Falkland Islanders hold a referendum on Sunday and Monday to send a message to the world that they want to stay British, although Argentina has already dismissed the vote as illegal.

Residents of the windswept archipelago in the South Atlantic have hoisted British and Falklands flags and even created a giant "YES" made of four-wheel drives ahead of the vote.

Britain will provide body armor and armored vehicles to the rebels battling forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad, Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Wednesday.

Hague said the non-lethal military aid, worth $20 million (15.4 million euros), was a "necessary, proportionate and lawful response" to a situation of "extreme" humanitarian suffering.

Scores of Palestinian students forced the British consul general to make a hasty departure from a West Bank university campus on Tuesday, witnesses and an Agence France Presse correspondent said.

Consul General Sir Vincent Fean had traveled to Bir Zeit University near Ramallah to deliver a lecture on Britain's policy in the region and the prospects for peace but was turned away by a noisy demonstration.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, suffering from gastroenteritis, was admitted to hospital on Sunday, a Buckingham Palace spokesman told Agence France Presse.

All the 86-year-old's engagements for this week, including a visit to Rome, have been called off, the spokesman added.

Britain said Sunday that the reported killing of Islamist militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar would be a blow to terrorism in North Africa but would not represent the end of Mali's troubles.

Chad said its troops in northern Mali had killed Belmokhtar, the one-eyed Islamist leader who masterminded an assault on an Algerian gas plant that left 37 foreign hostages dead in January.

Syrian President Bashar Assad said he is ready to negotiate with the country's opposition but refuses to consider stepping down, in a rare interview with a UK newspaper.

Assad offered to hold talks with rebels in a bid to end the crisis on the condition they lay down their arms, but made the distinction between the "political entities" he would talk with and "armed terrorists".

Britain should conduct a "fundamental review of the law" governing undercover operations after police were accused of stealing the identities of dead children, a parliamentary report urged Friday.

The Home Affairs Committee warned that the current legislation threatened human rights.

Britain's most senior Roman Catholic cleric resigned as head of the Catholic Church in Scotland with immediate effect on Monday in the wake of claims that he made sexual advances towards priests.

Cardinal Keith O'Brien -- who steps down as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh -- denies the allegations, which date back to the 1980s, but he apologized to anyone offended by "failures" during his ministry.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday appealed to the Syrian opposition to reconsider their decision to boycott talks with foreign powers in Rome this week.

"I would urge the Syrian opposition to join us," Kerry told a news conference in London after talks with British Foreign Secretary William Hague at the start of his first overseas trip since taking office.

Three British Muslim men were found guilty on Thursday of planning a string of bombings that prosecutors said could have been deadlier than the July 7, 2005, attacks on London's transport network.

Irfan Naseer, 31, Irfan Khalid, 27, and Ashik Ali, 27, were convicted of being "central figures" in an Islamist extremist plot to set off eight rucksack bombs and possibly other timed devices in crowded areas.