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By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Black Death that decimated populations in Europe and elsewhere during the middle of the 14th century may not have been a blindly indiscriminate killer, as some experts have believed. An analysis of 490 skeletons from a London for Black Death victims demonstrated that the infection did not affect everyone equally, two U.S. scientists said on Monday. While  ...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Beatles guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has stepped down as the head of the organisation that brought "transcendental meditation" to the West, an aide said on Monday. "His work is done and now he'll be concentrating on the field of silence and dedicating himself more to pure knowledge rather than administrative matters," Benjamin Feldman, finance minister for the Global Country of ...

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain and the United States cannot say they support democracy in Pakistan unless they call for the reinstatement of sacked judges, cricketer-turned-politician Imran Kahn said on Monday. Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf sacked senior judges when he imposed emergency rule on November 3. Khan, speaking after Prime Minister Gordon Brown met Musharraf in London, said Britain and ...

By Paul Majendie LONDON (Reuters) - Princess Diana thought luxury store owner Mohamed al-Fayed was spying on her during her last voyage on his yacht before she died in a Paris car crash, her sister told the inquest into Diana's death on Monday. Diana and Mohamed al-Fayed's son Dodi were killed in a high-speed crash in a Paris road tunnel in August 1997 while being chased by paparazzi desperate to  ...

By Andrew Hurst and Thierry Leveque PARIS (Reuters) - Exchange officials warned Societe Generale about rogue trader Jerome Kerviel's deals late last year, a Paris prosecutor said, piling pressure on the French bank to explain why his trades were not discovered sooner. The setback came as investigating judges threw out the most serious accusation put forward by prosecutors against 31-year-old Kervi ...

By Matt Spetalnick WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush will try to reassure nervous Americans on Monday he is doing everything possible to keep the economy from sliding into recession, as he struggles to stay relevant in the twilight of his term. With the stumbling U.S. economy supplanting the unpopular Iraq war as the public's top concern, Bush, in his final State of the Union address ...

By Andrew Hough LONDON (Reuters) - Prince Charles will not be attending the Beijing Olympics, his office confirmed on Monday, a move that was hailed by pro-Tibet campaigners but labelled "unfair" by Games organisers. The Prince of Wales is a long-standing supporter of Tibet and its spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. In 2004, he hosted a reception at his St James's Palace residence in honour of the  ...

By Bate Felix LONDON (Reuters) - Britons spend more than twice as much of their weekly budget on housing as they did 50 years ago but only half as much on food, official statistics showed on Monday. The Office for National Statistics' Family Expenditure Survey, launched in 1957 to gather information of household spending patterns, shows the proportion spent on alcohol has remained unchanged. Fift ...

By Jeremy Lovell LONDON (Reuters) - Leading chefs will join forces with environment group Greenpeace on Wednesday in a campaign to push restaurants to serve up only species of fish that have not been overexploited. Experts say that some three-quarters of the world's fish stocks has been pushed to the brink due to overfishing and, with it, widespread corruption. "Protecting the diversity of fish i ...

CRETEIL, France (Reuters) - Six French activists sentenced in Chad to eight years' hard labour for trying to kidnap dozens of children had their sentences converted into French jail terms of the same length by a court on Monday. The six members of the aid group Zoe's Ark were arrested in Chad in October and found guilty last month of trying to kidnap 103 African children. They were later flown ba ...