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UK Citizens Abandoning the UK in Greater Numbers July 25, 2007 - Press Dispensary - Increasing numbers of people are taking the decision to move overseas as a result of the UK’s current immigration policy, according to www.globalvisas.com, a specialist immigration consultancy that provides immigration advice and visa services. As numbers of immigrants to the UK from the new European Union Accession states continue to grow, more and more people in the UK are choosing to take their experience and skills overseas. The consultancy caters for immigrants to the UK as well as British people who wish to emigrate to...

LONDON - Gordon Brown doesn't do charisma. In contrast to Tony Blair, the new British leader has offered no emotive sound bites, no promises of tough new laws and no talk of a "war on terror" since the failed attacks in London and Glasgow. The stern Scot's few public statements have been somber, measured and brief. Many Britons welcome the change, saying the lower-key approach may better reassure a rattled nation and prevent racial tensions from exploding. "We need to be calm about it," said Duncan Walls, 64, a retired lawyer walking through a London on "critical" terror alert after...

SAS on alert to rescue Baghdad Britons By Harry de Quetteville Damien McElroy and Nick Britten Last Updated: 2:21am BST 30/05/2007 The SAS was on standby to mount a rescue mission in Baghdad last night after five Britons were kidnapped in Baghdad in a raid by suspected Shia militants. Iraqi police security check motorists close to the finance ministry's information section in Baghdad Dozens of gunmen and vehicles apparently belonging to a paramilitary unit of the Iraqi interior ministry took part in an operation to snatch hostages from a government building in the heart of the Iraqi capital. The exact...

LONDON (AFP) - Politicians are the least trusted people in Britain, with more faith placed in car salesmen, a survey released on Tuesday revealed. The poll of 1,900 readers of Reader's Digest magazine showed that firefighters inspired trust in 97 percent of respondents, the highest rate of any profession, followed by pharmacists, pilots, nurses and doctors. Faith in politicians, however, dropped from an already-low 15 percent in 2002 to seven percent in the latest poll. Eight percent of respondents said they trusted car salesmen. It marks the first time in the survey's history that politicians have been the least-trusted profession....

Britons could lose the privilege of visiting the U.S. without a visa because of fears over the terrorist threat from within the British Pakistani community. U.S. security officials are deeply concerned at the ease with which young Britons who have trained in Pakistani terror camps can enter America under the visa-waiver programme. Their concerns were heightened this week when five men, most of whom were Britons of Pakistani descent, were jailed for life for terrorism offences. Omar Khyam, jailed for his part in the fertiliser bomb plot, could easily have entered America after training in Pakistan

US pushes for visa control on Pakistani Britons By Alex Spillius in Washington and Philip Johnston Last Updated: 2:05am BST 03/05/2007 Travel restrictions could be imposed by America on 800,000 British citizens of Pakistani origin because of concerns about terrorism, it emerged yesterday. The move has been prompted by fears that British Muslim men were behind several major bomb plots. On Monday, five men - four with Pakistani backgrounds - were convicted of plotting to attack a shopping centre, a nightclub and other targets with home-made fertiliser bombs. Last summer, MI5 foiled an alleged plot for suicide attacks on transatlantic...

ROYAL MARINE BASE CHIVENOR, England (AP) -- British sailors and marines freed by Iran said Friday they were blindfolded, isolated in cold stone cells and tricked into fearing execution while being coerced into falsely saying they had entered Iranian waters. They said there was no doubt the 15 crew members were in Iraq's territorial waters when they were seized by heavily armed boats of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. They also said their jailers had singled out the only woman among the captives for use in propaganda. Iran, which has been celebrating the incident as a victory, quickly rejected the charges, dismissing...

A website run by associates of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, reported last night that the fifteen British sailors would be put before a court and indicted. Referring to them as "insurgents", the site concluded: "If it is proven that they deliberately entered Iranian territory, they will be charged with espionage. If that is proven, they can expect a very serious penalty since according to Iranian law, espionage is one of the most serious offences." The penalty for espionage in Iran is death...

Many Brits make it in the US - not all keep their accents By Megan Lane BBC News Magazine A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a "brilliance that isn't there", says Stephen Fry. So is a British accent - of any variety - the route to success in the United States? "Gee, I just love your accent." Any Brit crossing the Atlantic will have heard that line many times. Like the rest of us, Americans are rarely immune to the charms of an accent different from their own. Go on, say "shagadelic"... There's the...

<p>An SAS team has been sent to Africa to rescue five Britons kidnapped in Ethiopia should diplomatic efforts fail to secure their release, according to reports.</p> <p>Sixty soldiers have already arrived in neighbouring Dijibouti, the Daily Mirror newspaper reported this morning. The Ministry of Defence has refused to comment.</p>

Britons detained after return from Somalia Staff and agencies Tuesday February 13, 2007 Guardian Unlimited (UK) Four Britons held in Kenya on suspicion of fighting alongside Islamist militias in Somalia have been detained by police under anti-terror laws following their return to the UK today. The men, all in their 20s and from the London area, arrived at RAF Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire, from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, at 6.50am, a Metropolitan police spokeswoman said. They were taken to a police station in west London, where they were being detained, the spokeswoman said. She added that the men had not...

Britons seized while trying to flee Somalia By Bonnie Malkin and agencies Last Updated: 2:30pm GMT 02/02/2007 Four Britons are being held by the authorities in Kenya after being arrested apparently fleeing from war-torn Somalia, the Foreign Office has said. Police officials in Kenya said they were among several foreigners detained on the country's border with the east African state. Somalia is in the grip of a violent power struggle between Islamic extremists and government forces, who are backed by Ethiopian troops. Last month, there were reports that Britons had been fighting alongside the Islamic forces with some killed, injured...

Britons freed from chains in mullah's 'drug cure' prison By Isambard Wilkinson in Haripur (Filed: 06/10/2006) A Pakistani cleric has been arrested for running a private jail to which he lured dozens of drug addicts from Britain by offering a spiritual cure in return for money. Treatment: Maulana Ilyas Qadri In a raid this week, police found 113 people, aged between 12 and 50, bound in chains and shackled together at a madrassa, or religious school, in a remote village in northern Pakistan. At least seven were British nationals of Pakistani origin. Many prisoners, whose relatives consigned them to the...

LONDON (AP) - Relatives of the 67 Britons killed in the Sept. 11 attacks five years ago tearfully remembered their dead Monday at a memorial garden near the U.S. Embassy. "It doesn't get any easier, but our minds are much calmer, and we can think through all the events without being flooded by tears and sadness." said Adrian Bennett, 65, whose 29-year-old son Oliver was among the victims. Bharat Parmar, 44, who cousin Hashmukh Parmar died at the World Trade Center, said the terrorist strike that killed 52 bus and subway passengers in London last year had increased his outrage....

FAR-RIGHT extremists have adopted the tactics of Islamic jihadis by posting videos on the internet in which they threaten to behead British Muslims. The films show balaclava-clad white British men brandishing guns, knives and clubs, calling on all Muslims to leave Britain or be killed. One appears to be a soldier who has served in the Gulf. In one film, a man tells Muslims to "go home" or risk being burned alive. He threatens, "I'll cut your head off", and claims to have "comrades" across Britain who have "had enough". The videos were made after the arrests three weeks ago...

Ten Britons have been injured after three explosions hit a holiday resort in Turkey, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has said. The blasts happened at the coastal resort of Marmaris. All ten are in hospital with four seriously injured, the FCO said. The explosions are said to have occurred in the past few hours. The Foreign Office had no further details on the cause of explosions or the exact location. A spokeswoman added consular staff were on the ground in the area. She said it was likely that the 10 injured were holidaymakers but that British nationals could...

British passengers on a flight from Malaga to Manchester did a little impromptu terrorist profiling recently. Some already on the aircraft got off, while those waiting to get on refused to do so, until the flight crew removed from the plane two apparently South Asian young men who seemed to be talking Arabic. The press has widely condemned the action of the skittish passengers. After all, the two young men had gone through searches like everybody else. Besides, there are many Muslims and very few suicide bombers. The passengers would no doubt have argued—rightly—that security services have not always been...

Ditch US in terror war, say 80pc of Britons By Toby Helm, Chief Political Correspondent and Philip Johnston (Filed: 17/08/2006) A majority of British people wants the Government to adopt an even more "aggressive" foreign policy to combat international terrorism, according to an opinion poll conducted after the arrests of 24 terrorism suspects last week. However - by a margin of more than five to one - the public wants Tony Blair to split from President George W Bush and either go it alone in the "war on terror", or work more closely with Europe. Divided state: The public wants...

Britons go bust at rate of one per minute By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor (Filed: 05/08/2006) One person is falling victim to insolvency every minute of the working day and home repossession applications show the biggest rise since the early 1990s housing crash. Many are finding it impossible to pay record gas and electricity bills The Government figures issued yesterday, 24 hours after the Bank of England raised interest rates for the first time in two years, show that more and more families are being caught up in the ballooning debt crisis. Experts said that many families were finding it...

More Britons seek new life abroad More Britons than ever before want to turn their dreams of a new life abroad into reality, according to a poll. The number of people hoping to emigrate in the near future has doubled in three years. The survey for the BBC News website found 13% of people wanted to emigrate soon, compared to 7% of those questioned for a similar poll in 2003 by ICM. The figure is even higher among young people, with a quarter of 18-to-25-year-olds saying they would move to another country if they could. More than a third of...