London - Unemployment in Britain has risen sharply to reach 1.79 million or 5.7 per cent of the workforce, its highest level since 1999, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said Wednesday.

The figures relate to the second quarter of this year, up to the end of August, a period during which unemployment increased by 164,000.

The rise - the biggest since 1991 - took the official unemployment rate to 5.7 per cent from 5.2 per cent in the previous quarter.

In September, the number of people claiming jobseeker's allowance increased by 31,800 to 939,900, the eighth consecutive monthly rise and the highest figure for almost two years.

London, Oct. 15: A British Sikh kebab shop owner has been asked to close down his business after police caught him cooking kebabs with the corpse of a colleague lying on a sofa nearby.

Jaswinder Singh was ordered to stop preparing curries, kebabs and Indian sweets immediately.

According to The Sun, a magistrates’ court heard the catalogue of horrors at Pappu Sweet Centre and Catering in Wolverhampton, West Midlands.

It included flies, rats, filth, mouldy food and staff dropping cigarette ends and spitting on the floor.

Refrigerators were running at more than 68°F (20°C). Singh, 45, was banned from working with food again after he admitted
12 hygiene and pest control offences.

London, Oct. 15 : A significant terror plot is being investigated by the security services, Britain’s counter-terrorism minister has warned.

Lord West''s comments came the day after the Lords forced the Government to abandon plans to extend detention without trial.

Lord West, who advises the Prime Minister on security matters, told the House of Lords: "There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring this."

British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith dropped the measure from the bill after it was defeated in the upper house but warned critics they were exposing the country to a greater risk.

London, Oct 15: Scientists have found the hottest ever planet that sizzles at 2250 degree Celsius, which is as hot as some stars, a find that could challenge models of how close planets can sidle up to their host stars.

According to a report in New Scientist, the new planet, known as WASP-12b, is 1.5 times as massive as Jupiter.

Incredibly, it takes just over a day to circle its host star, orbiting at 1/40th the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

London, October 15: An American research team has developed a new “gecko glue” that is about 10 times stickier than Spider-Man’s suit.

Liming Dai of University of Dayton, Ohio, and Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Institute of Technology have revealed that they have successfully used nanotubes to make a material that is 10 times sticker than some gecko lizards’ feet, and can also be easily unstuck with a tug in the right direction.

Gecko''s superhero toes are covered in microscopic hairs, known as setae, with even smaller branches at the tips, called spatulae, which ensure that its foot has a large surface area in contact with any surface, maximising the weak but ever-present attraction between adjacent molecules known as the van der Waals force.

London, Oct 15: India's young novelist Aravind Adiga has reportedly won the 50,000 pound Man-Booker-Prize for the year 2008 for his first novel ‘The White Tiger’.

Adiga is the third first-time novelist to win the Booker Prize, which is awarded every year for the best novel in the British Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland.

34-year old Adiga is one of the two first-time novelists, the other being Australia's Steve Toltz.