British

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said his intelligence services confirmed that a British journalist kidnapped in the Gaza Strip is alive, despite a group's claim to have killed the correspondent. Alan Johnston of the BBC was abducted March 12. Abbas said he knew which group was holding him, but he would not say whether contact had been established with the captors.

If it weren't for the alcohol-free drinks, the scene could have been straight out of an English pub. Young men sat in animated groups, sipping milkshakes and mugs of milky tea in a cozy, wood-paneled room. Others tucked into heaping plates of fish and chips. The TV was tuned to a soccer match, a game of pool was underway, and pop music pulsed in the background. Until a crashing explosion sent everyone diving to the floor.

LONDON -- You don't hear much about women's soccer in England. Then again, you don't really hear all that much about rugby, cricket, golf or, come to think of it, anything about tennis, or curling, or even all that much about O.J., compared with how much you hear about the stupefyingly colossal English Premier League.

Three British bankers were extradited to Texas on Thursday to face Enron Corp.-related charges filed more than four years ago in a case that sparked a political storm over a treaty used to bring them across the Atlantic Ocean. They arrived Thursday afternoon, in custody of U.S. marshals. They were taken to a federal detention center to await their first appearance in court today. Their years-long extradition battle ended earlier this year when they lost the last of a string of appeals.

Insurgent attacks in southern and western Afghanistan killed a British soldier and four Afghans, and police killed 10 suspected Taliban militants, officials said. The British soldier died when mortar rounds hit a NATO base in Kandahar province, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization said in a statement. Afghan officials said gunmen killed four people, including two policemen, in western Afghanistan, and government forces killed 10 militants in a clash in Helmand's Musa Qala district.

A Seal Beach bartender who charmed patrons by singing Irish ballads was deported Sunday, one month after an immigration appeals court ordered him removed from the United States for his role in the murder of two British soldiers 18 years ago. Sean O'Cealleagh was returned to Ireland aboard a commercial flight under the escort of two federal immigration officers, U.S. officials said.

They call this the "land of 1,001 chateaux" -- and maybe as many B&Bs with full English breakfast. In the shadow of crooked, half-timbered buildings in this French medieval town, British-accented English burbles through the weekly market like water in the centuries-old fountain on the town square. Down a side street, past stands of pungent French cheeses, a glass-fronted shop hawks baked beans, Marmite and other specialites britanniques.

Keith Waterhouse, a British writer, raconteur and wit whose works include the enduringly popular novel "Billy Liar," died in his sleep early Friday at his London home, his family said. He was 80. Waterhouse had his first major success in 1959 with "Billy Liar," the story of a funeral parlor worker who escapes into a world of fantasy. It became a hit 1963 movie starring Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie, and spawned a television series. Waterhouse also helped write some of the best-known British films of the 1960s, including "A Kind of Loving" and "Whistle Down the Wind."

The 1989 drug-trade miniseries "Traffik" is known, if at all, as the basis for the Oscar-winning 2000 film "Traffic." But this relatively little-seen British drama, which Acorn Media is reissuing in a remastered version this week, can stake a claim as an important forerunner of both the social-realist serial epic (as exemplified by "The Wire") and the globalized we-are-the-world movie (à la "Babel" and "Syriana"). When "Traffik" first aired on British television (and on PBS in the States the following year)

Maria Gulovich Liu, who as a young schoolteacher in Slovakia during World War II joined the underground resistance as a courier and later helped a small group of American and British intelligence agents evade the German Army as they fled through the frigid mountains to safety, has died. She was 87. Liu, who received a Bronze Star for her "heroic and meritorious" service to the Office of Strategic Services, died of colon cancer Friday at her home in Port Hueneme, said Jim Downs, a family friend.