A British solider has been killed in an explosion in southern Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed. The soldier from 36 Engineer Regiment, part of the counter-IED Taskforce, was killed in the Nad-e-Ali district of central Helmand province on Monday morning. The death brings the total number of British service personnel killed in Afghanistan since 2001 to 256, exceeding the number killed in the Falklands conflict of 1982.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:00:00

Beleaguered car manufacturer Toyota has announced a global recall of its newest Prius model due to problems with its brakes. The decision means around 436,000 hybrid vehicles, including the Prius and two other models, will be recalled. Of the almost half a million cars, over 200,000 are believed to be vehicles sold in Japan and 8,500 in the UK.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:00:00

Costa Ricans have elected their first-ever female president after Laura Chinchilla's nearest rivals conceded defeat. The country's current vice-president declared victory after building up an unassailable 47 per cent share of the vote, seven points ahead of the threshold to avoid a runoff. "Thank you, Costa Rica," she said in her first public comments since poll results emerged.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:00:00

The extent of taxpayer support towards maintaining financial stability in the UK has been "truly staggering", an influential committee of MPs has said. The public accounts committee has been examining the action of the Treasury to ensure that the taxpayer and wider economy are protected, its capacity to manage the programme of measures, and accountability to parliament. The committee said the Treasury faced a "formidable challenge" in the wake of the global financial crisis, but the scale of the support required from the UK taxpayer to maintain financial stability, totalling £850 billion, had been unprecedented.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:17:03

MPs have today called for "radical changes to teacher training" to improve achievements of school children in the UK. They said entry requirements for teachers were often too low, and "the bar must be raised". The Commons schools and families committee said major reforms needed to be introduced to help newly qualified teachers make the transition from training to their first teaching job.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:30:00

Iran has heaped pressure on the west by officially notifying the United Nations nuclear watchdog that it will begin enriching higher-grade nuclear fuel from tomorrow onwards. The country's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Ali-Asghar Soltanieh told the watchdog that Tehran had decided to enrich uranium to 20 per cent. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had already announced the move at a heavily stage-managed televised event that saw him claim Iran was ready to build ten new uranium enrichment plants.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:30:00

Scientists have said a popular antidepressant could block the beneficial effects of a breast cancer drug and cause an "increased risk of death". Women who take the antidepressant paroxetine whilst also taking tamoxifen could find the two interfere with each other; but the authors of today's study stressed that patients should not stop taking tamoxifen and the results of the study do not imply that paroxetine itself causes breast cancer. "This is simply a situation in which paroxetine impairs the effectiveness of tamoxifen," the authors of the study reported.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:30:00

The UK Border Agency has been criticised over the slow progress being made to improvements in the efficiency of asylum applications. A report by the parliamentary ombudsman Ann Abraham said despite progress being made in some areas there remained the danger that a failure to resolve applications within reasonable timescales continued to have serious implications for the individuals involved, for society in general and the public purse. In the first nine months of 2009/10, the ombudsman received 478 complaints about the agency and reported on 33 investigations of which 97 per cent were upheld in full or in part.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:30:00

Villages surrounding the Taliban-held target of a massive Nato operation in southern Afghanistan have emptied ahead of the start of the offensive. Operation Moshtarak - taken from the Dari word for 'together - will see 4,000 UK troops join a combined British, American, Afghan, Canadian, French and Estonian force of 15,000 to assault the Taliban stronghold of Marja in Helmand province. The offensive is thought to be the largest since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001 and the first since US president Barack Obama's 30,000-strong troop surge.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:30:00

Two British soldiers have died in an explosion in southern Afghanistan, taking the UK death-toll level to that of 1982's Falklands war. The unnamed soldiers, from the First Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland and whose next of kin have been informed, died during a foot patrol near Sangin in northern Helmand province. The UK death-toll from operations in Afghanistan now stands at 255, the same number of British military fatalities incurred in the Falklands war.

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:44:52