ABC reports that US air marshals are currently “flooding” flights from Germany and Britain.

As many as five or six U.S. air marshals are now assigned to each U.S.-bound flight from airports in Frankfurt, London and Manchester, England, because of fears terrorists might attempt a coordinated series of mid-air explosions, law enforcement officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

“We’re afraid someone in the back is going to mix something or light something up, so air marshals are being placed strategically through the plane,” said one senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the stepped-up security.

The stepped-up security on flights out of Britain’s Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester airports began about two weeks ago, based on intelligence reports that another al Qaeda hijacking plot was in the making, the officials said.

The London Times quotes an MI5 report.

Al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq are planning the first “large-scale” terrorist attacks on Britain and other western targets with the help of supporters in Iran, according to a leaked intelligence report.

Spy chiefs warn that one operative had said he was planning an attack on “a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki” in an attempt to “shake the Roman throne”, a reference to the West.

Another plot could be timed to coincide with Tony Blair stepping down as prime minister, an event described by Al-Qaeda planners as a “change in the head of the company”.

The report, produced earlier this month and seen by The Sunday Times, appears to provide evidence that Al-Qaeda is active in Iran and has ambitions far beyond the improvised attacks it has been waging against British and American soldiers in Iraq.

There is no evidence of a formal relationship between Al-Qaeda, a Sunni group, and the Shi’ite regime of President Mah-moud Ahmadinejad, but experts suggest that Iran’s leaders may be turning a blind eye to the terrorist organisation’s activities.

The intelligence report also makes it clear that senior Al-Qaeda figures in the region have been in recent contact with operatives in Britain.

It follows revelations last year that up to 150 Britons had travelled to Iraq to fight as part of Al-Qaeda’s “foreign legion”. A number are thought to have returned to the UK, after receiving terrorist training, to form sleeper cells.

The report was compiled by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) – based at MI5’s London headquarters – and provides a quarterly review of the international terror threat to Britain. It draws a distinction between Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda’s core leadership, who are thought to be hiding on the Afghan-Pakistan border, and affiliated organisations elsewhere.

Read the whole thing.

The Telegraph is commemorating Prince William’s break-up with his girl-friend, reportedly over class issues (the young lady was seen by the British Press chewing gum) with a quiz designed to identify your place in the British social system.

I found that I knew all the right answers, thus –in theory– entitling me to be Duke of Devonshire. But, if restricted to the facts, I’d have to settle for “having a coat of arms.”

The Telegraph editorializes:

If the Iranians hate us, let them also fear us.

Read the whole thing.

Iran continues its shameless lies and the contemptible games typical of outlaw dictatorships, making propaganda videos featuring illegally captured British hostages, releasing extorted “confessions” echoing its own official dishonest statements, promising to release a female hostage and then reneging, and threatening the lives of the captives.

As Simon Heffer observes: at some stage, Iran’s lethal contempt for the rule of international law is going to mean war.

Breaking News

Bloomberg:

Iran seized 15 British naval personnel who were conducting “routine boarding operations” in Iraqi waters, the U.K. Ministry of Defence said.

“The boarding party had completed a successful inspection of a merchant ship when they and their two boats were surrounded and escorted by Iranian vessels into Iranian territorial waters,” the ministry said in an e-mailed statement. “We are urgently pursuing this matter with the Iranian authorities at the highest level.”

The incident occurred in the Arabian Gulf at about 10:30 a.m. Iraq time today, the ministry said. It gave no details of the units and vessels involved. Britain is demanding the immediate return of the military personnel and vessels, and Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has summoned the Iranian ambassador in London, the ministry said.

It’s not the first time U.K. naval forces have clashed with Iran in the region. In June 2004, Iran held eight British servicemen for three days after capturing them in the Shatt al- Arab waterway that runs along the border between Iran and Iraq.

Iran, which also captured three British vessels in the 2004 incident, said the Britons were in Iranian waters and paraded them blindfolded on television, forcing them to make statements apologizing for their “mistake.” The U.K. crews said they were escorted forcibly into Iranian waters.

Allahpundit has the Channel 4 investigative program broadcast Monday, January 15, revealing the kind of Islamic extremism being preached today in British mosques.

The program has been divided into three 8-9 minute videos, which follow one after the other automatically.

link

Telegraph article

virtual tour

Yorkshire airlines.

2:09 video

The Times provides a typical story of fireworks misuse by an ordinary citizen illustrating precisely why we all need the nanny state to ban them in order to protect us from ourselves. After all, absolutely anyone might try this.

Neil Everley of the Quorn with Golden Eagle/Steppe Eagle cross

As we noted last December, the infamous February 2005 Hunt Ban, enacted by Britain’s Labour Party as a gesture of class animosity and urban spite, banned hunting par force du chien (i.e., the traditional pursuit and reduction to possession of the quarry by a pack of hounds), but included certain loopholes: drag hunts (i.e., hunts in which the pack hunts an artificially created line of scent) are lawful; and hounds can be used to follow a scent and to flush out a fox, which may then be pursued by no more than two dogs, and ultimately shot or taken by means of falconry.

The strange consequence of this vile legislation has been a curious revival of falconry employing large raptors by several enterprising hunts. Last year, the Cheshire Hunt was seen taking to the field accompanied by a European Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo).

This year, the illustrious Quorn is training a huge Eurasian Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos chrysaetos) and Steppe Eagle (Aquila nipalensis) cross.

Melton Today

Hat tip to Steve Bodio. I’m less pessimistic than Steve’s correspondent Patrick, who evidently accompanied the link he sent Steve with prognostications of havoc.

Let’s see — amped up hounds, lots of people, a couple hundred horses, a panicked fox, and someone in a coat and tie handling a massive Golden Eagle cross in the middle of it all. Madness on stilts if you ask me! When the eagle is injured or killed, it will be described as an “accident” rather than planned stupidity.”

I’m sure some very interesting misadventures (and ones worth writing about!) will inevitably occur, but it’s all part of the game in the sporting field. And I’m rather pleased myself at the irony of the same detestable English Puritanism which nearly extinguished the ancient sport of falconry in the British Isles in the 17th century, inadvertently ushering it back in in the 21th century, and in a particularly colorful and grandiose form to boot.

Alfred Tennyson opined that simple faith (was more) than Norman blood, and Tennyson may well be right.

Stephen Oppenheimer, one of the most prominent British autorities on DNA research, is contending that there simply isn’t all that much Norman blood around in Britain anyway, nor Celtic, nor Roman, nor Anglo-Saxon.

According to Oppenheimer,

Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands…

The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language.

Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix…

based on the overall genetic perspective of the British, it seems that Celts, Belgians, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all immigrant minorities compared with the Basque pioneers, who first ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets.

By “Basque pioneers,” Oppenheimer is referring to female-line mitochondrial DNA haplogroup H1.

mtDNA Haplogroups in general.

Oppenheimer has a new book on all of this, titled The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story.