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Barcelona book their place in the Champions League final courtesy of an entertaining draw against Real Madrid in the second leg of their semi-final.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The BBC’s Jenny Hill says it has been one of longest periods crews have spent tackling moorland fires in recent years
Firefighters are continuing to deal with wild fires which have been burning across parts of the Highlands over the dry bank holiday weekend.
Several homes in Inverkirkaig in Assynt and Shiel Bridge in Kintail were evacuated because of advancing flames.
Crews have been working on steep rugged terrain and helicopters have been brought in to reach inaccessible areas.
Hundreds of firefighters have been involved – most of them part-time, retained firefighters.
Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service will reassess the situation over Tuesday morning.
Much of the effort to tackle the fires has involved the exhausting work of physically beating out the flames, along with water bombing by helicopter.
The largest scale fire has been burning at Torridon in Wester Ross and has destroyed about 10 square miles of vegetation.
It has been burning over the long weekend and has led to the evacuation of a campsite and the airlifting of several hillwalkers to safety.
“Once the fires reached the trees, the flames leapt as high as 40 feet”
Pete Selman National Trust for Scotland
The National Trust for Scotland said the fires had raged over key areas of Scottish woodland, including the Inveralling forestry scheme, and that late on Sunday they hit the forest regeneration plantations above Kintail village.
The regeneration is part of a plan to join up existing patches of ancient Caledonian pine forest and is one of its main conservation objectives.
The trust’s director Pete Selman said: “Despite the best efforts of the crews on the ground, once the fires reached the trees, the flames leapt as high as 40ft.
“At one point it looked as if the plantation might have been saved but the fires flared up again and, as it was getting dark, the teams had to come off the hill for their own safety.
“The loss of the mature trees is heartbreaking to all those involved in forest regeneration in the area over many years. However, the main thing is that no-one was hurt.”
New fires also broke out at Lochailort, south east of Arisaig, Kinlochleven in Lochaber, and at Dava woods near Inverurie in Aberdeenshire on Monday evening.
Fire crews also called in a helicopter to help fight the blaze on the Balmoral Estate.
Central Scotland Fire and Rescue Service had also been dealing with a large area of scrub and gorse on fire at Glengyle, at the northern end of Loch Katrine.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Ian Tomlinson collapsed at the G20 protests two years ago The jury at the inquest into the death of Ian Tomlinson has retired to consider its verdict.
Jurors must decide whether Pc Simon Harwood acted illegally and directly caused the death of Mr Tomlinson at the G20 protests in London on 1 April 2009.
As well as unlawful killing, the other verdicts available to the jury are misadventure, natural causes and open.
Mr Tomlinson, 47, collapsed and died after he was hit by a baton and pushed to the ground by the officer.
Judge Peter Thornton QC, summing up at the inquest, said the jury had to decide if the baton strike and push were “unlawful” and “dangerous” and whether they inadvertently caused Mr Tomlinson’s death.
The judge said the push on Mr Tomlinson did not have to be the “sole or principal” cause of death for jurors to return an unlawful killing verdict.
The jury has been told the Crown Prosecution Service could review its decision not to seek charges against police officers depending on its verdict.
The month-long hearing at the International Dispute Resolution Centre in Fleet Street, central London, has heard Mr Tomlinson fell to the ground after Pc Harwood hit him on the thigh with a baton and then shoved him from behind.
Mr Tomlinson, who was not part of the G20 protest, got back to his feet but collapsed and died minutes later.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Former Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff says he is resigning as the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, after a defeat in the country’s general election.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
A tornado has roared through the New Zealand city of Auckland, killing one person and injuring several more.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Ian Tomlinson was unlawfully killed by a Metropolitan Police officer at the G20 protests, an inquest jury has said.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The BBC says Today presenter John Humphrys could have been “clearer” about how the alternative vote works during an interview with David Cameron on the impending voting system referendum.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The BBC’s Jenny Hill says it has been one of longest periods crews have spent tackling moorland fires in recent years
Firefighters are continuing to deal with wild fires which have been burning across parts of the Highlands over the dry bank holiday weekend.
Several homes in Inverkirkaig in Assynt and Shiel Bridge in Kintail were evacuated because of advancing flames.
Crews have been working on steep rugged terrain and helicopters have been brought in to reach inaccessible areas.
Hundreds of firefighters have been involved – most of them part-time, retained firefighters.
Highlands and Islands Fire and Rescue Service will reassess the situation over Tuesday morning.
Much of the effort to tackle the fires has involved the exhausting work of physically beating out the flames, along with water bombing by helicopter.
The largest scale fire has been burning at Torridon in Wester Ross and has destroyed about 10 square miles of vegetation.
It has been burning over the long weekend and has led to the evacuation of a campsite and the airlifting of several hillwalkers to safety.
“Once the fires reached the trees, the flames leapt as high as 40 feet”
Pete Selman National Trust for Scotland
The National Trust for Scotland said the fires had raged over key areas of Scottish woodland, including the Inveralling forestry scheme, and that late on Sunday they hit the forest regeneration plantations above Kintail village.
The regeneration is part of a plan to join up existing patches of ancient Caledonian pine forest and is one of its main conservation objectives.
The trust’s director Pete Selman said: “Despite the best efforts of the crews on the ground, once the fires reached the trees, the flames leapt as high as 40ft.
“At one point it looked as if the plantation might have been saved but the fires flared up again and, as it was getting dark, the teams had to come off the hill for their own safety.
“The loss of the mature trees is heartbreaking to all those involved in forest regeneration in the area over many years. However, the main thing is that no-one was hurt.”
New fires also broke out at Lochailort, south east of Arisaig, Kinlochleven in Lochaber, and at Dava woods near Inverurie in Aberdeenshire on Monday evening.
Fire crews also called in a helicopter to help fight the blaze on the Balmoral Estate.
Central Scotland Fire and Rescue Service had also been dealing with a large area of scrub and gorse on fire at Glengyle, at the northern end of Loch Katrine.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
There have been 76 gorse fires since midnight on Saturday There are concerns for the safety of people out walking or camping on the Mournes as firefighters attempt to contain a blaze on a mountainside.
The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service said a large section of gorse land is on fire near Annalong in County Down.
Group Commander Kevin Synott said a police helicopter was launched to look for people in the Mourne area.
“It’s a very, very difficult task,” he added.
“We know for a fact there are a number of cars sitting in car parks near to the area.
“We can’t tell for certain if that is people on the mountainside or if it is people who have parked up and gone for a walk somewhere else.”
Mr Synott said strong winds are fanning the blaze, which is one of 76 gorse fires the NIFRS has attended since midnight on Saturday.
“What we’re saying to people who are enjoying the lovely countryside that we have is to please take care,” Mr Synott said.
Kilkeel leisure centre and Annalong community centre were due to open to accommodate anyone moved from their homes in the area.
However, an evacuation plan has been cancelled and the centres will not now open.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Footage from inside Bin Laden’s compound
Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the ISI, has said it is embarrassed by its failures on al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
An ISI official told the BBC the compound in Abbottabad where Bin Laden was killed by US forces on Sunday had been raided in 2003.
But the compound “was not on our radar” since then, the official said.
He gave new details of the raid, saying Bin Laden’s young daughter had said she saw her father shot.
Bin Laden, 54, was the founder and leader of al-Qaeda. He is believed to have ordered the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, as well as a number of other deadly bombings.
The ISI official told the BBC’s Owen Bennett-Jones in Islamabad that the compound in Abbottabad, just 100km (62 miles) from the capital, was raided when under construction in 2003.
It was believed an al-Qaeda operative, Abu Faraj al-Libi, was there.
But since then, “the compound was not on our radar, it is an embarrassment for the ISI”, the official said. “We’re good, but we’re not God.”
He added: “This one failure should not make us look totally incompetent. Look at our track record. For the last 10 years, we have captured Taliban and al-Qaeda in their hundreds – more than any other countries put together.”
The compound is just a few hundred metres from the Pakistan Military Academy – the country’s equivalent of West Point or Sandhurst.
The ISI official also gave new or differing accounts of some of the events of Sunday’s raid. They included:
There were 17-18 people in the compound at the time of the attackThe Americans took away one person still alive, possibly a Bin Laden sonThose who survived the attack included a wife, a daughter and eight to nine other children, not apparently Bin Laden’s; all had their hands tied by the AmericansThe surviving Yemeni wife said they had moved to the compound a few months agoBin Laden’s daughter, aged 12 or 13, saw her father shot
The official said it was thought the Americans wanted to take away the surviving women and children but had to abandon the plan when one of the helicopters malfunctioned.
Clearly there were people helping Bin Laden in this location… were they state employees, were they simply from Taliban-related groups, were they from the intelligence agencies?
For all Americans may ask the questions, I doubt they will get any answers. There will be ambiguity about this and the Pakistanis will deny they had any knowledge whatsoever.
The establishment here is made up of army leadership, intelligence agency leadership and some senior civil servants, and they have always run Pakistan, whether democratic governments or military governments, and those people do have connections with jihadis.
The difficulty the West has is in appreciating there are more than 20 different types of jihadi organisations, and al-Qaeda is just one of them. The state has different policies towards different types of group and that subtlety is often lost on Western policy-makers.
The helicopter was destroyed by the special forces unit.
The US has not commented on anyone it captured or had planned to capture, other than saying it had taken Bin Laden’s body.
The ISI official said the organisation had recovered some documents from the compound.
The CIA is already said to be going through a large number of hard drives and storage devices seized in the raid.
White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan said there had been concern Pakistani forces would deploy to counter the US Navy Seal team conducting the raid but it had avoided any confrontation.
The ISI official said: “We were totally caught by surprise. They were in and out before we could react.”
Our correspondent says residents near the compound in Abbottabad reported that Pakistani soldiers had asked them to switch off their lights an hour before the attack, but the ISI official said this was not true and that it had no advance knowledge of the raid.
Earlier, in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, President Asif Ali Zardari admitted Bin Laden “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be”.
But he denied the killing suggested Pakistan was failing in its efforts to tackle terrorism.
Mr Zardari said Pakistan had “never been and never will be the hotbed of fanaticism that is often described by the media”.
“Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn’t reflect fact,” he said.
“Pakistan had as much reason to despise al-Qaeda as any nation. The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan’s war as it is America’s.”
Mr Brennan had said it was “inconceivable that Bin Laden did not have a support system” in Pakistan.
Pakistani Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir tried to draw a line under the matter, saying: “Who did what is beside the point… This issue of Osama Bin Laden is history.”
Bin Laden was America’s most wanted man but had eluded capture for more than a decade.
US officials say that after DNA tests they are “99.9%” sure that the man they shot and killed and later buried at sea was Bin Laden.
President Obama: “We were reminded again that there is a pride in what this nation stands for”
US President Barack Obama watched the entire operation in real time in the White House with his national security team.
Mr Brennan said: “The minutes passed like days.”
CIA director Leon Panetta narrated via a video screen from a separate Washington office, with Bin Laden given the code name Geronimo.
Mr Panetta’s narration lasted several minutes. “They’ve reached the target… We have a visual on Geronimo… Geronimo EKIA (enemy killed in action).”
Mr Obama said: “We got him.”
Bin Laden, his son Khalid, trusted personal courier Sheikh Abu Ahmed and the courier’s brother were all killed, along with an unidentified woman.
Bin Laden was shot above his left eye, blowing away a section of his skull, and was also shot in the chest.
The BBC’s Andrew North in Washington says the White House is still discussing whether to release a video that was made of Bin Laden’s burial from an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, which some Islamic scholars have said did not conform with tradition.
Our correspondent says many people will want proof that Bin Laden is dead but the White House will be concerned about the reaction if the video, and still photographs of the body, are released.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Gay rights activist Eudy Simelane was raped and killed in KwaThema three years ago The brutal killing of a South African lesbian activist has been condemned as a hate crime by Human Rights Watch.
The US-based group has urged the police to do more to find those responsible for the recent murder and rape of Noxolo Nogwaza.
She was stoned and stabbed on 24 April after a row in a bar in KwaThema township, east of Johannesburg.
Activists say gay South African women are targeted for what some call “corrective rape”.
Unlike in many African countries, homosexual acts are legal in South Africa and the constitution outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation.
But activists say gay and lesbian people are often attacked in townships.
“Nogwaza’s death is the latest in a long series of sadistic crimes against lesbians, gay men, and transgender people in South Africa,” said Human Rights Watch researcher Dipika Nath.
The police say they are investigating the case and are waiting for the results of the post-mortem.
Prayers were held for Ms Nogwaza outside her home on Saturday and some activists report hearing threatening comments from young men in the crowd.
They fear some of the killers may have mingled with the mourners.
In 2008, female footballer and gay rights activist Eudy Simelane was also killed in KwaThema, some 80km (50 miles) east of Johannesburg.
Two people were given long prison terms for her murder and rape, although prosecutors denied that her sexuality had been a motive.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park, land 14 Tony nominations in the US for their stage musical The Book of Mormon.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Syrian security forces surround the coastal city of Baniyas, activists say, days after tanks and troops took control of Deraa in the south.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
The energy secretary has criticised the no campaign’s attacks on Nick Clegg Chris Huhne confronted the prime minister at a Cabinet meeting over the No campaign’s claims in the alternative vote referendum, the BBC understands.
Sources said the energy secretary challenged David Cameron to defend statements made by the No campaign.
One source said: “There was a bit of a bust up. Chris Huhne went for the PM and the chancellor over AV.”
Voters will be asked on Thursday whether they want to change the voting system for UK-wide elections.
The BBC’s deputy political editor James Landale said the confrontation happened at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning.
But a second source said it felt like a “deliberate stunt by the Yes campaign to get back on the front foot this week”.
Another said: “It was all about the general literature of the No campaign. He was supported by nobody else and the moment passed quickly.”
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Wayne David is Caerphilly MP and Labour’s Shadow Minister for Europe Plaid Cymru and Labour have reported each other to the police over a dispute about Welsh assembly election placards.
Plaid reported Caerphilly Labour MP Wayne David for allegedly taking down placards from residents’ gardens without permission.
Labour in turn accused Plaid of “illegal fly-posting” as part of a campaign of “dirty tactics”.
Gwent Police said they were looking into “reports of electoral irregularities in the Caerphilly area”.
Plaid said Mr David was seen by party members with a number of their placards in his car and is demanding a police investigation.
A Labour spokesman said that the claims were “nonsense”.
He said local Labour activists had removed the Plaid posters “at the explicit request of angry residents” before handing them “to the police as evidence of Plaid’s illegal activity”.
Labour claimed the dispute was the culmination of “weeks worth of Plaid wrongly putting up posters on public property”.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.