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Harry Redknapp believes the gap between North London rivals Tottenham and Arsenal is closing fast but claims the Gunners still have a real chance of winning the title.

Malcolm Calvert, the former Cazenove banker convicted of insider dealing earlier this week, was today sentenced to 21 months in prison.

World famous sanctuary for abandoned pets, Battersea Dog & Cats home, has teamed up with Royal Mail to celebrate its 150th anniversary.

Where better than the urban sprawl of Camden with its filthy alleyways and tucked-away boozers to catch a glimpse of the new generation of indie and rock and roll acts?

A 64-year-old man with learning difficulties was "tormented to death" after being bullied by yobs for more than a decade, neighbours claimed today.

Portsmouth's hopes of survival were today given a major boost when Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs accepted the club's move into administration.

The largest aftershock since Chile's devastating earthquake rocked the South American country Thursday minutes before the inauguration of President Sebastian Pinera.

A gang who kidnapped and tortured a 16-year-old boy have been jailed for 40 years, it was confirmed today.

It?s one small step for Beethoven and a giant leap for mankind from the First to his Eighth Symphony and to hear both works in tandem on instruments of the period only intensifies the revolution drawing us ever closer to the mighty Ninth.

The banks are resisting reforms to break up large, systemically unsafe, institutions today through their considerable lobbying power and their funding for political parties on both sides of the Atlantic.

El Hadji Diouf's lawyer has insisted allegations of assault against the Blackburn player are "erroneous".

An award-winning female porn director has been appointed as a parliamentary hopeful for the Liberal Democrats, it was disclosed today.

London Underground is to axe up to 800 jobs under plans to make savings of £16 million a year, the transport giant announced today.

Former England goalkeeper David Seaman's wife was granted a quickie divorce today on the grounds of adultery.

I seem to have confused everyone by taking issue with Nick Clegg's seeing a parallel between the conduct of the banks today and that of the trade unions before the 1980s reforms.

Three Labour MPs accused of expenses fraud said they would plead not guilty when they appeared in court for the first time today.

Lawyers acting for a former Bosnian president who was arrested at Heathrow over war crime allegations return to the High Court today in a bid to secure him bail.

England's Hockey World Cup campaign ground to a halt today as they were beaten 4-1 by Germany in the semi-finals.

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger was not surprised to see Manchester United demolish AC Milan 4-0 at Old Trafford - but still would have no qualms about facing them in the quarter-finals of the Champions League.

Arsene Wenger accepts it will take a "miracle" for Arsenal captain Cesc Fabregas to be fit for Saturday's Barclays Premier League trip to Hull.

Sitting on the floor of her village homestead in India?s Madhya Pradesh region and cradling her new born baby girl in her arms, 27-year-old Asha Jatav is all smiles.

Sir Terry Wogan said today he is living a "student" lifestyle - lying in bed watching TV until the afternoon.

Hopes for the battered airline industry were raised today after the global aviation body predicted a strong recovery this year as passengers take to the skies again.

Greece ground to a virtual halt today as workers held yet another general strike in protest at painful spending cuts.

A company boss was jailed for three years today for his part in a scam which saw tens of millions of eggs falsely passed off as free range.

Watch an exclusive preview clip from the film adaptation of Stieg Larsson's international bestseller 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.'

A British journalist detained in Gaza by Hamas was released without charge today, the Foreign Office said.

Married Labour MPs Ann and Alan Keen were ordered today to repay £1,500 in expenses claimed for running a second home where they were actually living full-time.

A new £30 billion high-speed rail (HSR) network, with 250mph trains, was announced today by the Government.

Pink Floyd won a ruling at the High Court today which will bar record company EMI selling single downloads from their concept albums.

Rock star Pete Doherty was given a 12-month driving ban and fined £500 today after he admitted allowing his manager to use his Daimler without insurance.

Five years ago today, the Commission for Africa launched a groundbreaking report that helped to set in motion a year of remarkable achievements in the fight against global poverty.

Wayne Rooney is refusing to set himself a goals target for the season despite crashing through the 30 barrier at Old Trafford last night.

?I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.? Not my words alas, but those of Groucho Marx.

Thousands of Network Rail maintenance workers have voted strongly in favour of strikes in a row over jobs, bringing the threat of industrial action over Easter closer, it was announced today.

The Daily Mail has today published an embarrassing apology after publishing an article claiming that a criminologist posing as a teenage girl on Facebook was inundated with contacts from men seeking sexual favours.

Here's the real significance of Barclays' floated move into the US retail banking market - they're betting that the Volker proposals, which would enforce the old separation of retail and investment banking, are going to get nowhere.

A British Airways computer expert who allegedly offered to take advantage of a planned strike by cabin crew as part of a terror plot appeared in court today.

The sudden takedown of an Internet provider thought to be helping spread one of the most promiscuous pieces of malicious software out there appears to have cut off criminals from potentially millions of personal computers under their control.

Real Madrid were accused of throwing 250 million euros down the drain on today after being dumped out of the Champions League by Olympique Lyon.

Manchester United thumped AC Milan 4-0 last night to progress to the quarter-finals 7-2 on aggregate.

Lewis Hamilton has no intention of going off the rails now he no longer has by his side two dominant characters who have ruled his life.

England seamer Graham Onions will fly back to England after being ruled out of the two-Test series against Bangladesh due to a back injury.

Tim Henman has ruled himself out of the running to be Great Britain's next Davis Cup captain because "it doesn't feel like the right time".

Ben Foden is determined to do his talking on the pitch after being given a dressing down by England manager Martin Johnson for speaking out of turn.

Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez wants his players to start taking responsibility for their own actions instead of looking to blame team-mates.

Real Madrid director general Jorge Valdano gave under-pressure coach Manuel Pellegrini a vote of confidence in the wake of last night's Champions League exit at the hands of Lyon.

Sony Corp has unveiled its new motion-controlled video game system, pitching it to both casual and hard-core gamers alike, as the company looks to ride one of the hottest trends in gaming.

The battle for control of Manchester United has taken another twist following confirmation that a leading global investment bank has agreed to advise on a possible acquisition of the Old Trafford outfit by the Red Knights group.

Insurers paid out £650 million in weather-related claims as the UK suffered the coldest winter for 30 years, a trade body said today.

Opera Software today unveiled a version of its Mini mobile browser for use on cellphones running on Google's Android software.

AC Milan's 4-0 drubbing at Manchester United in the Champions League shows the seven-times European champions are now scrabbling in the rubble of their great past, Italian media said today.

Motorola has reached a deal with Microsoft Corp that will put Bing search and mapping services on its phones that use Google's Android operating system.

Martin O'Neill has challenged Gabriel Agbonlahor, John Carew and Emile Heskey to deliver enough goal-power in the final quarter of the season to keep Aston Villa on course for FA Cup glory and a Champions League spot.

John Lewis staff are to be rewarded with bonuses worth nearly eight weeks wages after profits jumped at the department store group.

Nearly one in six children in England failed to gain a place at their first choice secondary school this year, Government figures showed today.

Early risers will be able to eat their breakfasts at a JD Wetherspoon pub from next month after the chain today announced plans to extend its morning opening hours.

?Porn objectifies women, but erotica doesn?t,? explains renowned British photographer Rankin. While he acquiesces that pictures of pouting blondes wearing nothing but stiletto spikes on the pages of Playboy are not usually considered art, Rankin?s new exhibition, jokingly entitled ?Cheeky?, seeks to dispel the mist of seediness surrounding erotica and to bring it out from beneath grubby mattresses.

More than 100 firefighters were battling a blaze today in a restaurant and office complex.

Take That star Mark Owen said he was "deeply sorry" today after admitting a string of affairs behind his wife's back.

Hopes that five-year-old British boy Sahil Saeed had been found were dashed today as the police chief leading the investigation in Pakistan confirmed the search is ongoing.

Morrisons today hailed "another good year" as profits climbed 21 per cent and sales hit record levels.

The World Cup kicks off in South Africa on June 11, and in anticipation, every day until then we will be highlighting a classic World Cup moment.

We've weighed up the options and here's the end result: our pick of the finest kitchen scales.

Philip Bujak has a dream. The chief executive of the Montessori St Nicholas Charity hopes that one day every state primary school in the country will have a Montessori teacher on their staff. But with only five state primaries using Montessori practices in the UK, he knows he has a mountain to climb.

It's the advice we treasure for ever. As Mothering Sunday approaches, public figures reveal to Holly Williams the words of wisdom given to them by the most important women in their lives...

The reputation of football's playing fraternity was not enhanced yesterday when it emerged that 85 people had been shown the door by financially stricken Portsmouth while only two players had offered to take pay cuts to save the fate of the less well-off.

Nicholson Baker, 52, is the author of Vox, the novel about telephone sex that Monica Lewinsky supposedly gave to Bill Clinton. Other novels include The Fermata, the story of a man who can stop time, and, just out, The Anthologist. His non-fiction includes Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, which came out last year.

The future is incontestably digital: the internet is changing the way we do all sorts of things, from shopping to working to running our social lives. Education, though, has so far largely remained anchored in the old world ? but even this is beginning to change.

It's 1pm at The Petchey Academy in Hackney, north London, and the serving hatches clatter open, revealing rows of grey trays, each one offering exactly the same food as every other tray.

When Richard Galt returned from Japan a year ago, he resolved to break into advertising. So, he applied to JWT for a traineeship. They said the 25-year-old would make a good "creative" or "planner" but that first he needed to do a Master's course at Buckinghamshire New University.

Should top independent schools set up a new private university on the lines of American liberal arts colleges, providing high-quality teaching, a broad curriculum and charging full fees?

When you think of the Baftas, images of red-carpet glamour, frilly frocks and Colin Firth no doubt immediately spring to mind. You probably don't envisage a graphic designer sitting in an office, day in, day out, glued to his computer screen as he works on refining the already renowned corporate image of Britain's premier showbusiness awards.

This morning, I started my day in the local Pret A Manger huddled over a skinny latte and a gay porn magazine called Butt. I can't think of many porn mags, gay or straight, that I'd be happy to read at 8.30am in Pret, if at all. But then Butt, with its apparently unpretentious Courier typeface, small format and smiling cover boy isn't really like the rest. Did I mention that it's printed on blushing pink paper too?

What coronaries, kittens and caterwauling tantrums one would have ? doubtless simultaneously ? if one could eavesdrop on a political party's HQ when it was awash with bad faith at manifesto-writing time. So it says a lot for Tom Basden's play-making skills that he has managed to concoct a charmingly funny comedy about the process. We're not talking David Hare here. Basden's satire is gentle and oblique and it derives its beguiling mix of acuity and tactical daffiness from the fact that, far from being professional politicians in Millbank, the five twentysomethings whom we follow through 70 minutes of inconclusive bickering are incompetents hard put to come up with a name for their organisation, let alone any mutually agreed policies beyond "democracy" and "space programme".

In profile, he has his dad's pursed mouth and nose. Full on, the face becomes more eerily identical the more you stare at it. No DNA tests would ever be needed to confirm that this is indeed Paul McCartney's only son, playing his first official London gig at the age of 32. Start listening as well, though, and the fantasies that intrude aren't of the Beatles' Shea Stadium triumph, or Abbey Road genius. I start to imagine Paul McCartney's Liverpool suburban upbringing shifted in time to the early 1990s, with him now listening to Nirvana and the Cure, not Elvis Presley, at night, and instead of conquering the world, remaining a talented, almost content weekend rocker, sometimes musing what might have been: McCartney, in other words, if the sparks of genius and luck never struck. That seems James's honourable level.

We live in a jaded world where we are bombarded by information, much of it in the form of text. It must have been quite different when Jenny Holzer was setting out in the 1970s. She made her name in the pre-digital media stone age on the cutting edge of the New York underground art scene, pitching for the attention of passers-by with fly posters carrying a few well-chosen words pursuing philosophical and political themes.

I'm flying over Russia with Air New Zealand, travelling from Hong Kong, having just had a lovely meal of passion fruit and vodka-cured salmon, followed by braised beef short rib with garlic mash, and a blueberry almond cake.

The 1692 Massacre of Glencoe can still rouse passions today, so it's a brave author who tries to wrest fiction from it. In her third novel, Susan Fletcher approaches the massacre using two main characters, one historical, the other semi-legendary. What emerges is very much a literary, rather than a traditional historical, novel.

In an employment environment where very few of us enjoy absolute job security, there's much to be said for appending another substantial paragraph or two to our CV. Add to that the sharply increasing number of people coming out of universities with first degrees, and it's easy to see why there's a healthy market in postgraduate business-related courses.

If logistics summons up unhappy memories of an articulated lorry cutting you up on the M6, think again. For Haitians devastated by January's earthquake, it was a matter of life and death that the right supplies arrived at the right time and at the right place. With its sister, supply chain management, logistics has become more important as world trade has expanded, and countries such as India and China have emerged as manufacturing giants. The status of logistics has risen, and its techniques are being deployed for humanitarian and military, as well as commercial, use.

An affaire d'état? Two affaires de tit for tat? Or just an affaire de twitter which proves to be tat?

Nick Clegg will this weekend announce the four "tests" he would set for Labour and the Conservatives in return for the support of the Liberal Democrats if neither main party wins an overall majority at the general election.

As a letter to The Independent pertinently pointed out earlier this week,when has there ever been a case of a human-being being hurt by a mouse? This follows the brouhaha over the revelation that most West End theatres are riddled with the little critters ? except, no doubt, for the St Martin's Theatre, home of The Mousetrap.

You get a better class of vox pop in John Lewis, judging from the first of Liz Allen's films about Middle Britain's favourite retailer. "In seven days, God made the world and in seven days, John Lewis will make your curtains," said one well-spoken lady, her tone suggesting that the latter act of creation was at least equal to the first. "If John Lewis is short of anything," said another customer feelingly "we've got it in our house." He appeared to feel that his wife had done everything that could reasonably be expected of her to prop up John Lewis's profit figures, but unfortunately not everyone has been shopping with the same zeal in recent months; Inside John Lewis, a three-part series about the department-store chain, was filmed as the recession was biting. It had already taken a great chunk out of John Lewis's ambitious plans for expansion and the question that ran through this first episode was whether it might yet swallow the fabled peculiarities of the John Lewis business model.

It started as a bit of a laugh. After my food memoir, The Settler's Cookbook, was published earlier this year, friends who can't cook and won't cook asked if I could show them how to make some of the recipes. So they came, a motley crew, to my house. I taught them five dishes in a couple of hours and we ate a jolly lunch. They brought their own mates, new people, amiable strangers ? some of whom had been dying to have meaty arguments with me about my "provocative" newspaper columns. It was exhilarating.

'But do you know what no one has ever suggested?" Carly Simon teases. "That it's a girl." It's the great, white, vain (Warren Beatty-shaped, perhaps?) elephant in the room, which happens to be a chilly hotel conservatory in west London. It's like interviewing Colonel Sanders and not enquiring about his "secret formula". It's a subject that can't be avoided. I'll bring it up at the end, I reason. I'll playfully mention that I think "Nobody Does It Better" is the best James Bond song and then in a throwaway fashion, ask "You're So Vain", so it is about Beatty or Jagger, or both? It doesn't quite work out like that, though, and anyway there's a lot more to this prodigious talent than one song, albeit an exquisitely acerbic ("But you gave away the things you loved and one of them was me") and droll ("Well, you're where you should be all the time/And when you're not you're with/Some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend") one.

Even if the Oscar-nominated Brit-flick, An Education, didn't strike a chord with the judges, it certainly struck a chord with me. I went to the school portrayed in the film and I remember the headmistress Ruth Garwood Scott even more fearsomely than Emma Thompson played her, a regally coiffed presence requiring pupils to line up and, amazingly, curtsey as we shook her hand. But that was then, and weirdo etiquette like curtsying is way off the curriculum now, replaced by texting tutorials and domestic violence role-play probably. Yet the question of precisely what children should learn at school is still wide open, according to Anne McElvoy, who is currently engaged in that nightmare modern quest ? finding a secondary school for her 11-year-old son.

Georgia Rakusen, 24, and Beckie Darlington, 27, used to be competitors. Two freelancers managing cultural events in Newcastle, they met pitching for the same clients. It was only after winning scholarships on an entrepreneurship course at Teesside University that they were able to join forces and form their new company, Haus Projects. One year on, they are working with some of the biggest arts organisations in the North-east.

Sir, the champagne! Motor racing enthusiasts were treated to the sight of a distantly familiar face aboard yesterday morning's Gulf Air flight to Bahrain, departing just in time for the start of the 2010 Grand Prix season.

The final moments of Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist crushed to death beneath a pile of earth and rubble in the path of an advancing Israeli army bulldozer, were described to an Israeli court by an eyewitness yesterday.

Joe Biden, the US Vice-President, yesterday repeated his attack on Israel's plans to build 1,600 new Jewish homes in Arab East Jerusalem as European governments backed his complaint that they undermined trust before imminent new indirect Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

The largest aftershock since Chile's devastating earthquake rocked the South American country Thursday minutes before the inauguration of President Sebastian Pinera.

Lawyers acting for a former Bosnian president who was arrested at Heathrow over war crime allegations return to the High Court today in a bid to secure him bail.

Sitting on the floor of her village homestead in India?s Madhya Pradesh region and cradling her new born baby girl in her arms, 27-year-old Asha Jatav is all smiles.

Greece ground to a virtual halt today as workers held yet another general strike in protest at painful spending cuts.

A British journalist detained in Gaza by Hamas was released without charge today, the Foreign Office said.

Hopes that five-year-old British boy Sahil Saeed had been found were dashed today as the police chief leading the investigation in Pakistan confirmed the search is ongoing.

The final moments of Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist crushed to death beneath a pile of earth and rubble in the path of an advancing Israeli army bulldozer, were described to an Israeli court by an eyewitness yesterday.

An affaire d'état? Two affaires de tit for tat? Or just an affaire de twitter which proves to be tat?

American officials have reacted with dismay to the charge by the former head of MI5 that US authorities deliberately concealed mistreatment of terror suspects from their British colleagues. The unexpected public statement by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller is said to have significantly added to the strains in the relationship between the two countries on intelligence matters.

Joe Biden, the US Vice-President, yesterday repeated his attack on Israel's plans to build 1,600 new Jewish homes in Arab East Jerusalem as European governments backed his complaint that they undermined trust before imminent new indirect Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

The case of "Jihad Jane" ? the middle-aged woman from suburban Philadelphia linked to an alleged plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist held to have insulted the prophet Mohamed ? represents the worst nightmare of US security authorities: a white, female, all-American terrorist.

Suspected Islamist militants yesterday stormed an office of World Vision, a US-based Christian aid agency in Pakistan, killing six Pakistani aid workers after singling them out and then blowing up the building.

An Israeli supermarket commercial is looking to cash in on the infamous surveillance footage of an assassination team killing a Hamas commander in Dubai.

The place where the body of Pol Pot, the former Khmer Rouge leader, was unceremoniously burned in a pile of rubbish is set to be the latest location from Cambodia's dark recent history to be transformed into a tourist spot.

Moscow's top policeman apologised yesterday after his officers ordered passing motorists to park their cars across a main road to block a speeding getaway car filled with armed criminals.

In the doctor's surgery, they've leaflets advertising something called the BabyPlus. Each one costs $150 (£100), but apparently they're the latest big thing among the Hollywood celebrity crowd ? and not buying one is tantamount to child abuse. So naturally, I'm tempted.

She is being called the Yoko Ono of the cricket world. Lara Bingle, a 22-year-old swimsuit model, stands accused of jeopardising the career of the Australian cricketer Michael Clarke. The vice-captain's decision to desert a one-day series in New Zealand has outraged fans and commentators, with some calling for him to be sacked.

"Is this the whale?" joked a noisy patron, pointing to some dark red slabs of tuna on the small tray of sushi, which had just been deposited on his table at one of California's renowned sushi restaurants "Come on guys, it's your signature dish! Where's it gone? I'm feeling left out here!"

Fears that sectarian violence could spread across Nigeria increased yesterday after it emerged that militia leaders from Jos, where at least 200 people were massacred on Sunday, had been attempting to buy arms in the restive Niger Delta just prior to the attack.

At the best of times, Rahm Emanuel was always drawn, coiled, and combative. These days though, after less than 14 months on the job, his face is tauter, more lined and even thinner. And not surprisingly. For these times are far from the best. Indeed, Washington is starting to wonder: is President Obama's Chief of Staff, arguably the second most powerful man in the capital of the free world, about to walk the plank?

The Dalai Lama has accused the Chinese authorities of trying to "annihilate Buddhism" in Tibet as he commemorated a failed uprising against China's rule over the region.

The parties in Angela Merkel's increasingly embattled government were struggling to digest their worst popularity rating in nearly a decade yesterday, less than six months after the German Chancellor had described her ruling alliance of conservatives and liberals as the country's "dream" coalition.

Paris gossips were trying to sort out fact from fiction today as the blogosphere raised tantalising questions about the glamorous pop 'n' politics marriage of President Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni.

Laws drawn up by the Burmese junta will prohibit detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from taking part in a controversial election due to be held later this year. If her party wants to participate in the poll it may even have to formally expel her.

An indictment against a woman from suburban Philadelphia accused of recruiting jihadist fighters online and moving to Europe to try to kill a Swedish artist is a rare case of an American woman aiding foreign terrorists, authorities say, and shows the evolution of the threat of terrorism.

The United States is studying whether it can legally challenge Chinese Internet restrictions that hurt Google and other US companies operating in China, but direct talks with Beijing might yield faster results, the top US trade official said yesterday

Indonesia's president said a top-ranked Southeast Asian militant wanted for planning the 2002 Bali bombings was identified as the man shot dead by police in a raid on the island of Java.

Bank of America apologised to a woman after one of its contractors allegedly trashed her house and took her parrot while wrongly repossessing her home.

A US man who says marijuana is a sacrament in his religion has been convicted of misdemeanor drug charges.

A dozen centuries-old shipwrecks - some of them unusually well-preserved - were found in the Baltic Sea by a gas company building an underwater pipeline between Russia and Germany.

A dramatic 911 call reveals a terrified seven-year-old boy begging emergency dispatchers to send police to his California home where three armed robbers were threatening his parents.

The Taliban claimed responsibility today for a suicide bombing inside a US-Afghan base in eastern Afghanistan that killed two Nato service members.

Suspected militants attacked the offices of an international aid group in Pakistan today, killing six employees and wounding at least four others, police said.

The first British woman soldier to be killed in Afghanistan was inadequately trained and lacked vital equipment, a coroner ruled yesterday.

The greatest number of gallantry awards in recent times is expected to be announced next week in recognition of last summer's brutal fighting in Afghanistan.

Seven people were arrested in the Republic of Ireland yesterday as part of an international investigation into a conspiracy to murder a Swedish cartoonist whose work has led to death threats from Muslim extremists.

Indian politicians took an important step on the path to making history when they overwhelmingly voted to reserve a third of all legislative seats across the country for women.

A pampering session at the beauty salon always works wonders for morale ? not just for humans, but also for sharks and manta ray fish. Australian scientists have discovered that these large marine creatures regularly congregate at certain spots on the Great Barrier Reef to be groomed by smaller fish.

The French far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen may be a veteran provocateur but to infuriate both the Algerians and the Swiss with one poster takes genuine talent.

Three months after it was stolen, the corpse of Cyprus's former president was found buried in another grave, and police said they had arrested three men.

Two men have been charged with killing a British teenager who was found dead on a beach in India.

Somalia's president yesterday welcomed any US military involvement in a long-awaited offensive in his country aimed at driving Islamist rebels from the capital.

A former head of MI5 has accused intelligence services in the US of deliberately hiding the mistreatment of terror suspects from their British allies.

A German man who tried to blackmail supermodel Cindy Crawford using a photo of her bound and gagged 7-year-old daughter was sentenced to two years in jail yesterday.

A dozen shipwrecks that date back centuries ? some of them unusually well preserved ? have been found in the Baltic Sea by a gas company building an underwater pipeline between Russia and Germany.

George Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, used a visit to the White House yesterday to press President Barack Obama for tighter regulation of the speculative trading blamed for intensifying the country's debt crisis.

At the newly opened Café Khachapuri, just off Pushkin Square right in the heart of Moscow, young Muscovites tuck into plates of coriander-infused chakhokhbili chicken stew, spicy lobio beans and the eponymous khachapuri ? gooey cheesy bread.

The message passing drivers take from the roadside billboard will depend largely on their political leanings.

The Pope?s older brother has admitted to slapping pupils in the face while he was leader of a renowned choir in Germany which is currently at the centre of a new rash of child abuse allegations rocking the Catholic Church.

A California highway police officer helped slow a runaway Toyota Prius from 94 mph (151 kph) to a safe stop on Monday after the car's accelerator became stuck on a freeway near San Diego, authorities said said.

Seven Muslims were arrested in the Irish Republic today over an alleged plot to assassinate a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet Mohammed with the body of a dog, police said.

Somali President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed said today that progress was being made and he was "hopeful" about the release of a British couple seized by pirates.

The Israeli government last night managed to overshadow a high-profile visit by the US Vice-President, Joe Biden, with an announcement of controversial and politically highly sensitive plans to build 1,600 new homes for Jewish residents in Arab East Jerusalem.

A Bangladeshi school teacher has been accused of caning eight of her pupils so hard for forgetting to bring their pencils to class that they needed hospital treatment.

A soldier described how he picked up a Taliban hand grenade which landed at his feet and threw it back towards the enemy.

Burma's ruling junta will appoint the commission that will have the final say over the country's first elections in two decades, state-run newspapers announced today as the country's military rulers began unveiling the laws that will govern this year's balloting.

One of two Baptist missionaries still held on kidnapping charges in Haiti was released and flew to Miami, but the US group's leader remained in custody.

Two glass vials purportedly containing the ghosts of two dead people sold for 2,830 New Zealand dollars (1,983 US dollars) at an auction.

A body discovered in a Nicosia cemetery is the stolen corpse of Cyprus' ex-president Tassos Papadopoulos, police said Tuesday.

The prime minister of Ethiopia has stepped into the row between Sir Bob Geldof and the BBC which has claimed that 95 per cent of the $100m aid raised, by Live Aid and others, to fight famine in rebel-held northern Ethiopia in 1985 was diverted to be spent on weapons.

afghanistan A British soldier was killed in an explosion while on foot patrol in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday. The soldier, from 1 Rifles, died near the Sangin district. He is the fifth member of the Rifles Regiment to die in Helmand province in the last week.

A series of allegations in Germany and Holland have plunged the Catholic Church into a renewed crisis over how it has dealt with child abuse after it emerged that the Pope's brother ran a renowned choir at the centre of some of the latest claims.

Soldiers were out in force last night in the troubled Nigerian city of Jos where aid workers were still counting the dead after a sectarian massacre in which hundreds of villagers were hacked to death or burned in their homes.

Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to hold "indirect" talks mediated by Washington, the US special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, said yesterday.

PARIS Interpol said yesterday it had issued an alert for 16 more suspects in connection with the January slaying of a Hamas commander in a Dubai hotel room.

It's only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it out, blessed by a flourish of wild yellow lilies. Inside are the powdered bones and skulls and bits of femur of up to 300 children, Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a converted Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children ? between three and 15 years old ? who lived in the crowded dormitory of this ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did indeed commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915.

They arrived from every corner of the country. They were from men women and children, of every race, age, class and calling. Half a century on, they have come to life again, expressing Americans' grief, shock and collective sense of bereavement at the news of John F Kennedy's assassination.

Pakistani officials yesterday admitted that an American citizen arrested on suspicion of being a member of al-Qa'ida is not the movement's US born "spokesman" Adam Gadahn.

Early estimates from a range of Iraqi parties yesterday predicted a coalition led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would take the lead in the parliamentary election, though official results are not expected for a few days. A win by Mr Maliki could signal Iraqis' rejection of the religious parties that have dominated the country since 2003.

French students are deserting the Sorbonne because of the once élite university's reputation for militancy, strikes and abandoned lectures. They are also increasingly snubbing the country's prestigious Grandes Ecoles system for a new educational El Dorado ? Britain.

A powerful earthquake struck in a remote part of eastern Turkey yesterday, killing at least 51 people from five villages.

When David Paterson, the Governor of New York, for whom the prefix "embattled" doesn't nearly suffice, made an emotional pledge over the weekend to "fulfill the mission in which God placed me", he did so at a Baptist church in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. He didn't do it in Harlem.

A British soldier has been killed in an explosion while on foot patrol in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence said today.

A strong earthquake hit eastern Turkey today, killing at least 41 people and knocking down houses in three small villages, the government said.

Rioters armed with machetes slaughtered more than 200 people overnight Sunday as religious violence flared anew between Christians and Muslims in central Nigeria, witnesses said. Hundreds of people fled their homes, fearing reprisal attacks.

Two teenagers have been named as the latest British military deaths in Afghanistan.

Zimbabwe's prime minister said he would run against Robert Mugabe in presidential elections expected next year and called for an army of peacekeepers to protect voters.

An acid-filled beer bottle was dropped onto a street in the same area of densely populated Hong Kong for the third time in six months, police said Monday, fueling media speculation about a serial attacker.

Two homemade bombs exploding in quick succession killed 12 people, including 10 civilians, in an increasingly volatile part of northwestern Afghanistan, police said on today.

For years it has burnished a reputation as Eastern Europe's destination of choice for stag weekends, drawing thousands of revellers in search of cheap lager, pretty girls and Kalashnikov-shooting activities.

There were millions of euros at stake and some of the world's best poker players squeezed into a hotel ballroom, under the gaze of the massed gambling media and tens of thousands of enthusiasts online.

Afghan and British security forces have seized £150m worth of heroin allegedly due to be used to fund weaponry for the Taliban.

The US taxpayer has given more than $107bn (£71bn)during the past decade to companies which are also doing business with Iran, it was revealed yesterday. That sum includes at least $15bn (£9.9bn) of US Government funds that were channelled to corporations which have defied international sanctions to help Iran develop its vast and strategically important oil and gas reserves.

In the face of bomb and mortar attacks that killed 38 people and wounded 89 others, Iraqis went to the polls yesterday to elect a new parliament.

US Vice-President Joe Biden will arrive in Israel today following a formal decision by the West Bank Palestinian leadership to approve Washington's proposal for indirect peace negotiations with Israel.

The US-born spokesman for al-Qa'ida has been arrested by Pakistani intelligence officers in Karachi, officials said. Adam Gadahn appeared in a video urging US Muslims to attack their own country.

Togo's opposition said yesterday it would contest an election result which returned President Faure Gnassingbe as the West African state's leader. Police fired tear gas at demonstrators. Gnassingbe, who took over after 38 years of dictatorship by his father Gnassingbe Eyadema, won 1.24 million of 2.1 million votes in Thursday's poll.

According o the two women wearing the white clothes of mourning, Lalmohan Tudu was a well-loved husband and son, a man who only wanted to help his village. They say the farmer, a tribal rights activist, was seized near his home by police who then shot him dead in a nearby paddy field.

Nigeria's lethal religious divisions were underlined again this weekend as at least 100 people were killed in clashes in the divided city of Jos in the centre of the country.

Of all the examples of human misery on such open display in this remarkable, terrifying, contradictory city, few are more moving than the hand-pulled rickshaws. For a handful of coins, an often-barefooted man dressed in little more than a dhoti tied around his waist will pull his passengers through the noisy, cluttered streets. Life as a rickshaw-puller is hard, difficult and usually short. Many of the 20,000 pullers are migrants from Bihar and many sleep on the streets. They are lucky to make more than $2 (£1.30) a day. "I only have the clothes I am wearing right now. I am very low," one puller, plying his trade at a temple in the south of the city, tells me. He is painfully thin: his leg is barely the size of someone's arm.

The tall, dapper and smiling Chinese leader looked presidential as he pulled up at the front entrance of the Great Hall of the People, waving photographers and waiting reporters away. Senior members of the Politburo never enter through the front door. But this is Bo Xilai. And when the popular Bo, the mafia-busting Communist Party chief in the south-western city of Chongqing, arrives for the annual National People's Congress, there is a whiff of change. "He is very cool. He's Bo, no?" said one passer-by. At the vast People's Congress which opened in Beijing on Friday and continues until Sunday, Bo is enjoying a moment of celebrity.

Tens of thousands of anti-abortion demonstrators gathered in at least four Spanish cities yesterday to protest about a new law that allows abortions without restrictions up to 14 weeks.

Swiss voters have soundly rejected a plan to appoint special lawyers for animals that are abused by humans. Results in yesterday's referendum showed that 70.5 per cent of voters cast their ballot against the proposal. Switzerland already has among the world's strictest rules when it comes to caring for pets and farm animals.

France likes to point the cinema camera on its own past, good and bad, but one of the darkest events in modern French history has been almost banished from the screen, until now. The movie Le Rafle, which opens in France on Wednesday, is the first to address head-on the most notorious episode in the persecution of French Jews during the Second World War.

The Pakistani government has reassured the father of a five-year-old British boy that his son will be returned "within 48 hours" as the police were said to be closing in on the kidnappers.

At least 50 people died in gunbattles between the Taliban and another Islamist faction in north-eastern Afghanistan today.

The new Chinese-appointed governor of Tibet said today that only socialism can "save" the remote region and guarantee its development, and lampooned the Dalai Lama's indecision on his succession.

Explosions killed at least 24 people as Iraqis voted today in an election that Sunni Islamist militants have vowed to disrupt, in one of many challenges to efforts to stabilise Iraq before US troops leave.

A gang who abducted a five-year-old British boy from his grandmother's home in Pakistan contacted the boy's father on Friday, it was claimed last night.

Malcolm Calvert, the former Cazenove banker convicted of insider dealing earlier this week, was today sentenced to 21 months in prison.

The banks are resisting reforms to break up large, systemically unsafe, institutions today through their considerable lobbying power and their funding for political parties on both sides of the Atlantic.

Here's the real significance of Barclays' floated move into the US retail banking market - they're betting that the Volker proposals, which would enforce the old separation of retail and investment banking, are going to get nowhere.

John Lewis staff are to be rewarded with bonuses worth nearly eight weeks wages after profits jumped at the department store group.

Early risers will be able to eat their breakfasts at a JD Wetherspoon pub from next month after the chain today announced plans to extend its morning opening hours.

Morrisons today hailed "another good year" as profits climbed 21 per cent and sales hit record levels.

The City watchdog has sounded alarm about the prospect of a meltdown in commercial property. Announcing much tougher stress tests for banks, the Financial Services Authority raised concerns that they are not setting aside enough to cover losses on the sector.

The High Court yesterday ordered three people to pay damages after they fronted an internet events company that failed to provide a single ticket to the Beijing Olympics, despite clients paying millions of pounds. The deception meant that the British swimmer Rebecca Adlington's parents nearly missed seeing their daughter claim gold.

At last, someone who is prepared to show bankers some kindness. The Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square is showing Michael Moore's documentary Capitalism: A Love Story next week and is so concerned about the plight of our poor City folk that the first 50 bankers at each screening can get it in for free.

Britain's banks are to be ordered to disclose more details of their highest earners' pay.

A former Cazenove banker will return to Southwark Crown Court in London today to be sentenced, after being convicted yesterday on five counts of insider dealing.

Northern Rock, the state-owned bank, said yesterday it would pay its staff £14.9m in bonuses after reducing its annual losses by more than £1bn.

With Gordon Brown yesterday having set 24 March as Budget Day, it's a little late to be offering this advice, but here goes anyway: let's not bother with a Budget this side of the general election at all.

Glencore, the secretive Swiss commodities trader, yesterday insisted that its 2009 results were "credible" despite profits falling by 43 per cent.

The row over funding for the London Tube upgrade switched to a new, but equally incendiary tack yesterday after the independent Arbiter settled the value of the next slug of work at £4.46bn and immediately faced a threat of a legal challenge from Transport for London (TfL).

The waste management group Shanks attempted a comeback as bargain hunters piled in last night.

British Airways' concessions to Europe's competition watchdog over its proposed tie-up with American Airlines (AA) were derided by Sir Richard Branson as "woefully inadequate" yesterday.

Even being bombed five times during the Blitz didn't stop staff keeping Hamleys' store on London's Regent Street open throughout the Second World War. They just donned tin hats.

Toyota, the embattled Japanese car-maker that has been embroiled in a row over the safety of its vehicles in recent weeks, yesterday said that employees at its factories in north Wales and Derbyshire were set to return to full-time working.

EMI Music's chief executive has shocked the market by quitting weeks before the group was due to draw up a growth plan critical to its future. The beleaguered music label has appointed the former ITV chief executive Charles Allen to replace him.

From basket case to buyer. Less than two years ago, almost everyone assumed that Barclays would join Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group in taking a bailout from the Government. Having avoided that fate, its recovery has been so strong that City gossips now take very seriously talk that Barclays is planning a major acquisition in the US retail banking sector.

Though you wouldn't think it from the hysterical warnings we have been hearing of late about the dangers of a credit rating downgrade, the UK has a little time to get its finances in order. And one of the chief reasons for this is that even though our borrowing is high, we have relatively little debt to roll over in the next few years ? the average maturity of gilts, at around 13 to 14 years, is significantly higher than for the bonds of most other governments.

Banks would have to disclose the number of employees taking home half a million pounds or more under draft Government plans on top earners, it was revealed today.

He might be a bully and he might lack many of the qualities of leadership, bit even his worst enemies - plenty of em - would have to agree that Gordon Brown did call much of the financial crisis right.

Music group EMI today named former ITV boss Charles Allen as executive chairman as the firm battles to improve its fortunes.

Northern Rock today said it was paying staff £14.9 million in bonuses after losses narrowed last year.

A European Monetary Fund? Why not? It would do all the things that the IMF can do to rescue a stricken economy, but it keeps it in the family, the European family that is. This has the great political advantage of keeping the US (which retains a big role in the Washington-based IMF) out of EU affairs. This, in case you hadn't guessed, is a particular concern of the French, who cannot bear the idea that Greece, or anyone else, should become a Trojan horse (to borrow an apt classical metaphor) for Anglo-Saxon orthodoxies. Too humiliating.

Merlin Entertainments, the private equity-owned operator of attraction parks, held the door open to a potential flotation later this year as it revealed that it was on track for another record performance in 2010.

Sterling suffered a triple whammy yesterday as poor trade figures, warnings from two credit agencies about the UK's AAA rating and the possibility of more bank failures badly damaged confidence.

Ark Therapeutics, the AIM-listed pharmaceuticals group, said yesterday that it would consider offers for the company after its potential brain cancer treatment, Cerepro, was rejected by European regulators.

The credit ratings agency Fitch is entitled to its view that Britain's current plan to cut the budget deficit is too vague and too slow. But if Fitch, or any other critic, thinks it is going to get any more clarity from the Government ? or the Conservatives, for that matter ? on deficit reduction this side of the election, it is living in cloud cuckoo land.

It may have missed out on the top gongs at the Oscars ceremony on Sunday, but Sony is backing Avatar's record-breaking box office performance to help usher 3D viewing into the living room.

For children of the 1970s, the name Skynet is synonymous with one thing: killer robots.

Toyota yesterday hit back at allegations that defective electronics are behind the recall of 8.5 million of its cars in recent weeks.

Hopes of increasing mobile internet use helped Vodafone to weather a weak session on the benchmark FTSE 100 index last night.

Npower became the fourth of the "big six" energy suppliers to cut its gas prices yesterday, ratcheting up the pressure on Scottish Power and EDF to announce similar plans before the new tariffs come in at the end of this month.

The field to buy Hobbycraft, the arts and craft retailer, for as much as £100m has been narrowed to up to six serious bidders.

EADS is withdrawing from the race for a $35bn Pentagon contract because the terms "clearly favour" US rival Boeing, prompting harsh words from the European Commission.

Consumer groups were quick to criticise yesterday's announcement by the Financial Services Authority that it will embark on another six weeks of consultation with the providers of payment protection insurance over its plans for a regulatory crackdown on the policy. And while there is nothing wrong with a watchdog taking some time to ensure it gets things right, it's easy to see why bodies such as Which? are so concerned.

The stockbroker appointed to alleviate West Ham United's debt mountain is joining the exodus of companies from Britain.

It's not often that Rupert Murdoch is lost for words, but that's what happened during his keynote speech at an Abu Dhabi media summit yesterday when the autocue broke down. In the end, an aide had to dig out a hard copy of the speech, enabling the great man to carry on.

European Monetary Fund? Why not?

Dismal trade figures and fresh doubts over the UK's sovereign credit rating heaped more pressure on the pound today.

In his own terms the Greek MP, George Papandreou is right to ask, beg even, President Obama to clamp down on the speculators

UK exports took their biggest plunge in more than three years during January, official figures showed today.

t's difficult to know what to be more worried by; the appalling trade numbers; credit rating agency warnings on the UK's credit rating, or similar warnings about how fragile the banks still are.

The interest charged on two-year fixed rate mortgages fell to a six-and-a-half-year low during February in a further sign that competition was slowly returning to the market, figures showed today.

Britain's goods trade deficit with the rest of the world unexpectedly widened in January to its biggest since August 2008, raising further concerns about the strength of the country's broader economic recovery.

Profits at Eurotunnel collapsed last year as the business was hit by a tunnel fire and wintry weather, the firm said today.

Fears that London faces an exodus of bankers increased yesterday as it emerged that many will have to pay more income tax from next month than in any of the capital's rival financial centres around the world.

An influential committee of MPs will today call for root-and-branch reform of the Treasury's dealings with UK Financial Investments, the organisation charged with overseeing the state's multi billion-pound stake in the banking sector.

International Woman's Day was ushered in triumphantly as Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Director. The corporate world managed to take the shine off the success as the World Economic Forum (WEF) released a report criticising businesses around the world for failing to close the gender gap.

International Women's Day prompted a rash of research bemoaning the failure of businesses to promote more women to senior roles, with the Prime Minister even suggesting large companies might soon have to publish an annual report detailing their progress on this issue.

It looks as if the price comparison service uSwitch got a telling-off after it issued a press release on price cuts made by the energy supplier E.ON. It put out a second release hours later with the correction: "E.ON is not the cheapest gas supplier. Scottish and Southern Energy remains the cheapest."

It increasingly looks as if Williams & Glyn, the 320-branch network that Royal Bank of Scotland is selling off as part of its settlement with the EC competition regulator, will be acquired by Santander. The Spanish bank may be the only bidder with deep enough pockets to meet the £1bn asking price, particularly as it is dependent on £3bn of Bank of England funding support that the acquirer would need to replace while also meeting capital adequacy requirements.

Royal Dutch Shell and PetroChina are making a joint bid for the Australian gas group Arrow Energy valued at nearly £2bn.

Government efforts to encourage motorists to buy greener cars are proving so successful they are raising concerns that tax breaks for cleaner vehicles may have to be re-jigged.

Retail sales rebounded strongly in February after the exceptionally cold weather and the hike in VAT back to 17.5 per cent depressed high street activity at the start of the year.

The hedge fund group Man was in focus as the FTSE 100 crept beyond the 5,600-point mark last night. The stock closed 5.6p higher at 251.5p after Bank of America Merrill Lynch issued a defence of the group's flagship AHL fund, which lost money in 2009.

Another mutual looks set to bite the dust with the announcement of merger talks between Coventry, the UK's third largest building society, and its smaller rival, the Stroud & Swindon. The confirmation of merger discussions comes just weeks after the Chesham was swallowed by the much larger Skipton in a deal that didn't look far off a rescue, although the two sides insisted that this wasn't the case.

UK hoteliers will not see trading conditions improve this year and forecast it will be 2013 before room rates in Europe return to levels seen before the financial crisis.

DFS, the sofa retailer, is poised to be sold for more than £500m before the end of next week.

The Takeover Panel's investigation into the behaviour of Kraft during its buyout of Cadbury isn't likely to do workers at Somerdale much good. Still, public censure of Kraft is the least it deserves and might give other companies in takeover situations food for thought.

A leading hotel chain today launched a campaign to persuade businessmen and women to cut back on corporate jargon after a study found many people were turned off by phrases such as "thinking out of the box".

Business leaders today urged the Government to deliver a "credible" economic plan for balancing the books by 2016, including lower spending and reform of public services.

Firms could be required to report on efforts they are making to increase the number of women in senior management jobs, the Government announced today.

Kraft is under investigation by UK regulators over whether it misled Cadbury employees and investors in its battle to take over the confectioner, it was reported today.

British diplomats will today begin the final stage of a desperate rearguard action against new European legislation that London-based hedge funds and private equity firms warn could drive them out of business.

Britain is "prepared to be flexible" to reach a deal with Iceland over the £2.3bn debt owed since the collapse of the online savings bank Icesave, the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, said yesterday.

The clothing brand George at Asda today became the first retailer to offer customers a 100-day returns policy across its entire range, as it attempts to turn the screws on rivals Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Primark.

The CBI is calling on the Chancellor to use the Budget to spell out a "credible plan" to fix the public finances ? but it has rejected the idea of immediate deep cuts in public spending or hefty tax increases in a post-election emergency budget.

The huge earthquake in Chile last weekend ? which measured a massive 8.8 on the Richter scale and had killed more than 800 people at the last count ? has pushed up copper prices after power cuts caused production to halt at many of the country's mines.

Analysts expect to hear of solid profits growth when the supermarket group Morrisons posts its full-year results this week. UBS is eyeing £760m in pre-tax profits, up by about 18 per cent, while Numis and Jefferies are marginally behind, forecasting a rise of £759m and £757m, respectively. "Morrisons' recent outperformance better reflects its investment attractions. These should be underpinned by a strong set of finals and the confirmation of margin expansion potential," said Jefferies, which expects the chain's full-year earnings before interest and tax to grow by 21 per cent.

What is likely to be the big economic surprise over the months ahead? This might seem like a fatuous question given that surprises are, well, surprises. They're the events we typically don't expect. Nevertheless, it's not such a daft approach, if only because the economics profession has been consistently tripped up over the last couple of years by a collective failure of imagination.

The Institute of Directors today offers tacit support to the Conservatives with a business manifesto calling for immediate steps to cut the deficit. One demand will cause problems: the IoD wants the next Government to agree to a third runway at Heathrow, to which the Tories are implacably opposed.

Tidjane Thiam, the chief executive of Prudential, will begin a whistle stop tour of the Square Mile this week in a effort to persuade angry fund managers that a $35.5bn (£24bn) purchase of AIG's Asian insurance business makes sense.

More than 100 potential investors have told the Red Knights, the consortium planning a bid for Manchester United, they want to back its attempt to buy the club from the Glazer family.

Ftse 100 group Vedanta Resources and Canadian miner HudBay Minerals are believed to be in the mix for the $800m zinc assets of Anglo American which are up for sale.

Big Bear Group has shelved it's plans to float on the stock market. The company behind the Sugar Puffs cereal brand, Fox's Glacier Mints and Just Brazils chocolates has become the latest in a wave of companies forced to ditch their hopes for listings.

Russian steel group Severstal will formalise a $400m (£265m) bid for Surrey-headquartered miner Crew Gold next week. Severstal must make a formal offer as it has 26.59 per cent of Crew's shares ? beyond the threshold that forces a predator to make a bid.

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is severing ties with a number of its smaller company clients and reducing its analysis of the small cap sector in an effort to concentrate on larger, more-profitable businesses.

Collins Stewart is expected to announce that Tim Ingram, the chief executive of Caledonia Investments, is to become its new chairman to replace Terry Smith when the stockbroker delivers full year results next week.

British growth will stall in 2011 as the economy struggles to overcome a series of obstacles this year, the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) has warned in its latest forecast released today.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the administrator to Globespan, the failed Scottish airline, is considering pursuing an affiliate of Deutsche Bank for the £20m it is owed by E-Clear, the collapsed credit card processing company.

Ed Pressman is the Hollywood producer responsible for a string of business-inspired films, including Thank You for Smoking, American Psycho and, of course, Wall Street.

Achef who started his own business less than two years ago will tomorrow become the first outsider in Selfridges' 100-year history to open a restaurant in its flagship Oxford Street store. Ewan Venters, Selfridges food and catering director, says: "There are many fantastic British chefs, but Mark Hix represents the very best of British chef talent. It was a quite straightforward decision. We simply did not consider offering it to anyone else."

Much as the British are treated to The Sound of Music on television every Christmas, we Americans get It's a Wonderful Life. It stars the American icon and all-round good guy Jimmy Stewart playing George Bailey, a dedicated, honest banker. George's bank faces a run based on a rumour ? spread by the movie's bad guy ? that his bank is insolvent.

It's not just the brilliance of the footballers at Real Madrid and Barcelona that British clubs should be looking to for inspiration but the way the Spanish teams are run. Both are mutual organisations, owned by their supporters who are responsible for electing management.

Manufacturing is back. Not only is output in Britain finally climbing, but we had data last week that suggested manufacturers were more positive about prospects than at any time since 1994.

According to insiders at Prudential, Tidjane Thiam, the chief executive of the insurer ? which said last week that it was bidding $35.5bn (£23.6bn) to buy AIG's Asian insurance business ? is a firm believer in emotion over analysis.

Property giant Liberty International is expected to confirm plans that it is to split into two parts when it announces its results later this week. It is believed it may also detail plans to raise more cash from investors in a rights issue.

African Barrick Gold, a subsidiary of the world?s biggest gold mining company, yesterday started bookbuilding for its expected $975m London floatation.

Iceland's disgruntled voters are expected to deliver a resounding "no" when they head to the polls today to vote in a crucial referendum on the terms of the island nation's repayments to Britain and the Netherlands.

Primark's Ryan comes out of hiding

Arthur Ryan, chairman of Primark, hasn't been photographed in public since founding the chain in 1969. Now Mr Ryan's seclusion is over: after turning up to accept a gong at the Retail Week Awards at London's Grosvenor House on Thursday night, the septuagenarian stuck around and was spotted puffing away on a ciggie with pals outside the Park Lane hotel after midnight.

Everyone in Reykjavik, whatever their opinion, is so fed up with the whole thing: Icesave is a banned word here. It has been ongoing since before 2008. And, you know, this is always on the evening bulletins. Even if you don't understand it you're sick of it. "You can talk about anything," people joke, "so long as it's not Icesave."

Glencore, the secretive Swiss commodities-trading group, yesterday exercised an option to buy back the Colombian coal miner Prodeco, a year after selling the company to Xstrata.

Hong Kong's richest man ? dubbed "Superman" for his business skills ? is set to table a bid for the UK power distribution arm of France's EDF Group this month. Li Ka-shing's Cheung Kong Infrastructure (CKI) will make an offer for the network jointly with Hongkong Electric Holdings, in which it also has a 40 per cent stake.

Harry Redknapp believes the gap between North London rivals Tottenham and Arsenal is closing fast but claims the Gunners still have a real chance of winning the title.

Malcolm Calvert, the former Cazenove banker convicted of insider dealing earlier this week, was today sentenced to 21 months in prison.

World famous sanctuary for abandoned pets, Battersea Dog & Cats home, has teamed up with Royal Mail to celebrate its 150th anniversary.

Where better than the urban sprawl of Camden with its filthy alleyways and tucked-away boozers to catch a glimpse of the new generation of indie and rock and roll acts?

A 64-year-old man with learning difficulties was "tormented to death" after being bullied by yobs for more than a decade, neighbours claimed today.

Portsmouth's hopes of survival were today given a major boost when Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs accepted the club's move into administration.

The largest aftershock since Chile's devastating earthquake rocked the South American country Thursday minutes before the inauguration of President Sebastian Pinera.

A gang who kidnapped and tortured a 16-year-old boy have been jailed for 40 years, it was confirmed today.

It?s one small step for Beethoven and a giant leap for mankind from the First to his Eighth Symphony and to hear both works in tandem on instruments of the period only intensifies the revolution drawing us ever closer to the mighty Ninth.

The banks are resisting reforms to break up large, systemically unsafe, institutions today through their considerable lobbying power and their funding for political parties on both sides of the Atlantic.

El Hadji Diouf's lawyer has insisted allegations of assault against the Blackburn player are "erroneous".

An award-winning female porn director has been appointed as a parliamentary hopeful for the Liberal Democrats, it was disclosed today.

London Underground is to axe up to 800 jobs under plans to make savings of £16 million a year, the transport giant announced today.

Former England goalkeeper David Seaman's wife was granted a quickie divorce today on the grounds of adultery.

I seem to have confused everyone by taking issue with Nick Clegg's seeing a parallel between the conduct of the banks today and that of the trade unions before the 1980s reforms.

Three Labour MPs accused of expenses fraud said they would plead not guilty when they appeared in court for the first time today.

Lawyers acting for a former Bosnian president who was arrested at Heathrow over war crime allegations return to the High Court today in a bid to secure him bail.

England's Hockey World Cup campaign ground to a halt today as they were beaten 4-1 by Germany in the semi-finals.

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger was not surprised to see Manchester United demolish AC Milan 4-0 at Old Trafford - but still would have no qualms about facing them in the quarter-finals of the Champions League.

Arsene Wenger accepts it will take a "miracle" for Arsenal captain Cesc Fabregas to be fit for Saturday's Barclays Premier League trip to Hull.

Sitting on the floor of her village homestead in India?s Madhya Pradesh region and cradling her new born baby girl in her arms, 27-year-old Asha Jatav is all smiles.

Sir Terry Wogan said today he is living a "student" lifestyle - lying in bed watching TV until the afternoon.

Hopes for the battered airline industry were raised today after the global aviation body predicted a strong recovery this year as passengers take to the skies again.

Greece ground to a virtual halt today as workers held yet another general strike in protest at painful spending cuts.

A company boss was jailed for three years today for his part in a scam which saw tens of millions of eggs falsely passed off as free range.

Watch an exclusive preview clip from the film adaptation of Stieg Larsson's international bestseller 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.'

A British journalist detained in Gaza by Hamas was released without charge today, the Foreign Office said.

Married Labour MPs Ann and Alan Keen were ordered today to repay £1,500 in expenses claimed for running a second home where they were actually living full-time.

A new £30 billion high-speed rail (HSR) network, with 250mph trains, was announced today by the Government.

Pink Floyd won a ruling at the High Court today which will bar record company EMI selling single downloads from their concept albums.

Rock star Pete Doherty was given a 12-month driving ban and fined £500 today after he admitted allowing his manager to use his Daimler without insurance.

Five years ago today, the Commission for Africa launched a groundbreaking report that helped to set in motion a year of remarkable achievements in the fight against global poverty.

Wayne Rooney is refusing to set himself a goals target for the season despite crashing through the 30 barrier at Old Trafford last night.

?I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.? Not my words alas, but those of Groucho Marx.

Thousands of Network Rail maintenance workers have voted strongly in favour of strikes in a row over jobs, bringing the threat of industrial action over Easter closer, it was announced today.

The Daily Mail has today published an embarrassing apology after publishing an article claiming that a criminologist posing as a teenage girl on Facebook was inundated with contacts from men seeking sexual favours.

Here's the real significance of Barclays' floated move into the US retail banking market - they're betting that the Volker proposals, which would enforce the old separation of retail and investment banking, are going to get nowhere.

A British Airways computer expert who allegedly offered to take advantage of a planned strike by cabin crew as part of a terror plot appeared in court today.

The sudden takedown of an Internet provider thought to be helping spread one of the most promiscuous pieces of malicious software out there appears to have cut off criminals from potentially millions of personal computers under their control.

Real Madrid were accused of throwing 250 million euros down the drain on today after being dumped out of the Champions League by Olympique Lyon.

Manchester United thumped AC Milan 4-0 last night to progress to the quarter-finals 7-2 on aggregate.

Lewis Hamilton has no intention of going off the rails now he no longer has by his side two dominant characters who have ruled his life.

England seamer Graham Onions will fly back to England after being ruled out of the two-Test series against Bangladesh due to a back injury.

Tim Henman has ruled himself out of the running to be Great Britain's next Davis Cup captain because "it doesn't feel like the right time".

Ben Foden is determined to do his talking on the pitch after being given a dressing down by England manager Martin Johnson for speaking out of turn.

Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez wants his players to start taking responsibility for their own actions instead of looking to blame team-mates.

Real Madrid director general Jorge Valdano gave under-pressure coach Manuel Pellegrini a vote of confidence in the wake of last night's Champions League exit at the hands of Lyon.

Sony Corp has unveiled its new motion-controlled video game system, pitching it to both casual and hard-core gamers alike, as the company looks to ride one of the hottest trends in gaming.

The battle for control of Manchester United has taken another twist following confirmation that a leading global investment bank has agreed to advise on a possible acquisition of the Old Trafford outfit by the Red Knights group.

Insurers paid out £650 million in weather-related claims as the UK suffered the coldest winter for 30 years, a trade body said today.

Opera Software today unveiled a version of its Mini mobile browser for use on cellphones running on Google's Android software.

AC Milan's 4-0 drubbing at Manchester United in the Champions League shows the seven-times European champions are now scrabbling in the rubble of their great past, Italian media said today.

Motorola has reached a deal with Microsoft Corp that will put Bing search and mapping services on its phones that use Google's Android operating system.

Martin O'Neill has challenged Gabriel Agbonlahor, John Carew and Emile Heskey to deliver enough goal-power in the final quarter of the season to keep Aston Villa on course for FA Cup glory and a Champions League spot.

John Lewis staff are to be rewarded with bonuses worth nearly eight weeks wages after profits jumped at the department store group.

Nearly one in six children in England failed to gain a place at their first choice secondary school this year, Government figures showed today.

Early risers will be able to eat their breakfasts at a JD Wetherspoon pub from next month after the chain today announced plans to extend its morning opening hours.

?Porn objectifies women, but erotica doesn?t,? explains renowned British photographer Rankin. While he acquiesces that pictures of pouting blondes wearing nothing but stiletto spikes on the pages of Playboy are not usually considered art, Rankin?s new exhibition, jokingly entitled ?Cheeky?, seeks to dispel the mist of seediness surrounding erotica and to bring it out from beneath grubby mattresses.

More than 100 firefighters were battling a blaze today in a restaurant and office complex.

Take That star Mark Owen said he was "deeply sorry" today after admitting a string of affairs behind his wife's back.

Hopes that five-year-old British boy Sahil Saeed had been found were dashed today as the police chief leading the investigation in Pakistan confirmed the search is ongoing.

Morrisons today hailed "another good year" as profits climbed 21 per cent and sales hit record levels.

The World Cup kicks off in South Africa on June 11, and in anticipation, every day until then we will be highlighting a classic World Cup moment.

We've weighed up the options and here's the end result: our pick of the finest kitchen scales.

Philip Bujak has a dream. The chief executive of the Montessori St Nicholas Charity hopes that one day every state primary school in the country will have a Montessori teacher on their staff. But with only five state primaries using Montessori practices in the UK, he knows he has a mountain to climb.

It's the advice we treasure for ever. As Mothering Sunday approaches, public figures reveal to Holly Williams the words of wisdom given to them by the most important women in their lives...

The reputation of football's playing fraternity was not enhanced yesterday when it emerged that 85 people had been shown the door by financially stricken Portsmouth while only two players had offered to take pay cuts to save the fate of the less well-off.

Nicholson Baker, 52, is the author of Vox, the novel about telephone sex that Monica Lewinsky supposedly gave to Bill Clinton. Other novels include The Fermata, the story of a man who can stop time, and, just out, The Anthologist. His non-fiction includes Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, which came out last year.

The future is incontestably digital: the internet is changing the way we do all sorts of things, from shopping to working to running our social lives. Education, though, has so far largely remained anchored in the old world ? but even this is beginning to change.

It's 1pm at The Petchey Academy in Hackney, north London, and the serving hatches clatter open, revealing rows of grey trays, each one offering exactly the same food as every other tray.

When Richard Galt returned from Japan a year ago, he resolved to break into advertising. So, he applied to JWT for a traineeship. They said the 25-year-old would make a good "creative" or "planner" but that first he needed to do a Master's course at Buckinghamshire New University.

Should top independent schools set up a new private university on the lines of American liberal arts colleges, providing high-quality teaching, a broad curriculum and charging full fees?

When you think of the Baftas, images of red-carpet glamour, frilly frocks and Colin Firth no doubt immediately spring to mind. You probably don't envisage a graphic designer sitting in an office, day in, day out, glued to his computer screen as he works on refining the already renowned corporate image of Britain's premier showbusiness awards.

This morning, I started my day in the local Pret A Manger huddled over a skinny latte and a gay porn magazine called Butt. I can't think of many porn mags, gay or straight, that I'd be happy to read at 8.30am in Pret, if at all. But then Butt, with its apparently unpretentious Courier typeface, small format and smiling cover boy isn't really like the rest. Did I mention that it's printed on blushing pink paper too?

What coronaries, kittens and caterwauling tantrums one would have ? doubtless simultaneously ? if one could eavesdrop on a political party's HQ when it was awash with bad faith at manifesto-writing time. So it says a lot for Tom Basden's play-making skills that he has managed to concoct a charmingly funny comedy about the process. We're not talking David Hare here. Basden's satire is gentle and oblique and it derives its beguiling mix of acuity and tactical daffiness from the fact that, far from being professional politicians in Millbank, the five twentysomethings whom we follow through 70 minutes of inconclusive bickering are incompetents hard put to come up with a name for their organisation, let alone any mutually agreed policies beyond "democracy" and "space programme".

In profile, he has his dad's pursed mouth and nose. Full on, the face becomes more eerily identical the more you stare at it. No DNA tests would ever be needed to confirm that this is indeed Paul McCartney's only son, playing his first official London gig at the age of 32. Start listening as well, though, and the fantasies that intrude aren't of the Beatles' Shea Stadium triumph, or Abbey Road genius. I start to imagine Paul McCartney's Liverpool suburban upbringing shifted in time to the early 1990s, with him now listening to Nirvana and the Cure, not Elvis Presley, at night, and instead of conquering the world, remaining a talented, almost content weekend rocker, sometimes musing what might have been: McCartney, in other words, if the sparks of genius and luck never struck. That seems James's honourable level.

We live in a jaded world where we are bombarded by information, much of it in the form of text. It must have been quite different when Jenny Holzer was setting out in the 1970s. She made her name in the pre-digital media stone age on the cutting edge of the New York underground art scene, pitching for the attention of passers-by with fly posters carrying a few well-chosen words pursuing philosophical and political themes.

I'm flying over Russia with Air New Zealand, travelling from Hong Kong, having just had a lovely meal of passion fruit and vodka-cured salmon, followed by braised beef short rib with garlic mash, and a blueberry almond cake.

The 1692 Massacre of Glencoe can still rouse passions today, so it's a brave author who tries to wrest fiction from it. In her third novel, Susan Fletcher approaches the massacre using two main characters, one historical, the other semi-legendary. What emerges is very much a literary, rather than a traditional historical, novel.

In an employment environment where very few of us enjoy absolute job security, there's much to be said for appending another substantial paragraph or two to our CV. Add to that the sharply increasing number of people coming out of universities with first degrees, and it's easy to see why there's a healthy market in postgraduate business-related courses.

If logistics summons up unhappy memories of an articulated lorry cutting you up on the M6, think again. For Haitians devastated by January's earthquake, it was a matter of life and death that the right supplies arrived at the right time and at the right place. With its sister, supply chain management, logistics has become more important as world trade has expanded, and countries such as India and China have emerged as manufacturing giants. The status of logistics has risen, and its techniques are being deployed for humanitarian and military, as well as commercial, use.

An affaire d'état? Two affaires de tit for tat? Or just an affaire de twitter which proves to be tat?

Nick Clegg will this weekend announce the four "tests" he would set for Labour and the Conservatives in return for the support of the Liberal Democrats if neither main party wins an overall majority at the general election.

As a letter to The Independent pertinently pointed out earlier this week,when has there ever been a case of a human-being being hurt by a mouse? This follows the brouhaha over the revelation that most West End theatres are riddled with the little critters ? except, no doubt, for the St Martin's Theatre, home of The Mousetrap.

You get a better class of vox pop in John Lewis, judging from the first of Liz Allen's films about Middle Britain's favourite retailer. "In seven days, God made the world and in seven days, John Lewis will make your curtains," said one well-spoken lady, her tone suggesting that the latter act of creation was at least equal to the first. "If John Lewis is short of anything," said another customer feelingly "we've got it in our house." He appeared to feel that his wife had done everything that could reasonably be expected of her to prop up John Lewis's profit figures, but unfortunately not everyone has been shopping with the same zeal in recent months; Inside John Lewis, a three-part series about the department-store chain, was filmed as the recession was biting. It had already taken a great chunk out of John Lewis's ambitious plans for expansion and the question that ran through this first episode was whether it might yet swallow the fabled peculiarities of the John Lewis business model.

It started as a bit of a laugh. After my food memoir, The Settler's Cookbook, was published earlier this year, friends who can't cook and won't cook asked if I could show them how to make some of the recipes. So they came, a motley crew, to my house. I taught them five dishes in a couple of hours and we ate a jolly lunch. They brought their own mates, new people, amiable strangers ? some of whom had been dying to have meaty arguments with me about my "provocative" newspaper columns. It was exhilarating.

'But do you know what no one has ever suggested?" Carly Simon teases. "That it's a girl." It's the great, white, vain (Warren Beatty-shaped, perhaps?) elephant in the room, which happens to be a chilly hotel conservatory in west London. It's like interviewing Colonel Sanders and not enquiring about his "secret formula". It's a subject that can't be avoided. I'll bring it up at the end, I reason. I'll playfully mention that I think "Nobody Does It Better" is the best James Bond song and then in a throwaway fashion, ask "You're So Vain", so it is about Beatty or Jagger, or both? It doesn't quite work out like that, though, and anyway there's a lot more to this prodigious talent than one song, albeit an exquisitely acerbic ("But you gave away the things you loved and one of them was me") and droll ("Well, you're where you should be all the time/And when you're not you're with/Some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend") one.

Even if the Oscar-nominated Brit-flick, An Education, didn't strike a chord with the judges, it certainly struck a chord with me. I went to the school portrayed in the film and I remember the headmistress Ruth Garwood Scott even more fearsomely than Emma Thompson played her, a regally coiffed presence requiring pupils to line up and, amazingly, curtsey as we shook her hand. But that was then, and weirdo etiquette like curtsying is way off the curriculum now, replaced by texting tutorials and domestic violence role-play probably. Yet the question of precisely what children should learn at school is still wide open, according to Anne McElvoy, who is currently engaged in that nightmare modern quest ? finding a secondary school for her 11-year-old son.

Georgia Rakusen, 24, and Beckie Darlington, 27, used to be competitors. Two freelancers managing cultural events in Newcastle, they met pitching for the same clients. It was only after winning scholarships on an entrepreneurship course at Teesside University that they were able to join forces and form their new company, Haus Projects. One year on, they are working with some of the biggest arts organisations in the North-east.

Sir, the champagne! Motor racing enthusiasts were treated to the sight of a distantly familiar face aboard yesterday morning's Gulf Air flight to Bahrain, departing just in time for the start of the 2010 Grand Prix season.

The final moments of Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist crushed to death beneath a pile of earth and rubble in the path of an advancing Israeli army bulldozer, were described to an Israeli court by an eyewitness yesterday.

Joe Biden, the US Vice-President, yesterday repeated his attack on Israel's plans to build 1,600 new Jewish homes in Arab East Jerusalem as European governments backed his complaint that they undermined trust before imminent new indirect Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.