Thank you to all who have been sending in your best wishes to me for the holidays, it is greatly appreciated. Unfortunately I'm unable to answer each of you personally so I hope this short message goes some way to express my thanks to all of you. Hope you all have a great holiday and thank you for your continued support. Here's to a productive 2008! All the best, Mick

Animal rights activists have freed 15 hens from an Auckland farm in an effort to persuade more people to boycott battery eggs. New Zealand Open Rescue spokeswoman Deirdre Sims says the group took the hens because of the conditions they were living in. She says farmers in New Zealand cage 2.8 million hens, all of which are unable to nest, bath or move freely. Sims says hen farmers should be ...

TELEVISION Quality seems to be the very last thing on BBC execs mind, writes Declan Lynch THERE was a general air of stupefaction when the BBC bleeped the word "faggot" from Fairytale Of New York. But those of you who were reading this column last week were not surprised at all. No, you'll have smiled knowingly, remembering that opening line about the the BBC being dead, killed by many things ...

CIA rebuts suggestion it did not cooperate with 9/11 Commission investigation David Remes, an attorney for a dozen Yemeni prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, speaks to reporters following a hearing in federal court as costumed protestors stage a demonstration  The CIA ...

Tony Blair's conversion to Catholicism has been criticised by commentators who argue his views as PM were at odds with church teachings. Tony Blair has met Pope Benedict Mr Blair was welcomed into the Roman Catholic church by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor - leader of the Roman Catholics in England and Wales. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor welcomed the politician's personal ...

PM hits the streets and gets looked at more than ever before, then heads to the shop for first-look details on a futuristic car so efficient it’ll make your jaw drop. The good news? It’s coming next year.   Three hundred miles per gallon and a Jetsons-style look are enough to get ...

By Diane Smith According to the U.S. panel investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks, the CIA had deliberately withheld tapes of supposed torture of terrorism suspects to obstruct the panel’s work, the New York Times wrote in its Saturday edition. Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, the leading chairmen of the panel, were the ones to comment on the issue for the New York Times. The two declared that ...

By Carolynne Wheeler in Jerusalem Six-year-old Maria Amin races ahead of her father on the way to school. "Hurry up, papa. The bus will leave without us," she calls, steering her electric wheelchair with a mouth-stick towards the specially-equipped van.   Symbol of hope: Maria Amin's case has captured ...

The US dollar declined against the euro and the pound on Friday as traders continued to hotly debate whether the US Federal Reserve would continue cutting interest rates amid economic uncertainty. The euro was swapping hands at US$1.4378 in late afternoon trading in New York, up from US$1.4320 late on Thursday. The British pound was quoted at US$1.9841, up from US$1.9830 a day earlier. Although the pound gained ground it has dropped below ...

By Deirdre Shesgreen The first session of the 110th Congress started off with a snap and had plenty of crackle. But the end was more fizzle than pop. "We had 50 weeks of basically polarization and brinksmanship and two weeks of problem-solving," said Rep. Todd Akin, R-Town and Country. Democrats were catapulted into power after the 2006 elections on big promises: They would clean up Washington, change course in Iraq and devote new ...

As Bush and Sarkozy lose patience with Assad, Syrian MP threatens Dimona A Syrian member of parliament thought to be familiar with the thinking of President Bashar al-Assad is quoted in the London-based pan-Arab daily newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi on Saturday as saying that Syria could strike Israel's nuclear reactor in Dimona as retaliation for any future forays into Syrian airspace and violation of Syrian "sovereignty", Haaretz reports. MP Mohammad ...

By Matthew Hay Brown While Washington debates whether it should talk to Iran, one Maryland congressman has already struck up a conversation. For the past year, Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest has been meeting with Iranian officials and business leaders to talk about ways to improve relations between the United States and the Islamic republic that President Bush put in his Axis of Evil. With the recent release of ...

Britain's former top policeman Lord Stevens was paid £1,000 a day for taking charge of the inquiry into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Documents released exclusively to The Mail on Sunday under the Freedom of Information Act reveal he was being paid double what he would have earned in his former role as Met Police Commissioner. The payments, for his part-time role in charge of Operation Paget, are among a ...

A leaked memorandum from the former 9/11 commission says it made repeated requests to the CIA for information on the interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects. But ex-commission executive director Philip Zelikow says the CIA did not hand over tapes that have since come to light, the New York Times reported. The CIA later erased the footage, which allegedly contains images of abuse. The memo urges a further investigation into whether the agency ...

FBI aims to amass huge database of people's physical characteristics By Ellen Nakashima The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of people's physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad. Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement in Clarksburg. ...