Former prime minister Gordon Brown has called for the creation of a worldwide fund to combat a "hidden and silent emergency in education".

The creators of Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run are at the centre of an angry storm surrounding their latest film amid accusations of bad taste and disability discrimination.

Alarm in China after bus driver dies, and, in nearby Hong Kong, 19,000 chickens have been slaughtered

A Chinese bus driver who tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus died in a city bordering Hong Kong today, health officials said.

Given the history of half-truths and special pleading which characterise the public pronouncements of tobacco companies, many people will find it unsurprising that the latest analysis casts doubt on previous industry-backed studies into the safety of cigarette additives. Indeed, independent scientists now claim that research published by Philip Morris a decade ago actually "obscured findings of toxicity".

The Aids crisis has affected so many millions that the numbers can be difficult to understand. Here, we look at the statistics behind the epidemic.

The Indian government says the rate of suicide is increasing in the country and more than 15 people kill themselves every hour.

Does screening for breast cancer do more harm than good? Once, a question like that would have been dismissed as heretical nonsense. After all, according to the Government's official line, 1,400 lives a year are saved by screening. But over the past few years evidence has begun to be raised suggesting that the harm may outweigh the benefits. A "better safe than sorry" approach can lead to over-diagnosis and unnecessary mutilating surgery for a lesion that was not going to cause harm.

Starring: Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet

Doctors have accused the BBC of bowing to pharmaceutical industry propaganda after a storyline in an episode of the hospital drama series Holby City featured an expensive drug that is widely regarded as "ineffective and unsafe".

Tobacco is the only consumer product that kills one in two long-term users. It remains the preventable cause of more than a quarter of all cancer deaths in the UK. The tobacco industry has funded misleading research and seeks to gain unwarranted respectability by association with credible bodies such as universities.

The United Nations today warned of a possible resurgence of the deadly bird flu virus, saying wild bird migrations had brought it back to previously virus-free countries and that a mutant strain was spreading in Asia.