Britain

For a member of a supposedly extinct species, Craig Wetherill does a pretty good impression of the living. He responds to premature reports of his demise by launching into a local fairy tale. "Y'n termyn eus passys, 'th era tregas yn Selevan den ha benyn yn tyller cries Chi an Hordh. . . . " The story he's recounting is "John of the Ram's House." The language he's speaking is Cornish.

It seems so very British that an ugly row has broken out between those who say they love dogs and those who say they love dogs more. But just such a royal catfight has ensnared the country's most prestigious dog show, Crufts, which opens today here in Birmingham, a four-day extravaganza of four-legged bliss that has drawn millions of viewers to the British Broadcasting Corp. since 1966. But not this year.

When Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle stepped off a plane at LAX in July 2008 -- a couple of jet-lagged Brits on the lam from the United Kingdom -- they looked for the first uniformed U.S. official they could find. Unfortunately for them, they found one. They thought they had found safe harbor from the English court that three days earlier had convicted them of hate-related writings originating on their website.

Last summer, the tranquil English village of Kentisbeare woke up to find a dagger piercing its heart. The man who ran the neighborhood pub, the Wyndham Arms, had decided to call it quits. Hit by hard times, he locked up one evening and never came back, leaving the village bereft of its "local," the watering hole down the road where, for more than 200 years, the good folk here could always drop in for a pint, a pie or a piece of gossip.

Scotland Yard investigators arrived Friday in Pakistan to help investigate the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, although the extent of their mandate was unclear. The team of British anti-terrorism officers was dispatched after President Pervez Musharraf, under intense criticism over the handling of the Bhutto inquiry, agreed to accept outside assistance. Musharraf's government initially had rebuffed international participation of any kind in the investigation.

A senior British Cabinet minister resigned Thursday in a row over political donations, prompting fresh criticism of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's leadership. Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain said he was leaving to clear his name after electoral authorities referred to the police questions about the funding of his unsuccessful campaign to become deputy Labor Party leader.

If you're looking for Russia's most notorious international outlaw, try his new office in parliament. Andrei Lugovoy, the prime suspect in the 2006 radioactive poisoning death of a former Russian spy in London, is a celebrated figure these days in the Russian capital. Not only has Moscow brushed aside extradition requests from Britain, this onetime bodyguard has just been elected to the marble halls of the Duma, the lower house of parliament. Lugovoy says he was framed.

A British judge has ordered budget airline Ryanair to pay $7,850 to members of a calypso band who were ordered off a plane at gunpoint after another passenger said they were acting suspiciously. Five members of the London-based Caribbean Steel International band were aboard a flight waiting to go from the Italian island of Sardinia to London on Dec. 31, 2006, when a passenger alerted the crew.

Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al Masri, whose sermons celebrated the Sept. 11 attacks and called for gays to be stoned to death, was cleared Thursday for extradition to the U.S. on charges of plotting to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon. But nearly four years after the United States originally sought the transfer, the cleric still has other avenues of appeal, and a final ruling could be weeks or months away, authorities said.

British consumers and retailers welcomed a cut in interest rates Thursday with relief and pleas for more, while the euro zone's central bank held rates steady but left the door open for a cut this year. The prospect for rate cuts in the 15-nation euro zone and for further reductions in Britain pushed the dollar up sharply. The euro sank to $1.4459 in late New York trading from $1.4628 late Wednesday. The pound dropped to $1.9405 from $1.9601.