Success has come comparatively late for Elena Baltacha and, at the age of 27, the British No 1 yesterday won the biggest domestic title of her career. Baltacha's 7-5, 6-3 victory over the Czech Republic's Petra Cetkovska in the final of the Aegon Challenge at Nottingham clinched her second International Tennis Federation tournament, following success in Michigan last year.

Thousands of train tickets will go on sale today for 50p each way, in the latest and biggest "flash sale" in the travel industry. The operator of Brighton-to-London trains, Southern Railway, which links London with Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire, is cutting all its advance fares by 90 per cent in a one-day online sale.

From the first page of this memoir, as a young boy hears the voice of his soon-to-die mother, we enter that zone of eerie clarity allied to soul-deep doubt that all readers of Thomson's fiction will know.

1 Edinburgh: Witness a world-record attempt at making the longest glow-in-the-dark necklace, one of the events at the Edinburgh International Science Festival (sciencefestival.co.uk) until 22 April.

There’s this awesome new song called “Friday” that I can’t get out of my head. It’s by this 13-year-old chick, Rebecca Black. Predictably the Twitterati hate her. I think she’s cool, the song is really catchy and the lyrics are great. It’s the problem with the UK I’m noticing more and more.

A 48-year-old man was remanded in custody today after appearing in court charged with stabbing a 39-year-old to death in a seaside town.

A 48-year-old man was under police guard in hospital today after being arrested on suspicion of knifing to death a man during a fight in a seaside town.

A girl aged six was admitted to hospital after drinking dangerous levels of alcohol.

A 20ft torpedo has been found floating five miles off Beachy Head, near a busy cross-Channel shipping lane. Fisherman Peter Storey was on board his boat when he spotted the torpedo near Eastbourne.

England fans Down Under were celebrating the Ashes victory in the streets today after a month of "Pom-baiting" from locals.

An inquest was opened today into the death of a 24-year-old goalkeeper found dead at his home.