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13 November 2013 Last updated at 06:45 ET Share this page Email Print Share this pageShareFacebookTwitter Nigeria: US 'to name Boko Haram as a terrorist group' Boko Haram frequently clashes with the Nigerian armed forces Continue reading the main story Nigeria under attack Afraid to go to school Dead or alive Vigilante war Gunning for Boko Haram The US state department is expected to designate the Nigerian Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, as a foreign terrorist organisation.

The US state department is expected to designate the Nigerian Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, as a foreign terrorist organisation

t will become a crime under US law to provide material support to the group

The site in Happisburgh was 900,000 years old, a time when mammoths and hippos still roamed in these parts. No human bones or prints that old had ever been found in Britain.

Standing on the ridge above Cardigan Bay in Borth, Dr. Bates described what the area would have looked like at the height of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago: more than half a mile of ice overhead and dry land stretching across today’s North Sea. The sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.“You could have walked from Denmark to Yorkshire in those days,”

suggest that they walked upright and looked much like modern humans, though their brains were smaller. If they had language, it was primitive. Living at the tail end of an interglacial era, as winters were growing colder, they may have had functional body hair. So far, there is no evidence that they used clothes, shelter, fire or tools more complex than simple stone flakes.

The last UK base in Afghanistan has been handed over to the control of Afghan security forces, ending British combat operations in the country.

The number of deaths of British troops throughout the conflict stands at 453. The death toll among US military personnel stands at 2,349.

Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, Mr Fallon accepted the Taliban had not been defeated, but said Afghan forces were now taking "full responsibilities".

The Republican candidate for US President has demanded all Muslims to be shut out of the USA, prompting calls to give him the same treatment

Donald Trump is an outright fascist

"We must confront the reality that his comments have provoked, and consider whether we want to import such hatred to this country"

The United States receives the most credit for defeating Adolf Hitler's Germany during World War Two, according to a YouGov poll

While the USSR trailed significantly in many of the countries sampled, the Soviets suffered the greatest losses of any of the Allies.

According to a new poll, however, most other countries look to the United States as the country that did the most to vanquish Adolf Hitler

Over the bank holiday weekend, a spate of shootings across England hit the headlines. They add to a picture of rising gun crime, after more than a decade of big decreases.

Guns are very tightly controlled in the UK. Those that end up on the black market often start off as legal guns - but become illegal because they are modified or their licence status changes.

In 2017, Europol - the EU police agency - said: "The reactivation of deactivated weapons and conversion of blank-firing firearms are among the main sources of illegal firearms trafficked in the EU."

Millions of people in the UK will need food aid in the coming days, food charities are warning, as the coronavirus outbreak threatens to quickly spiral into a crisis of hunger unless the government acts immediately to reinvent the way we feed ourselves.

Supermarket distribution systems, based on “just in time” supply chains, are struggling to cope with a sudden surge in demand since Covid-19 took hold. The most pressing concern is finding a way to feed the country’s most vulnerable and isolated people.

Anna Taylor, the Food Foundation’s director, said that between 4 million and 7 million people in lower risk categories are also affected by severe food insecurity or loneliness, so having to self-isolate could tip them into crisis.

Human rights lawyers have accused the UK and other large donors of blocking the release of a multimillion-dollar UN fund to provide relief to victims of a cholera epidemic that has killed 10,000 people in Haiti.

The outbreak, which affected hundreds of thousands of Haitians, was caused when infected UN peacekeepers from Nepal brought the disease to the country in 2010.

Ban Ki-moon said deadly outbreak that killed up thousands ‘leaves a blemish’ on United Nations’ reputation, ending six years of refusing to claim responsibility

one of the great divides of modern politics: young versus old. In Britain, age is now a better predictor of voting intention than social class. Overall, the Boomers voted for Brexit in 2016 and the Conservatives in 2017; their Millennial children voted Remain and Labour.

The debate is also about so much more than abstract disagreements over policy and government funding.

Caring for the elderly, for example, becomes wrapped up in assertions of “just deserts”—I’ve worked hard all my life and paid my taxes—and fears about money-grubbing children selling off their parents’ houses. It is also, like taxes on inheritance, a subject that prods at many people’s deep desire to pass something on to their offspring.

The most straightforward way to assess the UK’s performance is to compare the number of deaths with the fatalities normally experienced for the time of year.

The “excess death” rate over the average of the previous five years has topped 60,000. With 955 “excess deaths” for every million people, the UK has the grimmest record of all countries providing comparable data. In that respect only can the Johnson government’s performance be said to be “world-beating”.

The OECD is projecting that the UK will suffer the deepest downturn among advanced economies. It is only a forecast, but it chimes with other indicators suggesting that this country will pay a uniquely high price for its sluggish imposition of the lockdown and the government’s chaotic mismanagement of the attempt to grope towards an exit.

Together, these stories suggest that the “push-back” – the forcing away of migrating people from a country’s territory, even if it places them in harm’s way or overrides their right to asylum – is becoming an entrenched practice. Once something that would take place largely in the shadows, it is being done increasingly openly, with some governments trying to find ways to make the practice legal. The UK’s proposal has been strongly criticised by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, whose representative said it would “unavoidably” put lives at risk.

Just as shocking as the claims themselves is the fact that the revelations have largely been met with a shrug of indifference by EU officials, whose funding helps prop up border defences in both countries. Twelve member states are even demanding that the EU adjusts its rules so that it can finance “further preventive measures”, including walls and fences, at its external borders.

In south-eastern Europe, an international team of investigative journalists have revealed that Croatia and Greece are using a “shadow army”, balaclava-clad plainclothes units linked to those countries’ regular security forces, to force people back from their borders. In Croatia, these units have been filmed beating people with clubs at the border with Bosnia. In Greece, they are accused of intercepting boats in the Aegean and setting the passengers adrift on life-rafts in Turkish waters. (Croatia has promised to investigate reports of abuse, while Greece denies the practice.

Syria conflict: UN suspends all aid after convoy hit

The UN has suspended all aid convoys in Syria after a devastating attack on its lorries near Aleppo on Monday.

Russia and Syria have both insisted that their forces were not involved.

Treasury chief says UK to adapt if barred from EU market

Britain's treasury chief says the UK will take whatever steps necessary to stay competitive in the global economy, if the country is shut out of the European Union market.

Hammond says the UK's economy may be forced to change without access to the single market, but "you can be sure that we will do whatever we have to do."

Mr Trump promised a quick trade deal between the US and the UK after he takes office in five days' time.

He also criticised Nato and German Chancellor Angela Merkel's immigration policies

"Countries want their own identity and the UK wanted its own identity, but I do think if they hadn't been forced to take in all of the refugees than you wouldn't have a Brexit."

. Since the US-led, UK-backed invasion of Iraq in 2003, estimates of the lives lost to violence vary from a quarter of a million to 600,000. The number of injured will surely be several times that, and the number of men, women and children displaced from their homes is put at between 3.5 and 5 million, somewhere between one in 10 and one in six of the population.

In sum, failures do not come any more abject than Iraq, nor catastrophes any more pure.

this additional probe was impossible to avoid. None of the other investigations provided an official answer to the burning, central question, of how on earth the UK had got embroiled in this great misadventure in the first place.

I want to make three arguments here. Imitation is not just some new minor ability. It changes everything. It enables a new kind of evolution. The first is that humans are unique because they are so good at imitation. When our ancestors began to imitate they let loose a new evolutionary process based not on genes but on a second replicator, memes. Genes and memes then coevolved, transforming us into better and better meme machines. The second is that one kind of copying can piggy-back on another: that is, one replicator (the information that is copied) can build on the products (vehicles or interactors) of another. This multilayered evolution has produced the amazing complexity of design we see all around us. The third is that now, in the early 21st century, we are seeing the emergence of a third replicator. I call these temes (short for technological memes, though I have considered other names). They are digital information stored, copied, varied and selected by machines. We humans like to think we are the designers, creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but really we are stepping stones from one replicator to the next.

could any of our modern meme products take the step our hominid ancestors did long ago and begin a new kind of copying? Yes. They could and they are. Our computers, all linked up through the Internet, are beginning to carry out all three of the critical processes required for a new evolutionary process to take off.

This is a radically new kind of copying, varying and selecting, and means that a new evolutionary process is starting up. This copying is quite different from the way cells copy strands of DNA or humans copy memes. The information itself is also different, consisting of highly stable digital information stored and processed by machines rather than living cells. This, I submit, signals the emergence of temes and teme machines, the third replicator.

Fake ambulance drug smugglers jailed for between 18 and 28 years

Three drug smugglers have been jailed for at least 18 years each for transporting as much as £1.6bn worth of cocaine and heroin into the UK using a fleet of fake ambulances.

A third man, Richard Engelsbel, 51, was given an 18-year jail term after admitting that he acted as a driver or driver’s assistant on 25 smuggling trips purporting to be journeys to pick up injured patients.

The party has 2,300 delegates - although only 2,287 have been elected to attend, with reports suggesting the remaining 13 delegates were disqualified because of "improper behaviour".

This committee in turn elects the Politburo and fr

Those are China's real decision-making bodies. The Politburo currently has 24 members, while the Standing Committee has seven, although these numbers have varied over the years.

For Aldi, the panic and rush is an integral part of the shopping experience for two reasons. The first is the happy realisation once you have left the store, and your heartbeat has settled, that you have spent less time shopping than you would have in a typical supermarket. The second, and most important, is what Aldi managers describe, straight-faced, as “the thrill at the till”: your trolley full of goods has cost less than you thought it would. The rushed, no-frills experience isn’t something you merely endure for the sake of saving money; the awareness of your savings makes that experience a pleasure in itself.

Aldi is still relatively low-tech: without a loyalty programme, it knows little about individual customer preferences and you can’t buy its groceries online. What it has done is disrupt a mindset: the settled wisdom about how we think of ourselves as shoppers, and the basis by which we identify with a particular supermarket. Aldi’s victory was to show that there was no shame – and in fact there was satisfaction – in shopping at a discount supermarket

“Aldi’s customer profile is now classless,” said Hyman. “The supermarket is as strong with affluent people as it is with people on low incomes.”

The Freikorps was the name adopted by some right wing nationalists in Weimar Germany after World War One had ended.

The Freikorps was effectively a collection of groups as opposed to a cohesive whole but they all shared the same beliefs and objectives. Members of the Freikorps could be described as conservative, nationalistic, anti-Socialism/Communism and once it had been signed, anti-the Treaty of Versailles.

They did not believe that Germany had suffered a military defeat in World War One and members of the Freikorps were very vocal supporters of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend that was eventually taken up by the Nazi Party.