A former cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher's government believes there "may well" have been a political cover-up over child abuse in the 1980s.

Lord Tebbit, who served in a number of ministerial posts under Thatcher, made the startling comments when talking about the missing 40-page dossier detailing claims of a Westminster paedophile ring.

Speaking on BBC1's The Andrew Marr Show, Lord Tebbit said it was "the thing people did at the time".

He said: "At that time I think most people would have thought that the establishment, the system, was to be protected and if a few things had gone wrong here and there that it was more important to protect the system than to delve too far into it.

The decline in relations between Washington and Moscow has not damaged tobacco giant Philip Morris' business in Russia, according to the company.

"We don't see any special difficulties since our production is located on the territory of the Russian Federation. Not only are we a Russian producer, but also a Russian exporter," Aleksey Kim, corporate affairs director at Philip Morris Russia told RIA Novosti.

He was speaking after talks in the United States with the head of the Russian Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov on the sidelines of the Russia-US business council in New York. "We try to take a pragmatic look at the way things stand now," said Kim, adding that Philip Morris remains committed to expanding its plant near St. Petersburg.

Among the 201 Twitter accounts suspended from the platform for "Russian interference" in the 2016 US election was an African-American activist from Atlanta. Now she has come forward, telling RT she may sue the company for the unjustified suspension.

Twitter banned the 201 accounts in September, citing "prohibitions against spam" and other rule violations. Additionally, the company found 179 accounts that were "linked or related" to those banned by Facebook. Multiple media outlets, including Reuters, the New York Times and CNN, called the accounts "Russia-linked."

RT has spoken to a banned Twitter user, who says she was swept up in the anti-Russia operation.

RT independently confirmed the identity of the owner of the Twitter account @PoliticsPeach, who asked to be identified by the name she previously used on the platform, Charlie Peach. RT confirmed that Peach is an African-American woman based in Atlanta, Georgia.

King's College London (KCL) students' union is adopting 'safe space marshals' to control student events. Critics say the £12 per hour paid to the new guards out of students' union contributions is "subsidizing intolerance."

Marshals are being employed by the students' union to patrol debates and make sure speakers do not offend the audience. They have powers to take immediate action against any participant who is being offensive or discriminatory.

The news, however, sparked widespread criticism. Many are concerned the strategy poses a threat to freedom of speech, one of academia's founding principles.

Doctors at Brigham and Women's Hospital are offering new parents a landmark genetic scan that screens newborns for around 1,800 conditions. But most parents are declining the controversial test.

The trial allows newborns to be tested before showing symptoms of diseases, including some cancers.

Robert Green, medical geneticist at Harvard and co-director of the BabySeq Project along with Alan Beggs, told CBS This Morning the scan could "absolutely" save a child's life in the future.

But as Green told CBS This Morning, there are also drawbacks to the program.

The University of Virginia now requires all incoming freshmen to complete an "Understanding Implicit Bias" educational program during their first months on campus.

The "Understanding Implicit Bias" module, which the university described in an email as a part of its "commitment to a diverse, inclusive community that follows truth wherever it may lead," was tested on 300 first-year students early in the semester, but was recently made mandatory for all first-year students.

The module "pressured us to associate black [people] with bad things, and white [people] with good things."

A recent Global Early Adolescent Study analyzed how gender is learned, enforced and reinforced among early adolescents in 15 countries. It concluded that culturally-enforced gender stereotypes - that is to say, calling a boy a boy and a girl a girl - are linked to an increased risk of mental and physical health problems later in life. The study found these 'stereotypes' leave the girls at greater risk of exposure to physical and sexual violence, child marriage, and HIV, and boys at greater risk of substance abuse and suicide. It is not clear from the study if a global control group of boys and girls who had grown into adults without ever having been referred to as 'boy' or 'girl' was used in order to make the study's conclusions even remotely plausible.

It should be noted that the alleged 'life-long negative consequences' referred to above are definitely NOT the result of social ills that have existed in human societies for millennia, but are the direct result of parents referring to and treating their male children as males or 'boys' and their female children as females or 'girls'. As such, the authors of the study suggest that the small percentage of human beings that have a hormonal/brain chemical imbalance that presents as confusion about sexual identity should be used as a bench-mark for instructing young, well-balanced children on their own sexual identity.

According to the study, the problem is that when a female human child is treated as a female, she is effectively 'indoctrinated' with the idea that there exists a certain 'sexual attraction' between females and males which, until now, was believed to be a function of the biological and genetic mandate inherent in most human beings that ensures the continuation of the species, similar to how so-called 'females' and 'males' of other species ensure the continuation of their own kind. This belief however, has been proven false by the new study, which revealed that the alleged biological mandate is nothing more than a cultural manipulation by our global patriarchal society - albeit one that has been rather persistent and widespread throughout human history - that attempts to ensure that women continue to labor under the illusion that one of their primary biological functions is to bear children.

A Houston suburb has removed a requirement from a hurricane repair grant program that homeowners must agree to not boycott Israel as a condition of receiving money.

The Galveston County Daily News reports that the Dickinson City Council on Tuesday voted to remove the requirement from the application of the city's Hurricane Harvey repair grant program.

Dickinson had initially included the boycott requirement to comply with a new state law that prohibits Texas agencies from contracting with companies that boycott Israel.

City management assistant Bryan Milward says businesses in Dickinson will still have to refrain from boycotting Israel in order to get relief funding, because the city interpreted that as a requirement of the new state law.

The American Civil Liberties Union has called the boycott requirement unconstitutional.

A woman who stabbed her sister to death while having an affair with her husband has been jailed for a minimum of 22 years.

Sabah Khan, 27, of Overstone Road in Luton, was jailed after admitting to stabbing her elder sister Saima Khan, 34, who she lived with, on May 23 last year.

Sabah was babysitting her sister's four children when she lured Saima into returning home from work by messaging her saying one of her kids was crying. The attacker turned off the lights in the house for her sister's arrival before she carried out a "vicious and sustained"attack.

Veteran journalist Mark Halperin sexually harassed women while he was in a powerful position at ABC News, according to five women who shared their previously undisclosed accounts with CNN and others who did not experience the alleged harassment personally, but were aware of it.

"During this period, I did pursue relationships with women that I worked with, including some junior to me," Halperin said in a statement to CNN Wednesday night. "I now understand from these accounts that my behavior was inappropriate and caused others pain. For that, I am deeply sorry and I apologize. Under the circumstances, I'm going to take a step back from my day-to-day work while I properly deal with this situation."

MSNBC, where Halperin makes frequent appearances on "Morning Joe," said early Thursday that Halperin would leave his roles at that network and as an analyst at NBC News.