London - Tottenham Hotspur have agreed a fee with Portsmouth to re-sign striker Jermain Defoe.

The deal, which is expected to be around 15 million pounds, will see Defoe return to Spurs less than a year after he joined Portsmouth for 7.5 million pounds (11 million dollars).

The move will see Defoe reunited with manager Harry Redknapp, who signed him from Spurs last year before joining the London club late

in 2008.

Defoe is due to undergo a medical at Tottenham later on Tuesday.

London, Jan. 6 : There has been a drop in suicide rates in Britain to the tune of 40 percent in the aftermath of terror attacks such as 9/11 and 7/7, scientists in the country have opined.

The Telegraph quotes Dr Emad Salib, a consultant psychiatrist and senior lecturer at Liverpool University, as saying that any tragedy on a national scale such as a natural disaster, war or bombing brings society together in a common cause and this leads to the drop in suicides.

"There is greater social cohesion, the Blitz spirit," he said.

Dr Salib says that he expects to find that the effect of the London bombings would be greater than the 9/11 attacks because it happened on British soil and was carried out by British bombers.

London, Jan 06 : Pop star Rihanna reportedly celebrated Christmas at her rumoured boyfriend Chris Brown''s family home.

According to reports, the `Umbrella' hitmaker even took some of her own family to Virginia to be with her.

Some of the personal photographs from the holiday have even emerged on the Internet, reports the Daily Express.

The pictures show the Rihanna relaxing in a striped knitted dress and hugging Brown, other show them posing cheerfully for family photographs.

London, Jan 6 : Budget hotels in the UK have been found to be contaminated with blood, mould, urine and even faeces, an investigation has revealed.

In fact, the "most disturbing" discovery was made in a room at the Ibis hotel on Charles Street in Manchester-there the mattress was so badly soiled that the cover had started to fray and mould had begun to grow.

The investigation by the consumer group `Which?', during stays at the UK''s five most visited budget hotel chains, also found food debris and stray fingernails lying on the floor, and duvets with suspected blood stains.

The five hotel chains investigated were -Travelodge, Premier Inn, Jurys Inn, Ibis and Comfort Inn.

London, January 6 : Turkey has decided to restore the citizenship of its first and foremost modern poet, Nazim Hikmet.

The playwright, regarded throughout the world as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, had his citizenship taken away from him following his Marxist beliefs in the 1950s.

The poet, who spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile, subsequently became a Polish citizen.

During the 1930s, Hikmet had revolutionised Turkish poetry, which has been translated into more than 50languages.

London - A temporary ban on the practice of short-selling imposed at the height of the banking crisis last September will be lifted by mid-January as planned, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in London said Tuesday.

The regulatory body said that the three-month ban would expire on Jnauary 16, but could be reinstated if necessary.

Short-selling is when investors, typically hedge funds, borrow shares in a company which they then sell in the hope of buying them back later at a lower price in a process not dissimilar to betting.