London, Oct 11 : The British government is said to be working on a new media plan to counter the Taliban propaganda in Afghanistan to reach out to the nearly six million mobile phone users and nearly five lakh Internet users.

According to a BBC report, non-governmental organisations would distribute new mobile phones to Afghans for them to make their own video diaries.

Anti-Western films made by the Taliban are already in circulation on Afghanistan''s estimated six million mobile phones, and Internet users.

The plan, said to be “having merit” according to the UK’s Foreign Office, has been devised by an outside consultant, added the report.

London, Oct. 11 : The two alleged terrorists – Bilal Abdulla and Kafeel Ahmed - who left car bombs near a busy London nightclub, used tourist rickshaws to escape the scene in an attempt to conceal their identities from CCTV cameras, a court has been told.

Bilal Abdulla, an Iraqi doctor working at an NHS hospital near Glasgow, and his Indian-born accomplice, Kafeel Ahmed, fled to a hotel while firefighters dealt with the cars left outside Tiger Tiger club in the West End.

London - Hardy Amies, the fashion house which "dressed" Queen Elizabeth II for more than half a century, announced Friday that it had filed for administration after funding talks failed.

The firm, founded in 1946 by the late (Sir) Hardy Amies, who died in 2003, had been suffering losses for several years and warned in June that poor womenswear sales would see losses accelerate in the first half of this year and would continue into 2009.

London  - Former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan said on Friday that he sees a turning point in the current financial crisis, with the troubled US housing market recovering in the first half of 2009.

Writing in Emerging Markets, a British financial publication, Greenspan said that he saw the "eventual thawing" of the world's frozen credit markets and that "more conclusive signs of pending home price stability are likely to become visible in the first half of 2009."

London - Clara Furse, the chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II at a ceremony in Buckingham Palace Friday as turmoil again raged on the stock market.

Dame Clara, as the 51-year-old will now be known, emerged from the ceremony clutching a presentation box holding the damehood insignia, but refused to speak to the media.

London, Oct. 10 : Zimbabwe''s inflation has skyrocketed to an astronomical 231 million per cent.

According to The Telegraph, the latest inflation figures show that Zimbabwe is suffering the highest inflation rate in the world.

In June the statistic stood at 11.2 million per cent a year, but the state-owned Herald newspaper said that in July it was more than 20 times higher. Monthly inflation was 2,600.2 per cent, it added.