Children who speak English as their first language are a minority in more than 1,500 schools, official figures have revealed.

They show there has been a sharp rise in the number of schools in England where more than half of pupils have a foreign language as their mother tongue.

The statistics released by the Department for Children, Schools and Families show that in 1997, the year Labour came to power, half the pupils in 866 schools spoke English as a second language.

Her offence was to unwittingly sell a goldfish to a 14-year-old boy taking part in a trading standards ‘sting’.

At most, pet shop owner Joan Higgins, 66, expected a slap on the wrist for breaking new animal welfare laws which ban the sale of pets to under-16s.

Instead, the great-grandmother was taken to court, fined £1,000, placed under curfew – and ordered to wear an electronic tag for two months.

Britain’s anti-terror laws need urgent review, according to parliament’s joint committee on human rights.

Its report questioned the “permanent state of emergency” which the government has used to introduce a number of counter-terrorism measures.

“Since September 11th 2001 the government has continuously justified many of its counter-terrorism measures on the basis that there is a public emergency threatening the life of the nation,” the report stated.

NEARLY 95,000 descendants of Mohammed are going to sue 10 newspapers for publishing “blasphemous” cartoons of the prophet.

Faisal Yamani, a Saudi lawyer acting for the descendants, claims that the cartoons – which first appeared in 2005 and caused violent protests by Muslims around the world – are defamatory.

The Sunday Times said that although the cartoons were published by Danish newspapers, Mr Yamani plans to pursue legal action in England, where libel laws are weighted towards the plaintiff.

More than 2,000 police community support officers have been investigated for misconduct and more than 160 charged with criminal offences since the role was created, it can be revealed.

Figures obtained from police forces show that there has been roughly one inquiry for every seven of the civilian patrollers now employed, for alleged rule-breaking ranging from criminal activity to rudeness.

Every police force in England and Wales will be equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners to check the identity of suspects in the street.

Up to 3,000 devices, the size of a mobile phone, will enable officers on patrol to cross-reference prints with national records.

Kenny MacAskill, Scottish Justice Secretary and ex Levy & MacRae lawyer, is apparently so scared by the rising tide of public ire surrounding his and his colleagues apparent cover up of the Hollie Greig scandal, that he has proposed amendments to the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Bill, which is going through the Scottish Parliament at the moment.

The founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Today, however, just 21% of voters nationwide believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 61% disagree and say the government does not have the necessary consent. Eighteen percent (18%) of voters are not sure.

However, 63% of the Political Class think the government has the consent of the governed, but only six percent (6%) of those with Mainstream views agree.

It’s being called the largest research fraud in medical history. Dr. Scott Reuben, a former member of Pfizer’s speakers’ bureau, has agreed to plead guilty to faking dozens of research studies that were published in medical journals.

White jurors in diverse communities are more likely to convict white defendants who attack ethnic minority victims than other white victims because they are “more conscious of race”, Professor Cheryl Thomas’ report found.

For Merseyside police, the “eye in the sky” arrest was a landmark moment in policing history. The force had managed to track down and apprehend a teenager who had fled from a presumed stolen Renault Clio, senior officers revealed, by using a remote-controlled flying robot equipped with thermal imaging cameras.

But the attempt to claim credit for the UK’s first arrest using a surveillance drone backfired tonight after it emerged the force itself could face prosecution because officers flew the surveillance aircraft without permission – a criminal offence.

Robert Green, the man who was brave enough to speak out about the horrific paedophile rapes of Hollie Greig, the most probable murder of her uncle Robert Greig to “shut him up”, and the sickening wall of silence by the Scottish establishment, has been arrested in an Aberdeen guest house. We believe the charge is Breach of the Peace. We also believe that the ‘crime’ took place in Jays Guest House when the police arrived.

Scientists from the Tel Aviv, Israel-based company Nucleix have demonstrated that it is possible to create fake DNA samples and plant them as evidence at a crime scene, in a paper published in the journal Forensic Science: International Genetics.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said lead researcher and Nucleix co-founder Dan Frumkin. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

Clashes between immigrants and locals in a southern Italian town entered a second day on Friday, with the government rushing extra police to try to stem one of the worst episodes of racial unrest in years.

The violence inflamed a long-running political debate on immigration, with the interior minister saying years of excessive “tolerance” were behind the violence, and the opposition accusing the government of fuelling xenophobia.

President Giorgio Napolitano called for an immediate end to the unrest, during which at least 37 people, including 18 policemen, have been injured.

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to “virtual strip-searching” and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.

New Labour has two separate immigration policies. The first is the one it endlessly proclaims to the public – of supposedly tough restrictions, raids on employers of illegal workers, expulsions of those with no right to stay here.

There were 36 million prescriptions issued for antidepressant drugs in the United Kingdom in 2008, nearly one for every adult in the population, according to numbers obtained by the Liberal Democrat party.

President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year, according to administration officials.

Politically correct Scotland Yard chiefs have stopped using the term ‘gang rape’ because it is too ‘emotive’, the Mail can reveal.

Instead officers have been advised to use the long-winded phrase ‘multi-perpetrator rape’ when describing sex attacks involving three or more culprits.

Critics branded the move by the Metropolitan Police an ‘affront’ to the victims of appalling sex crimes and are preparing to launch a campaign on the issue.