Anger grows over trial of three young Londoners who face death penalty after drug confessions that they say were extracted by electric shocks and gun threats

Ros Barber's readable prose poem captures effortlessly the brutality and the secrecy of Elizabethan England during the time of Christopher Marlowe's death, with murder and torture a constant threat, and love between men forbidden.

The body of Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda will be exhumed for an autopsy seeking clues to what killed him.

He was a teenage rocker on the rise and she was a national treasure on the skids

Matthieu Debuchy and Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa have already joined with fellow Gallic players Yoann Gouffran, Massadio Haidara and Moussa Sissoko expected to follow

David Hare was wittily spot-on when he said recently that “there's a sort of line where you can't tell where Wilde ends and Rupert [Everett] begins”.  And Hare is not the only person to note a Wildean spirit in the prose of the actor's own two splendid volumes of autobiography – “the same heroic cheerfulness in the face of disaster”, as the dramatist puts it.

Beyonce will sing the national anthem at President Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony.

The politician and religious leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed, who died in Islamabad on 6 January at the age of 74 following a heart attack, was an advocate of Islamic democracy who transformed the right-wing Jamaat-e-Islami party into a populist outfit. He was a strong critic of the US's counter-terrorism policies, and was widely known for his opposition to the involvement of the US and its allies in Afghanistan.

The French actor's move has been condemned by Russian opposition

Andre Villas-Boas says 'anything can happen'

Advancing rebels are 45 miles from capital of Central African Republic

Kevin Pietersen appears to have got his wish for more free time after he was left out of the England limited-overs squad to tour New Zealand.

It’s because the French are instinctively statist that the Depardieu affair has exploded

Tom Peck meets the two boxers who were meant to fight for Olympic gold, but instead had to flee to London from a regime determined to persecute them