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By Aamir Ashraf ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan backtracked on Friday on a demand for foreign students enrolled in Islamic schools to leave the country by year's end, but urged the hundreds remaining to go as soon as possible. President Pervez Musharraf had ordered all foreigners studying at the schools, known as madrasas, to leave by December 31 as part of a drive to stamp out terrorism and religious extremism following the July 7 London bombings. His order came after revelations that at leas ...

LONDON (Reuters) - The Premier League has promised to review its Christmas fixture list after supporters travelled hundreds of kilometres this week for three matches that were postponed because of bad weather. Matches at Bolton, Blackburn and Newcastle were lost to the freezing weather on Wednesday with Newcastle United's match against Charlton called off 30 minutes before the kickoff. Fourteen  ...

GAZA (Reuters) - The kidnappers of three Britons in the Gaza Strip have still not presented demands or been in contact almost two days after the abduction, the Palestinian police chief said on Friday. "They have not made any demand and they have not revealed their identities," Ala Hosni said at a press conference, referring to Kate Burton, a human rights worker captured along with her visiting pa ...

VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Depictions of the U.S., French and British heads of state naked and engaged in a sexual act will be removed from hundreds of billboards across Vienna after causing a national uproar, the artists decided Thursday. Besides two images showing nude models wearing masks of President Bush, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and French President Jacques Chirac, another work also will b ...

LONDON (Reuters) - Sports Minister Richard Caborn is seeking a cap on soccer players' salaries throughout Europe in co-operation with the European governing body UEFA. "There's no point in English football earning 1.4 billion pounds from television contracts when most of it goes on players' wages," Caborn told the Daily Express. "We need to have restrictions on salaries and controls on agents."  ...

LONDON (Reuters) - Unmarried couples in England and Wales will be able jointly to adopt children from Friday when the most radical overhaul of adoption laws for 30 years comes into force. The new law means that both adults in a stable relationship can become a child's legal parents. Until now, only married or single people could become adoptive parents so in unmarried couples only one of the adu ...

LONDON (Reuters) - Travellers were advised to check forecasts and driving conditions before setting out as snow and freezing weather were expected to hit parts of the country on Friday. Up to 20 cm of snow was expected to fall in some higher areas in the north of the country and strong winds were also expected to cause drifting. The Met Office has issued severe weather warnings for large parts of eastern England and Scotland and said snow and freezing fog threatened to make the roads treachero ...

LONDON (Reuters) - A cold snap gripped the country for a third day on Thursday with plunging temperatures making travel dangerous, forecasters said, and more snow is expected on Friday. The Met Office issued severe weather warnings for large parts of eastern England and Scotland and said snow and freezing fog threatened to make the roads treacherous. "We have some more severe weather on its way, pushing in from the west. That will spread across the country tonight," a Met Office spokesman said ...

By Susan Heavey WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pregnant women coached through their first delivery do not fare much better than those who just do what feels natural, according to a study released on Friday. Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern found that women who were told to push 10 minutes for every contraction gave birth 13 minutes faster than those who were not given specific instruc ...

SEOUL (Reuters) - The U.S. periodical that published a landmark May 2005 paper on tailor-made embryonic stem cells -- a study since debunked as a fabrication -- will retract the article, according to a statement received on Friday. A South Korean panel dealt a devastating blow to discredited scientist Hwang Woo-suk on Thursday, concluding his once-celebrated team provided no data to prove they had produced tailored embryonic stem cells. "There is no question in our minds that the stem-cell pap ...