UK Headlines

Trickster Travels: The search for Leo Africanus, By Natalie Zemon Davis

The crunch brunch: Around Asia on a budget

BRITAIN’s top Asian cop is slapped down by the Met over race discrimination claims

It is generally seen as one of the more gentlemanly sports, particularly at grassroots level. But now rugby union's reputation is in danger of being dragged through the mud.

Magistrates and youth court hearings are being cancelled because the massive rise in the use of on-the-spot fines means there are too few criminals facing formal proceedings.

Democrat challenger Barack Obama brought his campaign roaring to life early today with a raft of specific promises to cut taxes and end America's dependence on foreign oil.

The wealth gap between the South East and the rest of Britain is greater than at any other time since the Second World War, according to researchers.

This is the extraordinary moment an elderly driver hurtled through a supermarket shop window - after he lost control reversing out of a parking space.

Relatives of the sick and elderly should be paid a salary of up to £110 a week for looking after them, MPs are demanding.

A British woman has been raped by a gang of asylum seekers in Calais, it has been alleged. The journalism student wanted to highlight the plight of migrants who sleep rough in a squalid camp at the French port before trying to sneak into Britain.

On the surface Christopher Foster had the ideal lifestyle but by the time a fire ripped through the house his success was nothing but a facade.

Barack Obama, the first African-American presidential nominee of a major US party, was last night set to stand before 80,000 supporters inside Denver's Invesco Field bearing a pledge to bring an end to Republican ownership of the White House with three short words of promise: "Eight is enough".

The 2,000-year-old fishing boat of Galilee in which, the story goes, Jesus may have sailed, is one of the most precious ancient treasures in Israel.

To those who can afford his designer creations, Valentino is a fashion deity: the last genuine haute couturier, whose classical garments have adorned and been adored by socialites and celebrities of the calibre of Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Gwyneth Paltrow and Uma Thurman.

Sir Ian Blair was facing a battle to survive as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police last night after Britain's most senior Asian officer publicly accused him of racial discrimination.

The National Party, which imposed the yoke of apartheid to divide and rule South Africa for much of the previous century, is being resurrected to contest next year's national elections where it will take on its old nemesis, the African National Congress.

The first celebrated Francis Bacon was born in the Strand, during the reign of Elizabeth I. He was raised as an English gentleman, and wrote elegant essays upon morality, taste, public virtue and private manners. The second, a descendant of the first, was born in a nursing home in Dublin to English parents, and became a self-taught painter whose canvases, when they were first widely shown in the 1940s, provoked exclamations of disgust, horror and near-incredulity. Would the first have acknowledged the second socially? It seems rather unlikely.

Cultural Life: Linda Grant, Author

After four years of criticising the choices of the Perrier and now if.comedy award panel as an outsider, I was happy to be asked to be a judge for the 2007 and 2008 awards and crown the Edinburgh Fringe's best comedian. As judges, we field the same questions over and over, the answers to which are: we see an average of four to five shows a day; no, we never get jaded as long as it's good; and yes, we have vehement disagreements.

Among the guests at the Flat Lake Festival in Co Monaghan last weekend was Keith Allen. His brother Kevin, a film director, is a co-organiser of the event. Between stints manning the bar Keith discussed his latest project, a documentary examining the inquest into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Al Fayed.