Scotland is to be handed sweeping new powers from the Government in its biggest power grab since devolution ten years ago, including powers to cut income tax, the Daily Mail reports.
Nationalist ministers will be able to set drink-drive and speed limits, air gun controls as well as controversially having an unprecedented control of taxation – including stamp duty.
Holyrood will seize a 10% share of all income tax raised in Scotland – being allowed to raise …

Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu today announced a ten-month freeze on building Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria, after the security cabinet approved the plan, and said the move was a “far-reaching and painful step”, the Jerusalem Post reports.
“We authorize it from a deep desire to move forward toward peace,” he said, adding that Israel hoped it would lead to “meaningful negotiations” toward a “historic peace agreement” with the Arabs.
Concerning Israel’s capital Jerusalem, Netanyahu said …

New Jersey voters are split on whether to legalise gay marriage, but more people now oppose it than support it, Reuters reports.
The Quinnipiac University survey found that 49 per cent of voters oppose a law allowing same-sex couples to marry, while 46 per cent support such legislation, reversing an April poll that found 49% supported it and 43% opposed it.
Democratic New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine has pledged to sign a bill into law if it …

Everybody who reads my blog knows how much I hate strikes. Moreover, I hate that they have a legal right to strike. But there is at least one country in the world where, for all its other faults, there is one positive quality: at least the public sector workers aren’t allowed to strike.
Well, according to the BBC, despite that the public sector workers in Turkey have no legal right to strike, they’ve done so anyway. …

British immigration officials accompanied a child killer who served time in the UK and was paid to leave the country, to her native Malaysia, but left without informing the local authorities, who now have no idea where the convicted child killer could be.
29-year-old Agnes Wong was returned to Malaysia secretly, according to Malaysian newspaper Malay Mail, and senior immigration officials in Malaysia are not convinced that their UK counterparts accompanied Wong at all.
Wong received a …

A Swiss court accepted rapist film-maker Roman Polanski’s plea to be freed on bail from a Swiss jail where he is being held for a US child sex case, the BBC reports.
Polanski has been wanted in the US since fleeing the country in 1978 after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex a year earlier with a 13-year-old girl.
He was held in Zurich after travelling from France to collect an award at the city’s film festival …

A Navy SEAL team that captured one of the most-wanted terrorists, Ahmed Hisham Abed, the man responsible for hanging the burned and mutilated bodies of four Blackwater security agents from a bridge on the Euphrates river in Fallujah in 2004, are now facing charges in a court martial for their alleged conduct during the apprehension of the terrorist, Gouverneur Times reports.
SO-2 Petty Officer Second Class Matthew McCabe is being charged with assault, reportedly for punching …

Scientists claim that a cup of mint tea could be as effective as an aspirin for pain relief, The Times reports.
Research showed that the herb Hyptis crenata, known as Brazilian mint, reduced pain as much as a soluble form of the conventional painkiller. The study was tested on mice, which allowed researchers to rule out the placebo effect as an explanation for its success.
In Brazil, the plant has traditionally been used to treat mild pain, …

Last week an Indian governmental imbecile suggested that people should stop eating beef to “save the planet” from the mystical “global warming”, which, as we all know already, is not human-induced. Now there’s a British governmental imbecile who tells people not to eat any meat.
Health Secretary Andy Burnham said that eating a more vegetarian diet would cut the impact of livestock on the climate, the Daily Mail reports. According to the newspaper, he is supporting …

A music industry executive has been arrested for refusing to send a tweet to out-of-control fans of the teenage pop sensation Justin Bieber, the Daily Telegraph reports.
James A Roppo of Island Def Jam Records was detained on assault charges after resisting police demands to use the micro-blogging site Twitter to restrain a crowd of teenage girls hoping for Bieber’s autograph.
Officers wanted Roppo to cancel the 15-year-old Canadian star’s album signing at a shopping centre in …

Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggested today that he backs sweeping away of the 300-year-old laws that prevent Roman Catholics ascending to the Throne, The Times reports.
Brown is also keen to change the ancient rule of primogeniture, which stipulates that men must always take precedence over a woman in line to the throne.
He is expected to raise the issue with heads of Governments in the “margins” of the Commonwealth summit that begins in Trinidad on Friday.
No …

The new Digital Economy Bill that has been receiving quite a lot of media coverage in recent days is quite an interesting document. Not only it imposes huge fines on people caught watching films downloaded from the internet, but apparently Business Secretary Lord Mandelson wants to amend the law so that he (and his successor) would have the powers to as many penalties and enforcements as he likes to – without any debate in the …

Wikipedia are losing tens of thousands of volunteer editors a month, a research found that in the first three months of this year the English-language version of the site suffered a net loss of 49,000 contributors, compared with a loss of about 4,900 during the same period last year, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Such contributing editors are vital to the integrity of Wikipedia, which rely on volunteers to create pages and check facts.
Wikipedia aren’t yet in …

An apprentice spy for Israel’s Mossad intelligence service was arrested by police during an abortive training exercise in Tel Aviv, AFP reports.
The novice spy was spotted on Monday planting a dummy bomb under a vehicle in the city by a woman passer-by who swiftly alerted a passing policeman.
It was only after questioning at the the local police station that the rumbled trainee assassin managed to convince his captors that he was indeed a member of …

Local councils are using drivers as “cash cows” by raking in £328million a year from parking fines, the Daily Mail reports.
The Taxpayers’ Alliance study shows that councils are handing out up to £85 in fines per person – 55 authorities are earning more than £1million a year from charges. In many cases there is no guarantee that the money extracted will be spent on local transport improvements, they say.
However, the report also shows that the …

Supermarket giant Tesco have joined a growing number of UK firms offering Apple’s popular iPhone, the BBC reports.
A spokesperson for the firm said that they hoped to offer the phone “in time for Christmas”. Although Tesco have not revealed tariffs, the spokesperson said that prices were “competitive”.
In September, it was revealed that O2 had lost their exclusive deal to sell the phone, which had been in place since the launch of the phone in 2007. …