Daily Mail Newspaper

Stephen Lawrence and a friend, both black and 18, were waiting for a bus home in a rough part of southeast London on the night of April 22, 1993, when a group of white youths attacked them, punching, kicking and yelling racial epithets. Passersby remember a scuffle. The white youths ran one way. The victims tried to run the other. But Lawrence was bleeding too heavily to go far. He died, of two stab wounds, before an ambulance arrived.

That constant, repetitive, annoying whine in the air has been tracked to its source. It comes from South America. There, despite economic mismanagement and organizational chaos in almost every soccer league and governing federation, the sport's leaders apparently have little else to do but complain about the four places the continent was allocated last month for the 2006 World Cup in Germany. They want more.

The Muslim businessmen who tend the East End textile shops went home early. So did the vendors at the Whitechapel Market after police swooped down on suspicious garbage bags. Down the street, a group of Muslim women and children edged nervously past a muscle-bound white youth who was shouting into his cellphone, "Yeah, mate, where I am, everyone looks like an Al Qaeda terrorist!"

Spies are averse to publicity, and Sir David Spedding was no exception. Until his death this week, no contemporary photograph of him had ever been published. His official biography was purposely sparse, identifying him only as a career diplomat and civil servant for Britain. But in the fictional world of James Bond, Spedding was the embodiment of "M," the dashing spy's mysterious boss who writes memos in green ink.

Anyone who has ever looked at the deceptively simple brush strokes of a modern painting and thought, "I could do that," would certainly have a similar response to Tracey Emin's "My Bed" installation at the Tate Gallery. Emin is one of the contenders for Britain's coveted Turner Prize for contemporary art.

With a twinkle in his eye and his bagpipes at the ready, Murdo Urquart stood at a roadside rest stop overlooking Loch Ness, waiting for the next busload of tourists. For a bit of loose change from visitors, the kilt-clad ex-soldier will happily puff the strains of a Scottish ballad into the stiff Highlands breeze. And, for those who ask, he will add a dash more spice to one of the world's great lingering mysteries: What really lies behind the legend of the Loch Ness monster?

Thanks to good genes and, perhaps, good gin, Britain's Queen Mother celebrated her 100th birthday Friday, as tens of thousands of well-wishers turned out at Buckingham Palace to salute their favorite royal. Tributes ranged from "Cheers Ma'am"--the headline in the Sun tabloid, which offered free coupons for the Queen Mum's "favorite tipple"--to the traditional card that reigning Queen Elizabeth II sends to all British centenarians. Only this one, written by hand, was signed "Lilibet."

Plainclothes police engaged in the frenetic hunt for fugitives involved in London's transit bombings pursued a suspect into an Underground train Friday and shot him to death in front of screaming and cowering passengers.

The foreigners who came from afar to the grasslands of western Nigeria seemed like a spectacular circus act to the area's subsistence farmers. Local people were amazed by the dozens of tractors, harrows and planters that materialized along with huge amounts of seed and fertilizer. But the residents were flabbergasted again when their new neighbors started planting crops, making, it seemed, some equally spectacular blunders.