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Terror-related arrests in England, Wales and Scotland reached record levels last year, when 338 people were held, Scotland Yard has said. More than half of those arrests were related to Syria, Met Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley added. Police said more than 700 potential terror suspects are now thought to have travelled to Syria. About half of those people - said to be of "significant concern" - are believed to have returned to the UK.

The king of Bahrain has apparently snubbed President Barack Obama to attend a horse show with Queen Elizabeth. According to Reuters, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa has elected to attend the Royal Windsor Horse Show, which begins Wednesday, at Windsor Castle outside London.

A proposed new law in Denmark could be the first step towards an economic revolution that sees physical currencies and normal bank accounts abolished and gives governments futuristic new tools to fight the cycle of “boom and bust”.... But if notes and coins were abolished and the only way to hold money was through a government-controlled bank, there would be no escape.

The media elite have a preeminent place in our politics, allegedly with the knowledge to declare what is politically feasible and what is not, including which candidates have a chance at winning and which do not. Before we head into a presidential primary season, it's time to insist that these "experts" don't know any better than the rest of us. And sometimes their biases so heavily shade their predictions as to keep themselves in the dark about reality. Take the elections in Israel in March. The manufactured conventional wisdom and polling predicted a tight race and rough sledding for conservative...

Abandoned pet found on road with broken bones and deep bite marks Thrown from car after being used as bait for blood-thirsty killer dogs Somehow avoided traffic, but still broke leg and punctured lung Rescued by two animal lovers who took £3,000 loan to pay for his surgery Twisted dog-fighters got rid of a whippet used for baiting killer devil dogs by throwing it from a car at 50mph on a packed motorway. The cruel owners tossed the helpless dog out the window and on to the road surface of the M56 in Cheshire after it had already been badly...

David Cameron is to set out a string of new powers to tackle radicalisation, saying the UK has been a "passively tolerant society" for too long. The PM will tell the National Security Council a counter-extremism bill will be in the Queen's Speech on 27 May. The bill will include new immigration rules, powers to close down premises used by extremists and "extremism disruption orders". Mr Cameron will say a "poisonous" extremist ideology must be confronted.

David Cameron is to set out a string of new powers to tackle radicalisation, saying the UK has been a "passively tolerant society" for too long. The PM will tell the National Security Council a counter-extremism bill will be in the Queen's Speech on 27 May. The bill will include new immigration rules, powers to close down premises used by extremists and "extremism disruption orders". Mr Cameron will say a "poisonous" extremist ideology must be confronted. The proposals were first set out by Home Secretary Theresa May before the general election. But the Conservatives were unable to secure the backing...

London (AFP) - British Prime Minister David Cameron was to announce new laws to combat "poisonous Islamist ideology" Wednesday in his first major policy announcement since winning last week's general election. His centre-right Conservative government is to include a new law to "defeat extremism" in its legislative programme which will be announced to parliament by Queen Elizabeth II on May 27. Britain's strategy on Islamist extremism has been in the spotlight for months since Islamic State (IS) executioner "Jihadi John" was identified as Mohammed Emwazi from London and a string of young people left Britain to fight for the IS...

NATO reportedly has moved to expel dozens of suspected Russian spies from its headquarters in Brussels in the latest sign of a renewal of tensions between the western military alliance and Moscow. The Guardian reported that NATO decided last month to mandate that all non-member state delegations reduce their staff to no more than 30 people. The new rule only affected Russia, though estimates of the exact number of Russian delegates vary. The Kremlin says it has only 37 people accredited to work in Brussels. However, a diplomat from a NATO member state told The Guardian that in fact 61...

David Cameron is the most successful Tory Party leader since Margaret Thatcher. Yet history may also record that his success led to the crackup of his country, and Great Britain's secession from the European Union. How did Cameron's Tories capture their majority? First, they compiled a strong record to run on. More critically, they attacked the Labour Party of Ed Miliband as too far left to govern, and warned that a Labour government would be hostage to a secessionist Scottish National Party, without whose votes Miliband could never reach a majority in Parliament. Labour could not shake off the charge,...

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- "Shocked," "surprised," "stunned" were some of the words used by broadcasters, columnists, political "experts" and pollsters when a Conservative Party victory was forecast by exit polls on election night. Former Liberal Democrat Party leader Paddy Ashdown was so certain the exit polls were wrong that he announced on the BBC he would publicly eat his hat if they were right. British chefs may now be considering whether a traditional bowler or a Carnaby Snap Brim from Christys’ would make the most palatable meal. When the actual results were in -- a Conservative sweep, with the exception...

Big surprises in Thursday's British election. For weeks, the pre-election polls showed a statistical tie in popular votes between Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative Party and the Labour opposition led by Ed Miliband. It was universally agreed that neither party could reach a 326-vote majority in the House of Commons. A prominent British political website projected that Conservatives would get 280 seats and Labour 274. But the exit poll, released when voting ended at 10 p.m., projected Conservatives with 316 seats and Labour with only 239. It showed the Scottish Nationalist Party sweeping 58 of Scotland's 59 seats and the...

A presidential candidate in the Polish elections whose party allied with Ukip in the European Parliament has called for the legalisation of child pornography. Janusz Korwin-Mikke, who lost yesterday’s election, said that child abusers should be ‘severely punished’, and added that pornography not created as a product of child abuse should be legalised. ‘I can buy pornography at home, I can look at it, I can even have child pornography on my computer’, he told the Telegraph. ‘I very strongly object to abuse of children, but that has nothing to do with child pornography. If you create child pornography absolutely...

Many of the party's main pledges were in its manifesto, but some were also made later in the election campaign. The party said it would: Introduce a law guaranteeing no rise in income tax rates, VAT or national insurance before 2020 Invest an extra £8bn a year for the NHS by 2020 Hold a referendum on membership of the EU by 2017 Open 500 more free schools Extend the right-to-buy scheme to housing association tenants in England Build 200,000 starter homes Ensure all people who work 30 hours per week on the minimum wage pay no income tax Double free...

PERUSE any basic work of European history, you will learn that about 200 years ago, a new way of thinking, secular nationalism, began to replace religion as the main focus of people's public loyalties. To judge by the landslide vote for the Scottish National Party in yesterday's general election, that process may just have been completed in Scotland, a land with a long history of religious rivalry and conflict... The number of people who identify with the national (Presbyterian) church had fallen to just over 20% in 2012 from 35% in 1999; while those who professed "no religion" had risen...

If information was all we needed, we’d have solved climate change by now. The scientific position has been clear for decades. Researchers have been waving a big red flag that has been impossible for our politicians to miss. Information, it seems, is not enough. Journalists have transmitted the warnings of scientists, but they have sometime focussed too much on the mini-controversies and the unimportant disagreements and not enough on the big picture. That has often left readers confused. As the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger explained when he introduced the paper’s Keep it in the Ground project, journalism struggles with climate...

· The results of the elections in the United Kingdom last week were the latest, not the first, surprise if "surprise" is based upon what the pre-election polls were saying. The Conservative Party had been tipped (as they say in the British papers) to play to a tie with the Labour (as they spell it in Britain) Party at the the six-week campaign. · When the dust settled (as they said in the old West), the Tories (another name for the Conservative Party) romped not just to the most seats in the 650-seat Parliament, but an absolute majority of 331...

FDR UNMASKED New book exposes how he lied us into war – and kowtowed to Stalin Justin Raimondo Antiwar.com June 25, 2001 This year has been set aside by the Powers That Be for a "celebration" of America's role in World War II: America's political and cultural elites are looking back on that historical moment, sixty years later, with unabashed nostalgia. It was the necessary prelude to yet another "unipolar moment," as Charles Krauthammer describes the present post-cold war position of US global dominance, the moment when America stepped out onto the world stage with both feet and buried...

It was both energizing and bracing to watch the election returns roll in here Thursday night and into the early hours of Friday — energizing because the unfolding story bore little resemblance to the polls and forecasts; bracing for the very same reason and for what that said about all the pre-election analysis. Public polls — and they were many and often — predicted a wholly different result. What the country was told to expect was the second hung Parliament in a row, and the prospect of tortuous negotiations and maneuvering to construct a new government. Instead, the Conservative Party...

After unexpected political charisma and cunning propelled him to another term as Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron will now need every ounce of those skills to avoid going down in history with an altogether different title: founding father of Little England. A result that maintained the status quo at 10 Downing Street masked the dramatic transformations roiling Britain, ones that threaten to leave this country more isolated than at any time in its modern history. “The E.U. referendum is going to trigger a debate over the role we play in the world, and on that, the different parts of the...