London, July 28 : Four giant panda cubs were born within 14 hours at a breeding centre in southwest China over the weekend.

The birth boom began on Saturday at the Chengdu Panda Breeding Research Centre when Qiyuan, a nine-year-old bear whose name means Magic Luck, gave birth to female twins at 5:24 pm and 6:16 pm, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Eight-year-old Chenggong, or Success, gave birth to a cub a little more than an hour later, followed by 8-year-old Zhuzhu, or Pearl, who gave birth at 6:55 am the following morning, the centre''s expert Yang Feifei said.

The breeding centre is currently raising 71 pandas in captivity.

The giant panda is revered as an unofficial national symbol of China.

London, July 28 : All passengers flying to and from British airports will be fingerprinted from next year.

According to The Telegraph, the Home Office''s Border and Immigration Agency has confirmed that it is considering forcing airport operators to introduce this measure to increase security.

It is concerned that so-called ''common departure lounges'' could allow an incoming international passenger - possibly a terrorist or a criminal - to switch tickets with an accomplice booked on a domestic flight.

The international passenger would then be able to fly elsewhere in Britain and enter the country without being checked by immigration authorities.

London, July 28 : Dungeon dad Josef Fritzl’s devastated wife Rosemarie made her last visit to the horror house to pack her bags and never return.

In April, news broke that Rosemarie’s husband Josef had kept their daughter Elisabeth as a sex slave in a cellar beneath their ancestral home for 24 long years and fathered six children with her.

And now, 69-year-old Rosemarie, who was unaware of her daughter’s plight, is without any money and is struggling to survive on 300 pounds-a-month benefits.

London, July 28 : British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had to take on a new job recently – that of being a V. I. P. tour guide to presumptive US Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama.

As soon as he arrived in London and met Brown, Obama asked every tourist’s favourite question: “Can you show me where the Queen lives?”

The request prompted Brown to act as a VIP tour guide for the U. S. senator, reports The Mirror.

However, alarmed American and British secret service officials curtailed their walkabout after astonished tourists came to close to dignitaries outside Buckingham Palace.

London, July 28 : New Chelsea manager Luiz Felipe Scolari has been impressed by his Chelsea squad, and signalled the start of hostilities for the coming season as he claimed that his squad is capable of winning the quadruple -- the Premier League, the Champions League, the FA Cup and the League Cup.

Brazilian Scolari has been quiet about his hopes for his new team so far, but three weeks of working with them has convinced him he has a squad capable of winning it all.

And Scolari has laid down a challenge to his men by saying that, if they can get to three-cup finals, he knows how to win them.

London, July 28 : A controversial new theory has proposed that the clashing of supercontinents billions of years ago may have been responsible for the oxygen-rich atmosphere that sustains much of the life on Earth today.

According to a report in Nature News, the theory has been put forward by geochemists at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.

They have suggested that as tectonic plates smashed into each other, reshaping supercontinents such as Pangaea, it set off a chain of events leading to increased oxygen in the atmosphere.

The Earth had almost negligible oxygen levels until the ''great oxidation event'' roughly 2.5 billion years ago. Today, oxygen makes up about 21% of the atmosphere.