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Former Beirut hostage Terry Waite is standing for parliament as an independent. Waite, who is a Quaker, an Anglican, a humanitarian and an author, and who was held hostage in the Lebanese capital between 1987 and 1991, aims to bring down shamed Tory MP Alan Duncan, the Shadow Leader of the...

Spare a thought for this little fellow. Ralph, a Humboldt penguin, has a condition which leaves him almost always featherless. Whereas other Humboldts lose their old feathers to grow new ones, Ralph's new feathers always fall out in just one day. This left him at risk of severe sunburn...

Exactly 190 years ago today, the 16th August 1819, a crowd of 60,000 - 80,000 gathered at St Peter's Fields in Manchester, Lancashire, to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. Just 2% of people in Britain at the time had the vote, and all of those were (mostly wealthy) men. Hunger...

The British miltary death toll in Afghanistan yesterday reached the 200 mark. The unnamed infantryman from The 2nd Battalion The Royal Welsh regiment was badly injured by a roadside bomb while on a vehicle patrol in Musa Qa’leh in Helmand province on Thursday morning. He was flown back to...

The row in the United States about the reform of its health system has spilled over to the United Kingdom. Many American right-wingers and Republicans are attacking Britain's National Health Service (NHS), which was formed by Health Minister Aneurin Bevan in the aftermath of World War II when...

British photographer Michael Bosanko doesn't use spray cans to graffiti British landmarks - he uses light. Bosanko uses long exposure shots and different coloured torches to 'draw with light' in the night-time shots. He visited London, Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle and Edinburgh in one...

In about the year 1050, Lady Godiva, the wife of Leofric, the Earl of Mercia, took pity on the people of Coventry, who were suffering under her husband's oppressive taxation. Lady Godiva appealed again and again to her husband to remit the tolls, but to no avail. At last, tired of her...

British rockers The Arctic Monkeys release their new album, "Humbug", on 24th August. It is their third album in the space of four years, which isn't a bad rate for releasing new music, following 2006's "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" and 2007's "Favourite Worst Nightmare"...

The British are supposed to be a nation of animal lovers, but even they would think twice about having this weird-looking creature in their homes. It is known as the Equicanigattus, and is made up of the body parts of the nation's favourite pets. A survey of 2,000 British pet lovers revealed...

A 9,000 year old house discovered on the Isle of Man is Britain's oldest. The Isle of Man is a British Crown Dependency in the Irish Sea, between England and Ireland. Queen Elizabeth II is its Head of State though to its people, the Manx, she is known as Lord of Mann (with two n's). The...

Physicist Stephen Hawking has defended Britain's health service after it came under attack from America's Republican Party who branded it "socialist." Politicians in the US are currently debating whether there should be reforms to the US health service. Hawking suffers from Lou Gehring's...

The two nations of England and Holland have quite a connection. Dutch is the most closely related MAJOR language to English (though the little language of Frisian, also spoken in Holland, is the most closely-related to English); Holland's Queen Beatrix and England's Queen Elizabeth II are fifth...

When pretty Louise Fairburn got married, she decided that just any old wedding dress wouldn't do. Louise, a shepherdess, married her fiance Ian in a dress made from wool, sheared from her own sheep. The couple own a farm in Risby, Lincolnshire, and Louise took wool from her favourite sheep...

A fifth of the population of the European Union, which currently stands at around 500 million, will be Muslim by 2050, an investigation by The Telegraph has revealed. That's four times greater than the Muslim population of the EU now. At the moment, only around 5 per cent of people in the...

He may be only 17, but Chris Morgan weighs an incredible 19 stone 10 pounds (around 280 pounds). Lifting a Ford Fiesta, which weights almost a ton, is easy-peasy for Chris, of Willenhall, West Midlands. Because of this, Chris has been named Britain's strongest teenager. He spends hours in...

Yesterday, 8th August, at 11.35am, was the 40th anniversary of when The Beatles walked across a zebra crossing in an unremarkable north London street giving rise to arguably the most famous album cover in history. To mark the occasion, hundreds of fans gathered at the spot, in St John's Wood...

After doing the right thing by invading Iraq to rid the country of a brutal dictator and invading Afghanistan to rid it of the Taliban, the question now being asked by some people is: "Should Britain invade Zimbabwe to get rid of Mugabe?" Zimbabwe gained its indepence from Britain in 1980 -...

Norfolk, a county is south east England is, like Holland, famous for being flat and full of ancient windmills. Like Alabama in the US, its inhabitants are often derided by outsiders for being inbred mutants with webbed fingers. But, according to William Rees-Mogg, Norfolk has a lot going for...

Guinness, the famous "black" Irish beer, was first made in 1759, meaning that this year marks its 250th birthday. The drink is produced at the St James's Gate Brewery in Dublin. In 1914, when all of Ireland was part of Britain, it was the world's largest brewery, covering 64 acres...

We all think of lasagne as being Italian, cricket as being English and tulips as being Dutch. But last week, the Scots found out that their national dish of haggis was actually invented by the English. But haggis isn't the only one whose origins are not from where you might think. Lasagne...