Britain has the busiest,

most congested roads 

in Europe according 

to new research

Advertorial feature: We have 77 vehicles per kilometre of road in Britain, that's 76% more than the European average

PA

Commuters in heavy traffic in north east London

Britain has the busiest, most congested roads in Europe.

Anyone who’s driven a car in the last few years probably won’t be surprised to learn that

According to research from the World Bank, there are 77 vehicles per kilometre of road in Britain – 76% more than the European average. That’s two and a half times more than Norway, which boasts the quietest roads at just 29 vehicles per km.

But despite this national snarl-up – or maybe because of it – UK roads are among the safest in the world.  Among EU nations, only Malta has a lower number of deaths per million population.

In 2012, there were 28 people killed on UK roads per million population. Norway, with its deserted roads and sensible people, suffered a total of 148 deaths, or 30 per million.

The figures show that the USA’s famous love affair with the car is more of a fatal attraction. American road accidents caused 33, 780 deaths in 2012, or 108 per million. That’s more than 3 times the UK rate, and one of the highest road fatality rates in the developed world.

Despite massive increases in traffic over the last few decades, the number of people killed on our roads has been falling steadily. From around 7,700 deaths in 1972, and 5,500 in the mid 1980s, there were just 1,754 in 2012.

Young mum was told to

abort her baby but 

battled on and kept a 

diary

Rachel Collins was told baby only had 10% chance of survival and she should abort. She kept a diary of her pregnancy and now little Alfie is happy and healthy she can't wait for him to read it

Caters

Happy days: Rachel Collins and Alfie

Every day mum-to-be Rachel Collins would make sure she took time to sit down and pour her feelings into her diary.

Started when she first discovered she was pregnant, it was to be a journal of her entire nine months preparing for the arrival of the baby she was so desperate for.

The 30-year-old and her partner, warehouse worker Tyler O’Driscoll, had been trying for a child for years. Months earlier they had suffered the agony of an ectopic pregnancy – when the embryo implants outside the womb.

Are you a secret caffeine

 addict? The health

 dangers off drinking too

 much tea and coffee

As a report claims we’re in the grip of caffeine use disorder, Caroline Jones looks at the worrying side effects of our coffee hits

Getty

Bean there, done that: But too much caffeine is bad for you

There’s no doubt caffeine has become our favourite legal high. Millions of us each morning make a trip to buy a latte on our way to work.

We spend £6.3billion a year on takeaway coffee and 80% of people around the globe drink the stuff daily. That is before we throw caffeine-packed tea, chocolate, cola and energy drinks into the mix.

No wonder a new report is claiming that many of us are heavily addicted to caffeine without realising.

Pictured: Ukraine opposition leader Yulia

Tymoshenko emotional 

reunion with daughter 

after release from prison

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Eugenia Tymoshenko, daughter of opposition leader Yulia, says she hopes her mother's release from prison will usher in a new era of democracy for Ukraine

View gallery

Reuters / Getty

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Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko's daughter reacts to mum's release from prison

View gallery

Photographers captured the emotional moment Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko was reunited with her daughter after being released from prison.

Daughter Eugenia wept tears of joy as she saw her mother for the first time after her two-and-a-half year prison term.

After being released from jail in Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, Tymoshenko was immediately flown to Kiev to make a speech in front of thousands of supporters in the city's Independence Square.

Yulia Tymoshenko, one of president Viktor Yanukovych's fiercest rivals, was jailed over a controversial deal with Russian energy company Gazprom, in which a court decided she had abused the powers of her office.

The real couples who

 met and fell in love at salsa dancing class

As Cuban Fury is released three if of the real couples who met on the dance floor discuss their salsa experiences

Furious dancing: Nick Frost (Bruce Garrett) in Cuban Fury

In the new Brit romcom Cuban Fury, salsa dancing is the way to meet the woman (or man) of your dreams.

Funnyman Nick Frost plays Bruce, an overweight, washed-up former teen dance champ who falls for his new boss, Julia, played by Rashida Jones, who’s mad about the sizzling Latin American dance.

And he decides that the only way she’ll fall in love with him is if he dusts off his Cuban heels and starts wiggling his hips.

Wife killer, Arowolo, gets death sentence

 

 

 

| credits: Odutayo Odusanya

A Lagos High Court in Ikeja has sentenced to death Akolade Arowolo for the murder of his banker wife, Titilayo, who he repeatedly stabbed to death with a knife at their residence in Isolo, Lagos, on June 24, 2011.

Justice Lateefat Okunnu, in her judgment on Friday, held that even though there was no eyewitness to the incident, the circumstantial evidence adduced by the prosecution proved the murder charge against the convict beyond all reasonable doubts.

“I pronounce the defendant guilty as charged and accordingly sentenced to death,” the court held.

The 32-year-old man, decked in white short sleeve shirt and black trousers, broke down in the dock and shouted, “Jesus, I did not do this,” shortly after the judge made her pronouncement.

“Jesus, what will happen to Olamide (the daughter the deceased had for her)?” he asked rhetorically.

The convict, who came into the courtroom with a Bible and a diary, began speaking in tongues as he was being led out of the court room. He held on to the Bible and the diary even after the prison warders handcuffed him and led him out of the courtroom.

The prison warders, who were assisted by the convict’s lawyer, Mr. Olanrewaju Ajanaku, had tough time dragging him to the temporary detention cell within the court premises.

Intermittently, Akolade would bow down, while the warders tried to pull him up, and rise up to say, “in the name of Jesus, I’m going to come out. I will not be condemned because I did not do this”.

He was led into the courtroom at about 9.36am. Before the judge arrived the courtroom at about 9.46am, he was alternately going on his kneels to pray and reading his Bible.

 

 

 

Undergraduates make fortune scavenging in Lagos waste dump

 

It is mostly believed that only a mad person or somebody who is psychologically demented that would go to a heap of dirt, relax and patiently rummage the dirt with hands and legs and analyse what he picks at the dumpsite.

But in Nigeria, it is not just the mentally deranged that go to the waste dump, sane, able-bodied men and women get their daily bread by scavenging at  dumpsites.

They could easily pass for mentally deranged people in their dirty clothes. But a closer encounter with them would give them away as normal Nigerians merely looking for survival.

Felicia Aje (not real name), a student of Lagos State Polytechnic, is one of them. Aje spends her holidays and mid-semester breaks at the Oko filling waste dump in Igando (Lagos), picking used bottles of soft drinks, water and canned containers. Aje doesn’t even care that she is  being ridiculed by her mates who see what she does as dirty and menial for an undergraduate. She confided in our correspondent that others scavenging with her were undergraduates from different institutions.

While some other undergraduates would be having fun, traversing from one joint or cinema to another enjoying their holidays, Aje is at a waste dump, scavenging, while hoping she would get a junk that she could sell.

Her fate is not any different from so many Nigerian youths and even older men and women who have turned to waste dump scavengers in order to earn a living.

These people pick empty bottled water, peel off the label, put them in a sack and get them ready for buyers which are mainly recycling companies.

The steady rise in the unemployment rate in the country has forced many people to dwell and work at waste dumps so as to make a living. While Lagos residents pay to dispose their wastes through the compactor trucks, they, indirectly, feed these scavengers whose daily meals come from what they make from the used bottles and junk they gather from waste dumps.