A "possessive and controlling" businessman who arranged the murder of his estranged wife after she began divorce proceedings was jailed for life today following a retrial.

Mr Philpott was earlier praised by police for his 'valiant' attempts to rescuehis sleeping children

The reviews are in for Hemingway & Gellhorn, the racy HBO television movie that aired in the US this week, and they're almost as hotheaded as the films' subjects.

A woman who tripped and fell downstairs while carrying her baby granddaughter has been successfully sued by her own family for causing head injuries that left the little girl severely disabled.

The Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has spoken out in favour of same-sex marriages in churches, revealing that his gay uncle would have liked to have had the right to marry his long-term partner.

The taxman has failed in a legal move to force a tycoon to hand over documents used in a divorce battle which ended in him having to pay the highest award in British legal history.

Lee Richardson, who was killed in a race crash on 13 May at the age of 33, was a British speedway international. Captain of the Lakeside Hammers team, Richardson rode for Great Britain at senior and under-21 level, and featured in several World Cups. He was a Grand Prix rider from 2003-06.

Police adopted an “impermissibly low tolerance to public protest” ahead of last year’s royal wedding, lawyers representing anti-monarchist activists who were pre-emptively detained to stop them protesting it have told the High Court.

Twenty seven people were crushed to death and several more injured when they were pinned between two minibuses involved in a multiple pile-up in western India.

William Finley is best-known for his roles in nine of Brian De Palma's films, a disturbing, lanky, goggle-eyed presence, notably the maniacal, disfigured anti-hero of The Phantom of the Paradise.

Michael Haneke today won the Cannes Film Festival's top prize for a second time with his film about love and death, “Amour.”

Beauty, like fashion, is still a seasonal business. Both operate on a calendar that assumes summer equals six months of solid sunshine. So the dust has barely settled on the Christmas gifts than we're exhorted to start madly buffing our body parts in anticipation.

Paperback reviews of the week

How do you make a 100-metre dash work on a small stage? With some difficulty – but this timely production is racing towards bigger things