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Campaigning in Renfrewshire, he said the nationalists want an SNP vote in the general election in order to "force" a second poll. Launching the SNP's "women's pledge", Nicola Sturgeon said this election was "not about independence". Meanwhile the Lib Dems set out plans for green laws and the Scottish Conservatives focused on jobs. As the penultimate weekend of campaigning got under way, SNP leader Ms Sturgeon joined female activists and actor and campaigner Elaine C Smith in Glasgow to launch the party's women's pledge, which commits the SNP and its members to delivering policies that promote equality... As part of...

Outgoing First Minister Alex Salmond has been compared to a Japanese soldier who believed World War II was still happening years after peace was declared. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, made the remarks as he called on the SNP leader to accept the result of last month’s independence referendum. […] Mr. Salmond appeared to open the door to an early re-run of the vote last week, saying “circumstances obviously can change” and that a breach of the pre-referendum “vow” to Scotland could pave the way for another ballot. …

Brent crude plunged below $57 per barrel briefly on Tuesday, marking a new five-and-a-half-year low as traders bet that the global oversupply of oil will continue deep into 2015. The benchmark has fallen more than 45pc since June and is on track for its worst year since 2008, while oil traded in the US is now poised to crash through the $50 per barrel level. "Oil bulls are having another hard week as Brent oil dropped to $56.90, a new five-year low, as lingering worries over supply excess overwhelmed fear of Libya supply disruptions," said Peter Rosenstreich, head of market...

English taxpayers face being held to ransom by Scottish and Welsh nationalists in a 'rainbow' coalition to prop up Labour - despite having voted overwhelmingly for the Conservatives. Even though Labour and the Liberal Democrats have now entered talks over a possible deal, they will only get a Commons majority if they ally themselves with minority parties from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But these parties, such as the SNP and Plaid Cymru, have said they will demand their countries be protected from cuts as a price for keeping Labour in No 10. Although last week's election was inconclusive across...

Sir Sean Connery, the SNP’s most famous supporter, is not planning to make a last-minute appearance for the Yes campaign because of his tax exile status, according to his brother. There has been speculation that the 84-year-old actor, who lives in the Bahamas, could make a morale-boosting intervention for the Yes camp at the 11th hour. But his younger brother Neil, 76, speaking in Edinburgh, said: “There's only a certain amount of days Sean can be in the country for tax reasons, so I know that he intends to use them wisely."

The dark side of the campaign for Scottish independence can be laid bare today. In a string of sinister incidents, separatists have used bullying and intimidation to cow their rivals. Pro-union voters have endured stone-throwing, been called traitors and faced threats that their houses will be torched. Many are now said to be too scared to show their support for fear of reprisals that might follow a defeat for the nationalists in tomorrow’s vote. …

EDINBURGH—If Scottish nationalists win independence from Britain in this week’s referendum, they will owe at least some thanks to an unlikely ally: the late, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The current Scottish referendum on independence, coming down to a too-close-to-call finish on Thursday, has reignited the fire under Scotland’s long-standing resistance to Conservatism in Britain, especially the Thatcher brand of the 1970s and 1980s. “I came over to independence as a result of Thatcher,” says Douglas Campbell, a 65-year-old Yes campaigner who showed up at a canvassing push near Scotland’s Parliament in Edinburgh on the last Sunday of the...

Muslims don’t like vaccines. It’s safe to mock a Jenny McCarthy over vaccines, but no one mentions the vehement opposition of Islamists to vaccinations. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have issued fatwas against vaccines and murdered workers. Nigeria and Pakistan have also been scenes of violent Muslim opposition to vaccination. Muslims aren’t even 1 percent of the population of Scotland. But they’ve been doing their Talibanest best there, with the aid and support of the so-called Scottish National Party that often seems more like the Pakistani Immigrants Party and now Scotland’s largest vaccination program has been shut down because of them.

SNP (Scottish National Party)-led West Dunbartonshire Council has ordered that its libraries ban any new volumes by Israeli authors, printed or published in the Jewish state. It follows an earlier decision by the local authority to boycott Israeli goods and produce as part of a pro-Palestinian display. Now, it has emerged the areas’ libraries have been told not to stock any new books from Israel. But a similar boycott move by Dundee City Council has had to be abandoned because legal experts advised such a move is illegal under EU law.

The custom is for every American president to put together a working paper that re-examines the government's stance on nuclear weapons. The document is in effect a summary of the main principles of the incoming administration's nuclear policy and a statement of the new president's intentions on the future of America's nuclear stockpile. Two presidents have produced such documents since the end of the Cold War: Bill Clinton in 1994 and George W. Bush in 2002. Now it's Barack Obama's turn to publish a statement that will set out his nuclear policy. Expectations are especially high this time around. Since...

A radical Muslim cleric alleged to have inspired the Fort Hood gunman has been praised in the past as “a preacher of peace” by a prominent SNP candidate with close links to Alex Salmond. The FBI is investigating communications between Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people at the US Army base in Texas, and Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born Muslim cleric now based in Yemen. Mr Awlaki has a large following in Britain and counts prominent mainstream Muslims among his supporters. In 2006 Osama Saeed, who has been selected as the SNP candidate for Glasgow Central for the next...

When DNA from hundreds of people is pooled together, it has been impossible to identify any individuals. In what could be a boon for crime-fighters, however, a statistical technique now makes the task possible--allowing forensic detectives to determine whether a suspect handled a gun, for example. But the technique also creates a privacy concern about health data; the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, is now backpedaling on a policy mandating genetic sharing developed just 8 months ago for fear that the health information of people who participated in the studies could be identified. The authors of the...

In his 2000 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton chose to emphasize something he had recently heard from a genome researcher: that humans are all, irrespective of race, 99.9% the same genetically. “Modern science,” he told his country's legislators, “has confirmed what ancient faiths have always taught: the most important fact of life is our common humanity.” Seven years on, and four years after the final publication of the sequences from the Human Genome Project, new technologies and larger data sets are allowing genome biologists to answer a conundrum embodied in that unity-inspiring percentage: if our DNA is...

LONDON -- Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party suffered a string of embarrassing election losses -- including in Scotland, where the party was defeated for the first time in a half-century -- in what appeared Friday to be a final rebuke to the outgoing leader. Overall, Labour lost fewer seats than some expected, but the contest in Scotland -- where Labour had won every election for 50 years -- went to the Scottish National Party, which has pledged a referendum on independence by 2010 if it wins power. "Scotland has changed for good and for ever. Never again will they...

Will auld acquaintance be forgot as Scots go it alone? 30 years ago Gordon Brown was the toast of student radicals in Edinburgh. Now he is seen as part of the Establishment — and out of touch with the Scotland’s new direction. Martin Fletcher timesonline.co.uk March 31, 2007 In 1974 Gordon Brown was Rector of Edinburgh University, elected after a campaign that featured the “Brown Sugars” — girls sporting miniskirts and T-shirts emblazoned “Gordon for Me”. I was a first-year student, and remember him as a striking figure with long black hair and trenchcoat, surrounded by acolytes. He was...

WE are frequently told by the Scottish Nationalists that it is time Scotland took its place in the world as a fully independent nation. The SNP is fond of citing the so-called "velvet divorce" that led to the separation of the Czech Republic from Slovakia as an example of civilised secession. Yet they are not so keen to draw our attention to events that do not fit their world view. Amid the stories of war, the threat of Sars and even the Scottish election you would be forgiven for missing an event of great relevance to Scots politics. Last week,...