19 May 2013
Last updated at 06:03 ET
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Jeremy Hunt told the BBC’s Jeremy Vine the Tories were united over Europe
The Conservative Party is “united” and David Cameron is showing leadership on Britain’s relationship with Europe, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said.
Tory grandee Lord Howe said the PM was “running scared” of Tory Eurosceptics and losing c [...]
Tories ‘united’ on Europe, says Hunt
19 May 2013
Last updated at 06:03 ET
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Jeremy Hunt told the BBC’s Jeremy Vine the Tories were united over Europe
The Conservative Party is “united” and David Cameron is showing leadership on Britain’s relationship with Europe, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said.
Tory grandee Lord Howe said the PM was “running scared” of Tory Eurosceptics and losing c [...]
Ax hovers over food stamp program as costs grow
Getty Images file
A sign in a market window advertises the acceptance of food stamps in New York City.
By Andrew Rafferty, Staff Writer, NBC News
A heated battle is brewing on Capitol Hill over cuts to the food stamp program, with lawmakers quoting Bible verses at each other and benefits for millions of people hanging in the balance.
Nearly 47 million people – one in seven Americans – rely on food stamps for some of all of their daily sustenance, according to the Department of Agriculture, a number that has grown nearly 70 percen [...]
Iran executes two men for spying
19 May 2013
Last updated at 06:06 ET
Iran has hanged two men convicted of spying for Israel and the US, the authorities there have said.
Mohammad Heydari was found guilty of passing intelligence on “security issues and national secrets” to Israeli Mossad agents in exchange for cash.
Kourosh Ahmadi was convicted of providing intelligence to the CIA, Tehran’s prosecutor’s office said.
Iran has repeatedly accused Israel and the US of carrying out covert intelligence operations.
It comes amid continu [...]
Syria army ‘storms’ rebel-held town
19 May 2013
Last updated at 05:57 ET
Syrian government forces have surrounded the rebel stronghold of Qusair and are storming it from several directions, says Syrian state TV.
Fighting has gone on around the town, near the Lebanese border, for weeks.
Syrian opposition activists said government air strikes and heavy shelling had killed at least 16 people in the town so far.
Opposition groups say militants from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement are fighting alongside government forces.
The fighting came as Syrian President [...]
Toyota Auris Hybrid: car review
Price from £21,745MPG up to 74.3Top speed up to 112mph
It’s almost a year since the mother of all traffic jams entered the record books – Beijing’s 60-mile, 12-day monster. It spawned its own micro economy with food sellers and laundry workers plying the lines of trapped drivers, while the rich abandoned their cars and paid others to sit in their static vehicles.
The jam put into context the paltry three-hour tailback I was stuck in over the bank holiday. We lay on the grass embankment and chatted to our new neighbours about t [...]
Is Kagame Africa’s Lincoln or a tyrant exploiting Rwanda’s tragic history?
Paul Kagame is angrier than I’ve ever seen him. Rwanda‘s president is famously direct with his critics. His contempt for governments he’s crossed swords with, led by the French, is only marginally less vitriolic than his view of human-rights groups daring to lecture him, the rebel leader whose army put a stop to the 1994 genocide of 800,0000 Tutsis. But now even friends are regarded with suspicion to the point of hostility. Take London and Washington accusing Rwanda of perpetuating the interminable and bloody conflict ac [...]
The Somali pirates ‘jailed in paradise’
18 May 2013
Last updated at 19:46 ET
By Anthony Denselow
Seychelles
There are more than 1,000 convicted Somali pirates in prisons around the world. Some of them end up in a UN-funded jail on the tiny island nation of Seychelles.
The Indian shopkeepers along the beach have never heard of the prison at Montagne Posee, but a villager tells me to drive above a deep ravine full of banana trees.
As the sea becomes a distant horizon and the road winds steeply, I stop to ask f [...]
N Korea urged to end missile tests
19 May 2013
Last updated at 04:55 ET
Ban Ki-moon said the UN was willing help North Korea get back to the negotiation table
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called on North Korea to refrain from carrying out any further missile tests.
His comments came a day after Pyongyang test-fired three short-range missiles from its east coast.
Speaking in Russia, Mr Ban called on North Korea to lower the tensions in the region and “resume dialogue” over its nuclear programme.
Tensions were high across the region earli [...]
‘Sole winner’ nets record US jackpot
19 May 2013
Last updated at 03:59 ET
The record amount drew large numbers of people buying lottery tickets ahead of the draw
The largest Powerball lottery jackpot in US history, more than $590m (£388m), has been won by a ticket-holder in Florida, local lottery officials say.
They said the winning ticket was sold in a supermarket in the Florida city of Zephyrhills, which has a population of at least 10,000.
It was not clear if anyone had yet come forward to claim the record win.
Forty-two US states, the District of Columbi [...]
Moshi Monsters founder: the shift to mobile caught us by surprise
London-based Mind Candy was stalling five years ago, but took a punt on an idea for a social networking game site for children.
By 2013, the children’s game network had become ubiquitous at every supermarket checkout and at every toy store – a runaway brand extension success.
Founder Michael Acton-Smith insists that revenues are holding up, but admits the company has struggled with the speed at which children are switching to tablets and mobiles, and has yet to release its tablet app.
On the eve of Moshi’s fifth [...]
Will computing speed make a quantum leap?
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost,” wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, “not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.” Which is another way of saying that physics is weird. And particle physics – or quantum mechanics, to give it its posh title – is weird to the power of n, where n is a very large integer.
Consider some of the things that particle physicists believe. They accept without batting an eyelid, for example, t [...]
Paul Kagame: I asked America to kill Congo rebel leader with drone
Rwanda‘s president, Paul Kagame, has rejected accusations from Washington that he was supporting a rebel leader and accused war criminal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by challenging a senior US official to send a drone to kill the wanted man.
In an interview with the Observer Magazine, Kagame said that on a visit to Washington in March he came under pressure from the US assistant secretary of state for Africa, Johnnie Carson, to arrest Bosco Ntaganda, leader of the M23 rebels, who was wanted by the international criminal c [...]