Demonstrators demanding an end to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza hurled their shoes at the gates of Downing Street yesterday during a wave of global protests.

Riot police were dispatched to the Israeli embassy in London last night as a day of protests across Europe degenerated into ugly skirmishes.

In London Israeli flags were set ablaze and surging crowds were penned back by police with shields and batons. Some protesters were in tears, claiming they were being stopped from leaving peacefully, and organisers said they would complain about police heavy-handedness. Others, growing more aggressive as news of Israel's ground invasion spread, threw missiles while police tried to drive them back. Late into the evening, several hundred were still staring down officers outside the embassy.

Israel launched the offensive after more than a week of Palestinian rocket fire that followed a six-month truce.

Tens of thousands of protesters will voice their anger at the Gaza bombing blitz today in a series of rallies across the UK

"The original £1 food-menu pub," says a sign outside the Four Crosses Inn near Cannock, Staffordshire. The claim may be a contentious one, as more and more pubs offer incredibly cheap meals to stave off closure, but the owner, Tony Rabbitts, insists that he was the first to show it could be done.

Alistair Darling has been forced to consider a second bailout for banks as the lending drought worsens.

The Chancellor will decide within weeks whether to pump billions more into the economy as evidence mounts that the £37 billion part-nationalisation last year has failed to keep credit flowing. Options include cash injections, offering banks cheaper state guarantees to raise money privately or buying up “toxic assets”, The Times has learnt.

British telecommunications firm FreedomCall has terminated its cooperation with Israel's MobileMax due to the IDF operation in Gaza.

The organisers of demonstrations in Britain against Israel's air strikes on the Gaza Strip urged Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Wednesday to end his "deafening silence" on the bloodshed.

In an open letter published on the back page of The Guardian, the 21 groups told Brown: "this is your hour with history and we urge you to take the first step".

Hundreds of Iranian radicals stormed the British compound in Tehran last night, replacing the Union flag with a Palestinian one in protest against Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

British officials will be assessing whether the security breach, unprecedented in recent years, was an isolated incident or presages further violent demonstrations.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on Sunday called for "an urgent cease-fire and immediate halt to all violence" in Gaza.

"Today, the issues may be different, more complex, more global," Brown says. "And yet the qualities we need to meet them the British people have demonstrated in abundance before."

He says he is confident that because the British have the "right character" they will one day be able to look back on the economic crisis facing them "as another great challenge that was thrown Britain's way, and that Britain met".

Ten people have been arrested for public order offences after clashes at a protest near the Israeli embassy in London against air raids on Gaza.

Violent confrontations broke out at the Israeli Embassy in London today as up to 1,500 protesters against Israel's Gaza campaign gathered in a vociferous demonstration.

Campaign supporters, Palestinians and British Muslims stood on the pavement of High Street Kensington, west London, and chanted in unison: “Five, six, seven, eight - Israel is a terror state.”

Works of art worth hundreds of thousands of pounds are missing from British embassies and other official buildings around the world.

At least 50 paintings from the Government Art Collection are unaccounted for, according to the latest audit. None was insured. Some are known to have been stolen but more than half the total simply disappeared.

I watched as suspect after suspect in the case was released, but Mohammad and an Iraqi man were put on trial. I felt at that point there was no hope, though I was still certain of his innocence. A man who knows his wife is in custody and his baby boy with social services can be persuaded to say all kinds of things even without "enhanced interrogation techniques." But not this time. This week I heard he'd been acquitted and cleared of all charges. So Hallelujah, Allahu Akbar and Merry Christmas.

Britain no longer has any stake in the production of its nuclear warheads after the Government secretly sold off its shares in the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston.

Ministers agreed to sell the remaining one-third ownership to a Californian engineering company. The announcement, which means that Americans will now produce and maintain Britain's independent nuclear deterrent, was slipped out on the eve of the parliamentary Christmas holiday. Officials refused to say how much the deal raised.

Madoff Securities International's traders are believed to have unwound all their positions on Friday morning and could not carry on doing business because all their capital belonged to Mr Madoff and his family. The New Yorker is now under house arrest after being accused of a $50bn investment fraud.

The government was yesterday forced to perform a rapid U-turn over plans to charge high-street levels of interest on loans to some of the poorest people in Britain who rely on a social fund when they experience financial difficulties.

Hours after the government was accused of acting like "loan sharks", the welfare minister, Kitty Ussher, took to the airwaves to deny that interest charges of up to 27% would be imposed on vulnerable people using the fund for vital items such as cookers and beds.

It has long been the stuff of dreams, of bestselling books and sometimes even of profit. The British love of France has led tens of thousands to cross the Channel in search of a better quality of life, a ruin to renovate, or simply to snap up a cheap second home.

John Hutton, the Defence Secretary, has compared the Taleban and al-Qaeda to the Nazis, saying that British forces in Afghanistan are defending the country’s values as they did in the Second World War.

Now they want to bolt the stable door. With British troops at last due to leave Iraq next spring, everyone is for a public inquiry. That is fine. But what about an inquiry into where they are going, straight from the frying pan into the fire, from Iraq to Afghanistan? In Basra the British army had at least a tattered remnant of a war plan. In Helmand the only plan is to be target practice for the Taliban.

Gordon Brown has rejected calls for an early inquiry into the Iraq war, saying it would not be considered until UK troops are out of the country.

Conservative leader David Cameron and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg both want an inquiry now that the exit date for British troops of 31 July has been set.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has hit out at Gordon Brown's plans to combat recession by boosting spending and has likened them to an 'addict returning to the drug'.

At least this time there was no ballistic footwear. The last time Gordon Brown made a surprise visit to Iraq to announce troop withdrawals, he was whacked so hard on the head by the giant DM attached to his own left leg – and if nothing else, you had to admire his Nadia Comanecian elasticity of movement – that it took this unfolding economic catastrophe to rouse him from the ensuing psephological coma.

THERE WILL be no victory parades, I think. Next March, fully six years after they arrived, the last of Britain's troops will begin to leave Basra. By June, reportedly, only a token few hundred of the 4100 remnant of a 46,000-strong force will remain to train Iraqis and assist the new American tenants at the city's airport. The British are packing up their tents, their tanks, and their pretensions.

Asylum-seekers who claim to have been abused by British security guards accused the Government yesterday of running Guantanamo Bay-style detention camps.

Mafungasei Maikokera, a Zimbabwean asylum-seeker attending a meeting at the House of Commons, said guards had beaten her when she resisted attempts to deport her. and had discussed "bonuses" they were paid for removing asylum-seekers.

British troops will begin withdrawing from Iraq in March and will mostly be gone by June, the Ministry of Defense said Wednesday.

Britain has become a worse credit risk than McDonald's and a host of other large companies, figures produced for The Independent reveal.

The collapse in Britain's credit rating has taken place over the past two and a half months, since the Government underwrote the banking system and decided to spend its way out of recession. Investing in UK government debt is now almost twice as risky as buying McDonald's corporate bonds, according to the market in credit default swaps (CDS), which provides insurance for the buyers of such debt.

One of the U.K.'s largest car-parts groups, Wagon Automotive, was on the brink of collapse this weekend, according to reports in several newspapers.
Administrators are expected to be appointed within days at Wagon, which employs more than 500 in the U.K.
Only the U.K. operation will be put into administration this week, with the fate of European plants still to be decided, reports said.

Since April 1, hundreds of thousands of State employees, from police to teachers, youth and nursery workers, social workers and sports coaches, have been entitled to interrogate children aged up to 19, using the ‘Common Assessment Framework’ (CAF), a creepy, eight-page, 60-section questionnaire.

CAF includes eyewateringly intimate questions about children’s sexual behaviour, their family’s structure, culture and religion, their views on ‘discrimination’, their friends, secret fears, feelings and family income, plus ‘any serious difficulties in their parents’ relationship’.

The vow by Commons Speaker Michael Martin to prevent "unauthorised" raids on MPs' offices in the wake of the Damian Green affair was seriously undermined last night as it emerged that the Government is preparing new laws to allow investigators to mount parliamentary searches without a warrant.

The Bank of England is working on radical plans to inject cash directly into the economy - the nuclear option to be used only when interest rates approach zero.

Blizzards are expected across most of northern England, the north Midlands and Scotland tonight, lasting into tomorrow morning.

Up to 8ins of snow is expected to fall in some parts of Britain as the cold snap continues, weather forecasters have warned.

Heavy rain is forecast for London, the south east, the south west and south Wales. But the freezing conditions means the rain could form dangerous black ice.

State officials are to be given powers previously reserved for times of war to demand a person’s proof of identity at any time.

Anybody who refuses the Big Brother demand could face arrest and a possible prison sentence.

The U.K. government has extracted a pledge from credit-card issuers to give struggling borrowers an extra 60 days to pay, in its latest effort to ease the impact of the financial crisis on the economy.

The move, which comes days after the government announced a £20 billion ($30.8 billion) economic stimulus package, is aimed at giving borrowers extra breathing room to restructure their debts, the government said.

David Cameron insisted police and ministers had "serious questions" to answer today after one of his frontbench spokesmen was arrested over Home Office leaks.

A British man who fathered seven children by raping his two daughters was jailed for life on Tuesday in a case described by the judge as the worst he had ever seen.
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The 56-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, made his daughters pregnant 19 times over a 25-year period of abuse.

You know what, I have now heard more than enough about how much Gordon Brown is enjoying this recession. Every time you read about the Prime Minister, they tell you that his mood is getting better and better.

Having been known as a gloomy old nail-biting misery-guts, he is now presented to us as a man "in his element", the life and soul of the party, a smile or a witty aside never off his lips.

They say that he was giving a speech the other day, and his mobile phone went. "Aha," quipped funster Gordon Brown, "that'll be another bank going bust!" Isn't he a scream?

Critics said that if the recent price-cutting campaign by stores offering discounts of up to 25 per cent had not enticed shoppers to spend, a 2.5 per cent reduction in VAT would not work either.