British parents were exposing their children to “eye sun danger.”
| Source:
BBC News
|
| 0, 2000 | - The British
funeral-services industry faced a backlog of hundreds of corpses as undertakers, unable to obtain credit, refused to perform burials for the poor until the government guarantees reimbursements.
| Source:
The Daily Mail
|
| 0, 2000 | -
Britain,
France, Germany, and other European nations agreed to provide hundreds of billions of dollars to guarantee loans and to prop up banks, leading to a 936-point rally in the Dow.
| Source:
Europe Pledges Billions for Banks
|
| December 26, 2000 | -
Britain approved rules allowing researchers to clone human embryos; German officials called such practices “cannibalism.” Cheap Chinese
pigskin miniskirts were appearing in malls all over America.
| |
| December 12, 2000 | -
British
scientists succeeded in making marijuana soluble, which could enable a wide array of medical uses for the drug.
| |
| December 5, 2000 | -
Tony Blair's
parliament invoked emergency powers and enacted a law making it legal for sixteen-year-old boys to engage in homosexual acts with middle-aged members of parliament; the House of Lords had thrice rejected the legislation.
| |
| November 28, 2000 | -
Queen Elizabeth II was photographed wringing the neck of a wounded pheasant which a hunting
dog had dropped at her feet; British
animal-rights types were appalled. At church the next day, the Queen wore a red hat accented with pheasant feathers.
| |
| November 21, 2000 | - In an attempt to stop the spread of CJD, German officials asked people who have lived in Britain to refrain from giving blood.
| |
| November 21, 2000 | -
Queen Elizabeth II of England banned the use of cell phones among her retainers.
| |
| November 14, 2000 | - Jodie and Mary, a pair of Siamese twins in Britain, were separated pursuant to a court order which concluded that Mary, being “incapable of independent existence,” was “designated for death.” Jodie was doing fine; doctors said they might put a mirror next to her to lessen the loss of her sister. Mary “sadly died,” the hospital said, “despite all the best efforts of the medical team.” It was unclear what the team hoped to accomplish; she had no heart, no lungs.
| |
| November 7, 2000 | -
Britain and the United States bombed Iraq again.
| |
| November 7, 2000 | - An Italian cargo ship was leaking 6,000 tons of toxic chemicals into the English Channel.
| |
| October 31, 2000 | - “Economy-class syndrome” was blamed for the death of a British woman who had just made a twenty-hour flight to London from Australia; the syndrome, more properly known as deep-vein thrombosis, occurs when a long, cramped period of inactivity leads to a blood clot.
| |
| October 24, 2000 | - The Most Reverend John Ward, Archbishop of Cardiff, was being urged to resign by other British
Catholic officials for having ordained a known pedophile who subsequently abused at least two young boys. The priest, Joseph Jordan, was also accused of attempting to pervert the course of justice by hiding a computer containing child
pornography from investigators.
| |
| October 17, 2000 | - William Hague, the British Tory leader, proposed a “zero tolerance” drug policy, then reversed himself after seven members of his shadow cabinet told reporters that they had smoked pot.
| |
| October 10, 2000 | -
Britain's new Human Rights Act went into effect; conservatives were concerned that the new “bill of rights” would permit gay sex in the schools.
| |
| October 10, 2000 | - It was revealed that Britain was again experimenting with genetically modified crops, though the agriculture ministry had repeatedly denied it was doing so.
| |
| October 10, 2000 | - A British woman was awarded £345,222 for being wrongfully diagnosed with cancer, which resulted in fourteen operations, including a double mastectomy and a full hysterectomy.
| |
| October 3, 2000 | -
British prime minister Tony Blair attended a Labor party conference; “Let's Work Together,” by Canned Heat, was the theme song.
| |
| October 3, 2000 | -
Canadian
police discovered organs in a warehouse that were taken from two dead children by Dick van Velzen, a pathologist who previously removed and kept the organs of 850 children without permission in Britain; last year authorities discovered that Dr. van Velzen's previous employer in Liverpool had a huge stockpile of children's organs, including a collection of 2,080 hearts.
| |
| September 26, 2000 | - A British court ruled that a pair of Siamese twins must be separated even though the operation will be fatal for one of them; the parents, who are Roman Catholic, had refused on religious grounds to give permission for the operation.
| |
| September 26, 2000 | -
Britain's Task Force on Near Earth Objects issued a report calling for the establishment of an early warning system to help protect the earth from a collision with a major asteroid, 900 of which are in orbits that cross the earth's; an encounter with any one of them could destroy civilization.
| |
| September 26, 2000 | -
British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted that the £628 million Millennium Dome “has not been the runaway success that people had hoped for.” A black hole with a mass 2 million times greater than the sun was discovered to be at the center of our galaxy.
| |
| September 19, 2000 | - Protesters prevented the distribution of gasoline in England, causing 90 percent of the country's filling stations to run dry; Prime Minister Tony Blair refused to reduce fuel taxes.
| |
| September 19, 2000 | - A new book by a prominent British psychologist argued that having enemies improves one's quality of life.
| |
| September 12, 2000 | - Baroness Margaret Thatcher accused British Prime Minister Tony Blair of trying to “abolish Britain.” Venus Williams won the U.S. Open tennis championship.
| |
| September 5, 2000 | - The U.S. and Britain bombed Iraq.
| |
| September 5, 2000 | -
Scientists in Oxford, England, will begin testing an experimental AIDS vaccine on humans; another vaccine trial will begin in Thailand.
| |
| September 5, 2000 | - Five British soldiers who were taken hostage in Sierra Leone were freed.
| |
| August 29, 2000 | -
Britain will join an international criminal court that will have jurisdiction over war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity; the United States still refuses to join the court, which fifteen countries have joined to date.
| |
| August 29, 2000 | -
British officials ordered the arrest of Johnny Adair, a Northern Irish Protestant paramilitary killer who was released from Maze prison last September as part of the Good Friday peace accord.
| |
| August 22, 2000 | - A British group was offering free vasectomies for Frenchmen.
| |
| August 22, 2000 | - American and British planes bombed Iraq.
| |
| August 22, 2000 | - After an outbreak of swine fever in Britain, the United States and other countries banned the importation of porcine semen and other pork products; a National Pig Association spokesman said that pig farmers were “at their wits' end.”
| |
| August 15, 2000 | -
British and American warplanes again bombed Iraq, just a few days after President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela visited the country; the airstrikes destroyed a warehouse used to store food acquired in the U.N. oil-for-food program.
| |
| August 15, 2000 | -
Saddam Hussein's decision to send assassins disguised as belly dancers to kill Iraqi exiles in London was denounced by British belly dancers, who said it would undermine their business.
| |
| August 8, 2000 | -
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother of England turned 100.
| |
| August 1, 2000 | - A British Health Department bulletin revealed that fourteen Britons have died of mad cow disease so far this year; scientists have said that 500,000 people could die of the disease by 2030.
| |
| August 1, 2000 | - The House of Representatives voted unanimously to ban the execution of pregnant women in response to remarks by Vice President Al Gore that a “the principle of a woman's right to choose governs in that case.” British Columbia asked the Canadian supreme court to affirm the validity of gay marriage.
| |
