The Foreign Office has apologised over an internal Foreign Office memo about September’s papal visit to Britain, written by 23-year-old Oxford graduate Steven Mulvain, who emailed the document to Downing Street and three Whitehall departments together with a covering letter in which he warned recipients that the contents “should not be shared externally” because they included [...]
A great number of world leaders, including President Barack Obama, were slated to attend the funeral of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, yesterday in Krakow. They were thwarted by volcanic ash from an eruption in Iceland, which has grounded many flights in Europe, so that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, along with other [...]
Eleven people have died and nearly 30 were injured when a train was derailed after it ploughed into a mudslide. The train was travelling near Merano in the Sud Tyrol-Alto Adige region. Initial reports said the mudslide was caused after a pipe broke in an underground irrigation system in an apple orchard, sending water cascading [...]
The Turin Shroud, said to be the burial cloth of Christ,was transferred to the sanctuary of Montevergine in Avellino, in the southern Campania region of Italy, in 1939 and was only transferred to Turin in 1946: officially this was to protect it from possible bombing, but ”the reason behind the move was because Hitler was “obsessed” [...]
The Vatican has praised a pledge by two newly elected Italian regional governor to halt the distribution of the abortion drug RU-486. The decision by the two regional governors from Italy’s resurgent right-wing Northern League to ban the abortion pill, just days after it was finally made available to Italian women, has opened again in Italy the debate over RU-486, which [...]
Senior lawyers in the Obama administration are deeply divided over some of the counterterrorism powers they inherited from President George W. Bush, according to interviews and a review of legal briefs. The discussions have centered on how to define the types of terrorism suspects who may be detained without trials as wartime prisoners. The outcome of [...]
