The chestnut tree that comforted Anne Frank while she hid from the Nazis during the Second World War is to be cut down next week because it is too diseased to be saved.

The 150-year-old tree has fungus and moths that have caused more than half of its trunk to rot.

The tree is familiar to millions of readers of The Diary of Anne Frank as she made several references to it in the diary that she kept during the 25 months she remained indoors until the family was arrested in August 1944.

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Portuguese police re-interviewed Maddie’s mother again today.

Kate McCann attended the police station in Portimao in the Algarve at 2pm, accompanied by her lawyer, Carlos Pinto de Abreu.

Her husband Gerry will be questioned by detectives separately at the same police station tomorrow.

Spanish police are investigating a possible sighting of missing four-year-old Maddie McCann.

It is now 112 days since Maddie vanished from her bed in the Portuguese Algarve resort of Praia da Luz while her parents, Kate and Gerry, ate with friends in a nearby tapas restaurant.

Numerous sightings of Madeleine have been reported across Europe and North Africa, including Belgium, Malta and Morocco.

The McCanns, from Leicestershire in England, raised the possibility yesterday that she could be alive and being held in Spain.

Praia da Luz is only a few miles from both the port of Lagos and the main east-west motorway linking southern Spain and Portugal.

YouTube have launched a channel called ‘Don’t You Forget About Me‘ which is devoted to helping to find missing children like Madeleine McCann.

The winner of Britain’s biggest lottery jackpot was revealed today as a mother-of-one who works in a Royal Mail sorting office.

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Madeleine McCann’s parents were hoping for the best but ‘fear the worst’ ahead of DNA results that could support detectives’ theory that their daughter was killed.

Relations between Portuguese police and the McCanns are under strain after Chief Inspector Olegario Sousa, a senior investigating officer, went on television to reveal that four-year-old Madeleine could be dead without telling her family first.

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Big Ben has fallen as workers climbed down Parliament’s iconic clock tower, beginning a month of maintenance work on the clock and its world-famous bell.
 
Time briefly stood still as the clock’s hands were frozen shortly after 8 a.m. on Saturday. The hands were then wound to 12 o’clock as a team of specialist “industrial rope-access technicians” descended to clean the clock’s four latticework faces, part of maintenance ahead of Big Ben’s 150th anniversary in 2009.

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It is exactly 100 days today, since British girl Madeleine McCann went missing.

Maddie, the four-year-old was abducted from her family’s holiday apartment at the Mark Warner Ocean Club holiday resort of Praia da Luz  in southern Portugal on the 3rd of May.

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