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A high profile trial opens in Florida of a young US woman, Casey Anthony, accused of murdering her two-year-old daughter.
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Cardiff University becomes the second in Wales to set a maximum tuition fee of £9,000 per year for students from the rest of the UK.
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A woman is arrested on suspicion of murder after the sudden deaths of her two children in Southampton.
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Transport Secretary Philip Hammond warns of disruption ahead
Hundreds of passengers face UK flight cancellations because of drifting ash from an Icelandic volcanic eruption.
BA, KLM, Aer Lingus and Easyjet are among the airlines that have suspended services in and out of Scotland for the coming hours.
But Ryanair has objected to an order from Irish officials to ground its morning flights to and from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen on safety grounds.
It said it would be complaining about the “unnecessary cancellations”.
A statement on Ryanair’s website read: “Ryanair strongly object to this decision and believe that there is no basis for these flight cancellations and will be meeting with the [Irish Aviation Authority] on Tuesday morning to have this restriction on Ryanair flights removed as a matter of urgency.”
The cancellations come just over a year after another volcanic eruption in Iceland caused widespread disruption across Europe, including the closure of UK airspace.
The transport secretary said the UK was “better” prepared than it had been last year.
Philip Hammond told BBC Two’s Newsnight there were now “much more robust systems” in place to “minimise the disruptive effect” and there was now a better understanding of the risk from ash clouds.
But he added travellers had got to learn to live with such disruption caused by volcanic activity in Iceland following an “unusually quiet period” in the last 20 years.
He added: “What we can’t promise is that there won’t be disruption when there is a major natural event like this.”
The Grimsvotn volcano in Vatnajokull National Park began erupting on Saturday.
Iceland’s airspace has been closed for a period as a result but experts say this eruption is on a different scale to the one last year and ash particles are larger and, as a result, fall to the ground more quickly.
However, the threat of disruption saw US President Barack Obama arrive in the UK from the Republic of Ireland on Monday night, a day ahead of his scheduled arrival for his state visit.
A number of airlines are choosing not to fly through Scottish airspace on Tuesday:
British Airways is not operating any flights between London and Scotland until 1400 BSTKLM cancelled flights to and from Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh, as well as some to NewcastleEasyJet cancelled flights to and from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness and Aberdeen scheduled for between 0500 and 0900 BSTRyanair said it has been advised by the Irish Aviation Authority not to operate flights from Glasgow Prestwick, Edinburgh or Aberdeen until at least 1300 BST but believed that “there is no basis for these flight cancellations”Flybe cancelled flights to and from Aberdeen and InvernessGlasgow-based Loganair has cancelled 36 flights. Only inter-island routes in Orkney are unaffectedEastern Airways will not be operating any services in or out of Scottish airspace
Since last year, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has graded ash levels as low, medium or high, and airlines are notified if levels reach medium or high.
All British aircraft can fly in medium-density ash but the airlines need to consider whether to fly, according to risk assessments.
A CAA spokesman said the current cloud could “potentially” cause serious disruption as charts showed that the density levels were higher than medium below 35,000ft.
But he said procedures were “totally different” compared with last year.
He added: “If an airline has done a risk assessment as to how it will fly safely in medium or high ash levels, and has liaised with aircraft manufacturers and engine makers, then they will be able to fly if the CAA considers it acceptable.
“No UK airline has applied to fly in high-density ash, but a number have applied for, and been given, permission for flying in medium ash.”
The Met Office says changing wind patterns make it hard to predict whether the ash cloud will spread because weather systems are changing so rapidly.
It forecast that the plume could hit parts of Scotland between 0100 and 0700 BST before moving on to Northern Ireland and other northern areas of the UK later in the day.
During last April’s six-day shutdown only a handful of flights took off or landed in the UK.
Thousands of Britons found themselves stranded overseas, forcing many to make long and expensive journeys home by land. Airlines estimated the shutdown cost them $1.7bn (£1.1bn).
The Foreign Office is advising passengers to remain in regular contact with their travel agent or airline for the latest news on the status of flights and bookings.
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Four police officers from the Leicestershire force are to face misconduct proceedings after an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
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The US president and his wife arrived at Stansted a day ahead of schedule
The US-UK partnership is “an essential relationship for us and for the world”, the countries’ leaders have said ahead of the US president’s visit to Britain.
Barack Obama is to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace later at the start of his packed, three-day state visit.
He will meet Prime Minister David Cameron for talks on Wednesday likely to focus on Libya and the Middle East.
Mr Obama arrived in the UK a day ahead of schedule on Monday, to avoid any disruption from a volcanic ash cloud.
He flew into Stansted, in Essex, with wife Michelle after leaving the Republic of Ireland, where his week-long tour of Europe began.
The couple will receive a ceremonial welcome later, before visiting Westminster Abbey and Downing Street.
In a joint article in the Times, Mr Obama and Mr Cameron said of their countries’ relationship: “Ours is not just a special relationship, it is an essential relationship – for us and for the world.
“When the United States and Britain stand together, our people and people around the world can become more secure and more prosperous.
“The reason it thrives is because it advances our common interests and shared values. It is a perfect alignment of what we both need and what we both believe.”
Whenever a US president comes here there is always a slightly tortuous debate on whether or not the relationship is still special or not.
Both sides have decided the best way of avoiding that debate is to come up with a new wording entirely. They have a new adjective. It is now an essential relationship.
In a joint article for the Times newspaper, the prime minister and the president say the relationship between their countries was based originally on what they called emotional connections, sentiment and the ties of people and culture but now it thrives on common interests and shared values.
So what they are trying to focus on here now is more business-like pragmatism rather than any idea of appealing to the mythology of past historic links.
They also vowed not to abandon the protesters fighting for democracy in Arab countries, writing that they would “stand with those who want to bring light into dark, support those who seek freedom in place of repression, aid those laying the building blocks of democracy.
“We will not stand by as their aspirations get crushed in a hail of bombs, bullets and mortar fire,” said the two leaders.
“We are reluctant to use force, but when our interests and values come together, we know we have a responsibility to act.”
Mr Obama’s week-long tour of Europe began in Dublin on Monday where he delivered an open-air speech to thousands of cheering people, reaffirming US-Irish ties.
Speaking in stilted Gaelic, he told them he was happy to be in the Republic of Ireland.
“Whenever peace is challenged… America will stand by you always in your pursuit of peace,” he said.
The president’s Air Force One jet landed at Stansted airport just after 2215 BST on Monday.
The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall were originally due to greet the Obamas but because of their early arrival the couple were met instead by the Lord in Waiting, Viscount Brookeborough.
Mr and Mrs Obama will stay at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday but are spending their first night in the UK at Winfield House, the American ambassador’s residence in central London.
Security will be tight during the three-day trip which comes ahead of the G8 summit of world leaders in France.
The state visit to the UK is the 101st to be hosted by the Queen but only the third involving a US president in 100 years. The last US leader to come to the UK on one was George Bush in 2003.
President Obama was given a warm welcome in Dublin at the start of his week-long tour of Europe The president’s itinerary starts with joining the Duke of Edinburgh to inspect a Guard of Honour in the palace gardens, before a private lunch with the Queen.
The public will get their first chance to see President Obama and the First Lady when they arrive at Westminster Abbey to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
The couple will then go to Downing Street to meet the prime minister and his wife, Samantha, before returning to Buckingham Palace to meet Labour leader Ed Miliband.
In the evening there will be a state banquet for the Obamas at Buckingham Palace, where they will stay overnight.
On Wednesday, Mr Obama will hold talks with Mr Cameron at Downing Street.
He will be joined later by Michelle for a barbecue at Number 10 with British and American military veterans.
There will be a news conference, before the president departs for the Houses of Parliament, where he will give a speech about US foreign policy to MPs in Westminster Hall.
The day will be rounded off with a return banquet at Winfield House, the official residence of the US ambassador, where the Queen will formally say farewell.
Later this week President Obama will visit Poland and France, where he will attend a meeting of the Group of Eight (G8) major world powers.
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Mr Singh is also likely to take up the issue of Somali pirates Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is visiting Africa in a bid to expand India’s trade with the continent.
Mr Singh is in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, for the second India-Africa summit, which begins shortly.
India’s commerce with Africa is worth $40bn (£25bn) a year, but it is dwarfed by China, which does roughly three times as much business with Africa.
Discussion at the summit is also likely to focus on piracy off the coast of Somalia, which is hindering trade.
In Africa there are plenty of Indian products on offer – from relatively cheap cars and motorbikes to life-saving drugs.
As African heads of state meet Mr Singh, the talk is expected to be about how to boost the trade between two parts of the world that have shown a fair bit of resistance in the face of the global downturn.
The graphs show that the economy in Africa is growing at more than 5% a year – although most people will say they are not feeling it.
Whilst India’s economy expanded by more than 8%, India’s business links in Africa are also growing – one example being Bharti Airtel spending $10bn (£6.2bn) last year to take over the mobile phone operations across Africa from the Kuwaiti firm, Zain.
The challenge for African leaders is how to boost the trade and move away from an over-reliance on single commodities – the continent’s raw materials.
The issue of piracy is also likely to come up during the discussion.
It is estimated that more than 10% of all the sailors kidnapped by the Somali pirates are Indian.
In what sounded like a “you help us and we’ll help you” scenario, the Indian prime minister recently said Africa should have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
India itself has for some years been pushing for its own seat.
So everyone will be keen to keep diplomatic ties strong.
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Thousands of passengers are facing delays and flight cancellations after a volcano erupted in Iceland at the weekend.
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Greece is seeking political consensus over its latest austerity programme Any Greek debt default would likely hurt the credit rating of other peripheral eurozone countries, the ratings agency Moody’s has warned.
In a statement on the impact of a potential default, Moody’s said such a default would also hurt Greek banks.
Moody’s also became the latest agency to say any kind of restructuring of Greek debt would constitute a default.
Meanwhile, the Greek opposition leader has rejected the government’s request to support a four-year austerity plan.
The plan would lay out deficit reduction measures that go two years beyond the next general election.
Greece’s European partners had demanded cross-party support for the plan after talks last week on possible further bail-out measures.
Antonis Samaras, leader of the New Democracy party, said he believed the austerity demanded by Brussels would hurt the country’s economic recovery.
“I am not going to agree to this recipe, which has been proven wrong,” said Mr Samaras after meeting Prime Minister George Papandreou.
The head of the Communist party, which is influential with trade unions, refused even to meet him.
The government has a majority in parliament and does not rely on opposition support for its current austerity budgets.
Greece received a 110bn euro (£96bn; $155bn) bail-out from the European Union and International Monetary Fund last year.
As it attempts to reduce its debts, it has introduced various austerity measures.
But its efforts have not been helped by political bickering and the European Union has called for cross-party support in Greece for a medium-term austerity programme.
There has been increasing speculation that Greece could be allowed to restructure its debt.
On Monday, the Luxembourg Prime Minister and head of the eurogroup, Jean-Claude Juncker, said that a restructuring would involve a delay in repayments and a cut in interest payments, but would only be granted if the Greek government met strict targets.
In its statement, Moody’s said: “It is apparent that the longer the current state of uncertainty affecting Greece persists, the greater the temptation on the part of both the Greek and the euro area authorities to try to undertake some form of debt restructuring – in other words, to allow Greece to default.
“Moody’s believes that a default is likely to have adverse credit rating implications for Greece, possibly some other stressed European sovereigns, and the Greek banks, regardless of the efforts made to achieve an ‘orderly’ outcome.
“The full impact on Europe’s capital markets would be hard to predict and harder still to control. The fallout would have implications for the creditworthiness (and hence the ratings) of issuers across Europe.”
Meanwhile, Greece’s cost of borrowing in bond markets has continued to rise steadily, as expectations of an eventual default rise.
The yield on its 10-year bonds rose above 17% on Tuesday, up from 15.3% a week ago.
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Hosni Mubarak is being held in a military hospital in Sharm el-Sheikh after reporting heart problems Egypt’s ousted President Hosni Mubarak and his two sons are to be tried over the deaths of anti-government protesters, judicial officials say.
Mr Mubarak, who was ousted in February, is being detained at a hospital in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
He and his wife also face allegations of illegally acquiring wealth while they were in power for 30 years.
The couple’s two sons, Alaa and Gamal, are being held in Cairo’s Tora prison and also face fraud charges.
The three men have been charged with “premeditated murder of some participants in the peaceful protests of the 25 January revolution,” the country’s state news agency reported the prosecutor general as saying.
The charges come after renewed calls for protests on Friday to demand the trial of the Mubarak family as well as the lifting of emergency law.
More than 800 people died in the weeks-long crackdown that preceded Mr Mubarak’s departure.
The 83-year-old former leader was admitted to Sharm el-Sheikh’s military hospital in April with reported heart problems.
He and his wife Suzanne – who was also recently examined for possible heart problems after falling ill – have already been questioned at the Red Sea resort on charges of profiteering.
Reformers in Egypt believe the Mubarak family accumulated a fortune worth tens of billions of dollars while in power.
The Mubaraks have denied this, and little hard evidence has yet been made public. However their bank accounts in Cairo and in Switzerland have been frozen.
More than 20 Mubarak-era ministers and businessmen linked to the regime have been detained since February’s uprising.
Earlier this month, former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly was sentenced to 12 years in jail on charges of money-laundering and profiteering.
Adly also faces separate charges of ordering troops to fire on demonstrators. He could face the death penalty if convicted.
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Mrs Brown, originally from the Isle of Man, ran an guest house in Ascot A pilot has been found not guilty of murdering his estranged wife in Berkshire.
The body of wealthy Ascot guesthouse owner Joanna Brown, originally from the Isle of Man, was found on land on the Queen’s Windsor Estate last year.
British Airways captain Robert Brown, 47, was acquitted of murder but convicted of obstructing a coroner from holding an inquest.
He had already admitted manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility.
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Sir Ian McKellen was 25 when he made his first TV appearance Footage of actor Sir Ian McKellen in his first TV role has been found in the US decades after it was thought lost.
The veteran actor played a character named Plowden in the 1964 BBC period drama The Tomb of His Ancestors.
The programme, based on a short story by Jungle Book author Rudyard Kipling, was no longer thought to exist.
It used to be BBC policy to wipe recordings to recycle expensive tape stock, so only two of the original 25-part series were known to exist.
‘Important find’
A copy of the episode featuring Sir Ian was discovered in a private collection in Illinois, and bought by a consortium led by classic TV organisation Kaleidoscope.
The company’s Chris Perry described the McKellen drama as an “important find”.
He said: “The Tomb Of His Ancestors is a vintage piece of BBC drama set in the days of the British Raj and is especially important because of its connection to Sir Ian McKellen.
Sir Ian has made numerous TV appearances since his debut “For the first time in nearly 50 years we can once again watch the very first TV appearance by one of the UK’s greatest living actors.”
Mr Perry added that Sir Ian had not been informed of the find because he was probably “too busy filming The Hobbit”.
The programme was filmed as part of a series called Kipling: The Indian Tales of Rudyard Kipling.
Broadcast between July and December 1964, Kipling featured performances from the likes of David Hemmings, Michael Bates, Alfred Burke, Barbara Murray, Keith Barron and Patrick Troughton.
Sir Ian has become a much loved British actor, appearing in Hollywood blockbusters including The Lord Of The Rings and X Men.
He is also well known for his stage acting and in recent years has returned to TV, appearing in The Prisoner and Coronation Street.
Also recovered by the consortium were two other BBC programmes previously thought to be lost – a 1950s ballet production, Giselle, and a 1963 episode of the series Suspense, starring Sylvia Simms.
All three finds have been made available on loan to the BBC for digitisation, after which the original film prints will reside at the Tim Disney Archive’s Nottingham facilities.
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The EU has fresh doubts about visa waivers for visitors from the Balkans EU countries will be able to reimpose a visa requirement on visitors from the western Balkans, under new rules proposed by the European Commission.
Since December 2009 nationals of Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro have not needed visas to enter the Schengen zone, which includes most of the EU.
But Belgium and some of its neighbours have complained of a rise in asylum claims since the visa waiver came in.
This year 544 such claims from Serbians have been registered in Belgium.
That figure is higher than for the whole of 2009, the Belgian national broadcaster RTBF reports on its website.
A high number of the asylum claimants are ethnic Roma and Albanians from the south of Serbia, RTBF says.
Belgium’s Migration Minister Melchior Wathelet flew to Belgrade this week to discuss the issue with Serbian officials.
The Schengen Agreement, which dates back to 1995, abolished internal borders, enabling passport-free movement across much of Europe.
The Schengen zone covers 22 EU states and three non-EU countries – Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.
Now the Commission is recommending a “safeguard clause” that would allow Schengen countries to restore a visa requirement for non-EU countries, in cases where the visa waiver has led to irregular migration or abuse of the system, such as asylum claims from economic migrants.
EU interior ministers are expected to approve the change next month.
The visa waiver was intended to ease travel for Balkan holders of biometric passports planning short stays in the EU.
Last December the waiver was extended to citizens of Albania and Bosnia-Hercegovina.
The Schengen rules are now under review because France, Italy and some other countries want more flexibility to reinstate border controls.
The review was prompted by an influx of migrants fleeing the strife in North Africa this year. Most of them arrived on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, creating an emergency for the authorities there.
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Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francecca Hardwick died after years of abuse A report into police actions over a Leicestershire mother who killed herself and her disabled daughter after years of abuse is due to be published.
Fiona Pilkington and Francecca Hardwick died in a burning car in October 2007.
An Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation began after it emerged Ms Pilkington had called police 33 times about attacks and taunts.
The case has lead to a review of the way police forces deal with targeted anti-social behaviour.
Single mother Ms Pilkington’s home in Barwell, Leicestershire, was the focus of attacks by groups of up to 16 youngsters, with stones, eggs and flour thrown at the property.
The 38-year-old killed herself and her 18-year-old daughter by pouring petrol over their car in a lay-by on the A47 in Earl Shilton.
Incidents were reported over a 10-year period but the family only received eight visits from officers, the 2009 inquest heard.
Leicestershire Police admitted many of Ms Pilkington’s calls were not linked and were classified as anti-social behaviour rather than crime.
The inquest jury returned verdicts of suicide and unlawful killing, and said the response of the police and two local councils had contributed to the deaths.
The force, along with the county council and Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council, are facing legal action from the family.
The case of their deaths has been raised in the House of Commons several times.
Earlier this month Home Office Minister James Brokenshire insisted that making changes to policing so such a case would never be repeated was a priority for the government.
In January eight police forces began a pilot project to identify and protect victims of repeated anti-social behaviour more quickly.
It is focused on creating more effective call-handling and improving information-sharing between the police and other agencies like social services.
Leicestershire Police said changes had already been made in the force in the years since Ms Pilkington and her daughter died.
The IPCC report is due to be published at 1000 BST.
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At least 10 road workers have been killed in southern Afghanistan when their truck hit a roadside bomb, officials say.
No group has said it carried out the attack. Last week gunmen shot dead 35 highway workers in eastern Paktia province.
Road workers are frequently targeted by Taliban militants.
The Taliban recently declared a “spring offensive” of attacks. This is the fourth attack in as many days.
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