© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Vicki Barker

  • Britain's most popular newspaper will reportedly stop featuring photos of topless women on its pages. The Sun began its "Page 3" pictures 44 years ago, but there has long been criticism of the feature, which critics say objectifies women.
  • The London mayor has been urging people to get around by bike for years. And this year, 14 London cyclists have been killed — a higher casualty count than that of the British military in Afghanistan. In each fatal accident, a heavy truck was involved.
  • Internet giants Google and Microsoft say they're going to be making it harder for pedophiles to search for child porn online. They made the announcement in a joint statement in London ahead of a British internet security summit.
  • Author Doris Lessing died Sunday at the age of 94. Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature for a life's work which included around 40 books and collections of essays and memoirs. Her book, The Golden Notebook, has been called the first feminist novel — a characterization Lessing rejected as "stupid."
  • Britain's Conservative-led government has unveiled proposals to change the social benefits system, moving ever closer to workfare. One measure under the plan requires the long-term jobless to do community work. Another plan would ax automatic housing and other benefits for unemployed Brits under 25.
  • The scandal has shown just how long and winding the food chain really is, and how little oversight is exercised within Europe's open borders. In Britain, local butchers are among the beneficiaries of this crisis.
  • The fast food giant said this week that some of its burgers in Britain and Ireland were found to contain horsemeat. That's prompted a Twitter campaign and threats of a boycott.
  • In most of Britain, property prices are slumping amid a weak economy. But mega-rich foreigners see London's upscale neighborhoods as a safe place to invest, and they are snapping up properties and pushing up prices even though many don't plan to use these homes as a primary residence.
  • There's no place for chronic misplacers of keys at the 21st World Memory Championships under way in London. About 75 competitors from some two dozen countries are vying to see who can memorize the most numbers, faces, playing cards or random words in a set amount of time in this "mnemonic Olympiad."
  • A nurse at a London hospital who took a hoax call about Catherine the Duchess of Cambridge was found dead on Friday. Jacintha Saldhana let through a call from an Australian radio station purporting to be the Queen calling about the ailing Duchess.