Out of America: The growing pressure on space could force Washington to end its ban on tower blocks

"These are a few of my favourite things," says Simon Fujiwara, showing me around his studio in the colourful Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Having previously worked in his flat, he laughs. "I deliberately recreated home here in the studio. It is so successful that people always ask if this is where I live."

Can a large, cork-lined hole in the ground in London's Hyde Park – with a steel disc floating above it, mind – be architecture? It can if it's designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist considered a threat to cultural order by his country's political apparatchiks.

Those who venture beyond Bruges and Brussels to Ghent will find culture, canals and a top B&B. William Cook paid a visit

The curse of the Kennedy family has struck again after Mary Richardson Kennedy, the estranged wife of Robert F Kennedy Jr, was found dead today.

A boy of 15 is facing a life sentence after being found guilty yesterday of murdering a student who was stabbed in a row over conkers.

Mladic appears in court on genocide charges in last major case arising from Yugoslav wars

The UK's tallest sculpture was officially unveiled today at Stratford's Olympic Park.

If only there were a well-worn idiom about people living in glass houses. Perhaps "people who live in glass houses... really shouldn't live in glass houses"? Or at least not this one.

Five prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who are accused of plotting the September 11 attacks refused to answer a military judge's questions in a chaotic court hearing.

Countyfile

This useful show leads us through Bauhauser paintings, furniture, even puppets, all forged in the years between the darkness of two world wars

Amid traditional thatched West Country cottages, Sophie Lam discovers an elegant Modernist homage to space and light

What on earth is that goldy-looking thing in the middle of Maidstone, that supersized Benson & Hedges fag packet pretending to be a building? Ah, it must be one of those World-Class Places that the government is promoting – as in "iconic" architecture. Not so. The new extension of Maidstone Museum and Bentlif Art Gallery, designed by Hugh Broughton, is a counter-blow to the government's witless, developer-friendly assumption that places, and lives, can be transformed by blinged-up buildings marketed as world class.