No, firearms are not illegal in the UK - that's a common misconception.. Some specific types of firearms are illegal (e.g. handguns), the rest require the owner to hold a firearms licence.

arshadk writes with this excerpt from the BBC about researchers at Oxford University who found that...

As an Englishman I may be biased, but I think the BBC counts as a major news company.

Marketing is Apple's strongest area, but PR has never been been their forté.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a series of hacked emails and documents that were recently posted on Wikileaks are causing quite a stir in the scientific community. All told, more than 1,000 emails and 2,000 documents were stolen from the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia University in the U.K. "The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with. [] Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We 'will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!' Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday."