New Zealand's Maori king has refused to meet the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their baby Prince George during a royal tour next month, saying a proposed 90-minute slot would not allow enough time for the meeting. 

The U.S. won't send a presidential delegation to the Paralympic Games in Sochi, Russia, the White House announced Monday in response to Russia's military advances in Ukraine. President Obama is still in full support of the U.S. athletes and wishes them success, White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

Several weeks ago, Club Deportivo Palestino, a top Chilean football team, was banned from wearing their shirt after it caused an international dispute, because the shirts depicted a map of pre-1948 Palestine in the shape of the number 1, denying any Israeli claim to the land. The cartographical choices we make are a fairly accurate barometer of an individual’s perspective. It shows how we wish to frame a debate.

Buckingham Palace has bought up dozens of website addresses for members of the Royal Family to protect their online identities, fuelling speculation it will launch websites about them. Online records show that an official at Buckingham Palace registered a series of domain names including countessofwessex.com, theprincessroyal.org, dukeofkent.org and earlandcountessofwessex.com at the start of this month.

Wales doesn’t get more Welsh than this northern market town. Business and conversations between friends here are conducted not in English but in Welsh, the language spoken by some 80 percent of the local population. For the past 40 years, the town has been a stronghold of Plaid Cymru, the nationalist party whose stated goal is eventual independence.

Great Britain's most recent Olympic gold medallist has vowed to use her sudden fame to inspire more girls to play sport and challenge "the media image of the perfect woman". Lizzy Yarnold, who became just the fifth British athlete to win individual gold at a Winter Olympics when she defeated her skeleton rivals by almost a second on Friday, said she was determined to convince more girls to stay involved with sport.

If Britain were fighting a war where 2,000 people died every year, where increasing numbers of our young people were recruited by the enemy and our opponents were always a step ahead, developing new weapons faster than we could combat them, there would be outcry and loud calls for change. Yet this is exactly the situation with the "war on drugs" and for far too long we have resisted a proper debate about the need for a different strategy.

If Britain were fighting a war where 2,000 people died every year, where increasing numbers of our young people were recruited by the enemy and our opponents were always a step ahead, developing new weapons faster than we could combat them, there would be outcry and loud calls for change. Yet this is exactly the situation with the "war on drugs" and for far too long we have resisted a proper debate about the need for a different strategy.