They believed Mrs Bremner may have been killed in a robbery that went wrong.. ‘Alarm’ at crashes

Labour demanded a full-scale inquiry into the spate of military air crashes which it attributes to “massive overstretch” of the forces. Defence spokesman Dr David Clark said he would table Commons questions about “a matter of mounting concern and alarm”. Eight aircraft have been lost since 10 January at an estimated cost of pounds 170m, compared with 10 in the whole of 1995, nine in 1994 and seven in 1993, he said.. Benefits abroad

Britain has opened two branch offices in India to make social security payments, the Benefits Agency confirmed. One is in Islamabad, Pakistan, the other in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They pay benefits to 7,000 people in Pakistan and 4,000 in Bangladesh and cost pounds 100,000 a year each to run.

The most common payments are state retirement pensions, benefits for widows and incapacity benefits for people injured while working in Britain.. Pain-free injections

A new cream which kills the pain of injections is to go on sale internationally. Dr Dermot McCafferty and Professor David Woolfson of Queen’s University, Belfast, claim Ametop gel, which they first used on young cancer patients, is a safe, effective and rapid anaesthetic on healthy skin It will be manufactured by Smith and Nephew.. The number of people giving to charity in December and January slumped to its lowest level since the National Lottery began over a year ago, an NOP survey for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations showed. Since the launch, people donating through charities’ own raffles and lotteries fell from 30 per cent to 14 per cent, those giving to street collections was down from 29 per cent to 21 per cent, while door-to-door donations were down from 28 per cent to 20 per cent.

Four tickets shared Saturday’s pounds 8.9m National Lottery jackpot The winning numbers were: 2, 5, 7, 24, 35, and 44 The bonus ball was 30.. Daffodil crisis

The price of daffodils could soar this spring as the crop is affected by the cold weather and an invasion by the narcissus fly which has infected 10 per cent of bulbs. Millions of pounds worth of commercial stock is under threat from the fly’s larvae which burrow into the bulbs and eat them.. John Major suffered a new blow yesterday with newspaper allegations of a secret deal with the banks to give favoured treatment to a Tory MP who had faced bankruptcy in order to save the Government’s tiny Commons majority, writes John Rentoul. The charges involving Roy Thomason, MP for Bromsgrove, seem bound to add to the Tory party’s troubled public image on ethical standards. Mr Thomason did not deny yesterday that he could have been declared bankrupt last November. But he said he had no knowledge of any deal between Tory figures and the banks to save him.