A US drone strike aiming for an al-Qa'ida leader has killed five militants as part of a Yemeni offensive against the Islamist group, Yemeni officials said today.

Naoto Kan, the former Prime Minister, has admitted that his office was "overwhelmed" during the Fukushima nuclear meltdown last year, and he recommended that Japan scrap all its reactors to avoid a repeat.

The Algerian FLN regime got away with it, after 200,000 dead – compared to the mere 10,000 killed so far in Syria's war

The runoff vote for Egypt's next president will pit the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate against the last prime minister to serve under Hosni Mubarak, according to full official results released by the election commission.

Protest groups left to wonder if struggle to overthrow Mubarak has backfired on them

Police have made four arrests whilst investigating the murder of a 23-year-old man who was gunned down in front of his friends and family in a pub in Greater Manchester.

Fighting in the central African state has reached the national park where a dwindling population of primates lives

A BBC classical music presenter has been arrested and detained in Zimbabwe, a human rights group has said.

The Military Council is taking the credit for the transition to democracy, but divisions remain

Yemen says its troops have killed 35 al-Qa'ida militants in an attack on a hideout in the country's south, part of a wider offensive.

Release date and pre-order packages confirmed.

Three Pakistan navy officers are to be court-martialled for "negligence" in connection with a dramatic Taliban attack on a base in Karachi last year.

For the background to this novel, Lindsey Davis picks up on Suetonius's biography of the Roman emperor Domitian, as well as more recent histories. Suetonius's dramatic account of Domitian is perhaps now unfashionable, but his spindly-legged madman stabbing flies with a pen is far more fun than the rather swotty legislator of modern scholarship.

Matthew Kelly, known to everyone as Paddy, was born in Dublin on 6 January 1916. His father, Laurence, served with the Machine Gun Corps on the Western Front and was killed at Ypres in 1917. Paddy's mother, Ellen, remarried after the war – and Paddy, one of seven children, spent an idyllic childhood having Huckleberry Finn-style adventures with his brother Terry.