The failure to comply with a promise to delete all the data was notified to Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which said the fact that the data still existed appeared to breach an undertaking signed by Google in November 2010.

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They revealed an unwillingness to share data which broke the spirit, if not the letter, of Britain's Freedom of Information act, an aggressive attitude to the peer review of papers by opponents and an apparent willingness to hedge science in the face of politics.

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Britain's major banks now share information on attempted cyber-attacks and hold regular meetings with officials from the UK's secret listening post GCHQ, the Public Accounts Committee was told.

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For example, Britain's defence secretary during the Falklands war, John Nott, revealed in his memoirs that France had been Britain's staunchest ally, providing information that helped to render the Exocet anti-ship missiles used by Argentina ineffective, and supplying Mirage and Super-Etendard fighters for British Harrier pilots to pit themselves against in training.

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The most important was with Averell Harriman, the top U.S. envoy in Britain, from whom she channeled intelligence information to her father-in-law to help draw the U.S. into the war.

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Britain's armed forces are increasingly reliant on information and communications technology.

BBC: UK 'complacent' over military cyber-attack risk, MPs warn

As a result, Britain's coppers are wondering whether one side-effect of the information age is going to be an upsurge of civil disobedience.

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First, the British government yesterday and today said that they have passed on the information about Abdulmutallab and his time in Britain to U.S. intelligence.

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The military figure, who has not been revealed, was a trusted source of information for Britain over a number of years, a senior Whitehall official told London's Financial Times.

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This interest in Britain's future head of state has turned into a frantic scramble to jump on any nugget of information that may provide clues as to the baby's gender.

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Some firms, such as Britain's ClickMango.com, plan to avoid this by focusing on direct-to-consumer sales and information on alternative medicine.

ECONOMIST: E-health