The last four British men held as terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay have arrived back in the UK, after almost three years in US custody. The men, one from Birmingham and three from London, were held after the US accused them of having al-Qaeda links. The RAF C-17 plane carrying Moazzam Begg, Martin Mubanga, Richard Belmar and Feroz Abbasi landed at RAF Northolt in west London at about 1700 GMT. They were arrested on arrival and taken to Paddington Green police station. Protests are taking place outside the high-security station where the men are now being held, but police say they have to investigate...

Excessive text messaging may be bad for you, or at least for your fingers. That’s what some Italian doctors think. They are telling people, particularly the young, that furious typing on mobile phones could lead to acute tendonitis. Italian newspapers La Repubblica and Il Messaggero dedicated about half a page each to the problem Monday. A 13-year-old girl in the northern Italian city of Savona needed treatment from an orthopedic specialist after typing at least 100 short message services (SMSs) a day. She was prescribed anti-inflammatory medicine and ordered to rest her hands. According...

A Frenchman lost in a labyrinth of disused mushroom caves said he had survived 35 days by eating rotten wood and clay, after being rescued only thanks to a teachers’ strike. Jean-Luc Josuat-Verges, 48, told French newspapers he had gone to the deserted caves at Madiran in the Pyrenees in December seeking isolation during a spell of depression which had left him considering suicide. While wandering through the cave network his flashlight stopped working, and he was unable to find his way out. His abandoned car was found 35 days later by three children who were not at school because their teachers...

A woman in northeastern Brazil has given birth to what one doctor called a “giant baby,” a boy weighing 16.7 pounds. Francisca Ramos dos Santos, 38, gave birth to the healthy boy named Ademilton on Tuesday at a hospital in Salvador, 900 miles northeast of Sao Paulo. He was the largest baby born at the Albert Sabin Maternity Hospital in its 12-year history, the hospital said. “Obviously the baby was born by Caesarean section,” hospital director Rita Leal said. “Both mother and baby are doing just fine.” Ademilton “could truly be considered a giant baby,...

A hoaxer who e-mailed the families of people caught up in the Asian tsunami telling them their relatives were dead has been jailed for six months. Christoper Pierson, 40, from Lincolnshire, was arrested on New Year’s Eve after sending 35 e-mails. He sent the messages from an AOL account after reading pleas for information on the Sky News website. Pierson pretend the address – ukgovfoffice@aol.com – belonged to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was co-ordinating contact with families of missing Brits. At Bow Street Magistrates Court, he had previously admitted one count...

From Slashdot: conJunk points out this AP story carried by Salon (also covered by various sources linked from Google News) “about the Pentagon’s plan to send robot soldiers to Iraq in March or April. The program, Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, uses Foster-Miller TALON robots, and is said to be “years ahead of the larger Future Combat System vehicles currently under development by big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Corp.” If it’s successful, maybe our men and women in uniform will have to team up with...

by Mary Shaw 01/17/05 “ICH” — A recent Cornell University survey found that almost half of all Americans believe that the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans. This bigoted, racist attitude is quite simply appalling. It essentially favors racial profiling; yet a recent report by Amnesty International presents strong evidence indicating that racial profiling does not work. Amnesty’s report was based on six national public hearings and more than a year of intensive research. The report provides overwhelming evidence indicating that racial...

By Robert Fisk 01/16/05 "The Independent" — Sunday 30 January will be the day when myth and reality come together with – I fear – an all too literal bang. The magic date upon which Iraq is supposed to transform itself into a democracy will no doubt be greeted as another milestone in America’s adventure and, I suspect, another "great day for Iraq" by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara. He, of course, doesn’t have to be blown up in the polling stations or torn to pieces by suicide bombers on the way home. The "martyrs of democracy", as I am sure...