Britain

Nuclear submarines from Britain and France collided deep in the Atlantic Ocean this month, authorities said Monday in the first acknowledgment of a highly unusual accident. Officials said the low-speed crash did not damage the vessels' nuclear reactors or missiles or cause radiation to leak. But antinuclear groups said it was still a frightening reminder of the risks posed by submarines powered by radioactive material and bristling with nuclear weapons.

Two of three respondents to a British poll have lied about reading books they have not, and George Orwell's "1984" tops the literary fib list, according to results published Thursday. Commissioned by the organizers of World Book Day, an annual celebration of reading in Britain, the study also shows that the author people really enjoy reading is J.K. Rowling, creator of the bestselling Harry Potter wizard series. The main reason for lying given by the 1,342 people surveyed was to impress others.

Two British military personnel were killed and four people were seriously wounded in a shooting at an army base in Northern Ireland, police said Saturday. "The two fatalities as I understand it are military personnel," a police spokeswoman said, adding that two of the wounded were also from the army. The shooting at the Massereene base near the town of Antrim followed reports that British special forces were back in the province gathering intelligence on dissident republicans.

The Bard, or not the Bard? That is the question posed by Monday's unveiling of a centuries-old portrait of a dark-eyed, handsome man in Elizabethan finery. Experts say it is the only portrait of William Shakespeare painted during his lifetime -- in effect, the sole source of our knowledge of what the great man looked like. But they can't be certain. In the shifting sands of Shakespeare scholarship, where even the authorship of the plays is sometimes disputed, nothing is written in stone.

A senior U.S. official Thursday expressed strong disagreement with the British decision to begin contacts with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, revealing a rare split between the two closely allied nations. The official said the Obama administration doesn't believe, as the British do, that there are separate military, political and social wings of the Shiite Muslim militia group, and that it is acceptable to deal with the political wing.

British troops ended six years of combat operations in Iraq on Thursday, beginning their withdrawal from the southern city of Basra after a bloody and costly mission that was deeply unpopular at home. Prime Minister Gordon Brown praised the military's accomplishments and sacrifices, speaking after meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki at Brown's Downing Street office.

The storied Nepalese warriors who have served in the British military for nearly two centuries were given the automatic right Thursday to settle in Britain, gaining a hard-won victory after years of lawsuits and lobbying. Actress Joanna Lumley, whose advocacy for Gurkhas made her the public face of the campaign, said the decision made it "a fantastic day for my brothers and sisters." She joined Gurkhas gathered outside Parliament in screams of "Ayo Gurkhali!"

Talk of the dilapidation of American tennis has droned on for so long that it's stale; talk of the dilapidation of Australian tennis has revved up long enough that it's audible; and talk of the dilapidation of British tennis has blared roughly since dinosaurs roamed the earth. Meanwhile, just look at the wake of the defending champion Rafael Nadal, even after he withdrew from this Wimbledon and took his muscles to Mallorca: six male Spaniards (plus two females) in the final 32.

She was a civil servant -- in fact, a secretary -- in August 1939, but Muriel Cooper knew before most of her fellow Londoners that war with Germany was imminent. But the young typist didn't dare breathe a word of what she knew. "We were told that, if we ever disclosed anything, we would be shot," Cooper recalled being told upon accepting a job with a government intelligence division. Her job was to prepare super-sensitive reports for Britain's two wartime prime ministers as well as King George VI. "I had to put 'Most Secret' on every envelope I did," Cooper, 91, told me during a visit to the Cabinet War Rooms, the underground bunker near St. James's Park in which political and military leaders plotted the battles that would eventually free much of Europe from the tyranny of Adolf Hitler.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown defended Britain's military presence in Afghanistan in a major policy speech Friday that came as a defense aide quit over the mission's strategy. Brown said that insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan still present major terrorist threats. "Each time I have to ask myself if we are doing the right thing by being in Afghanistan. Each time I have to ask myself if we can justify sending our young men and women to fight for this cause," Brown said in a keynote speech to the Institute of Strategic Studies.