The Carneros Inn, California

Great Portland Estates; Cape

As the politics plays out, there is always one loser: the whale itself

The superstar producer/remixer of Blur, Beck, the Black Keys and many more has teamed up with the frontman of The Shins. Andy Gill meets the duo

Conservative leader warns dozens of prospective MPs from consultancy firms: don't bring us into this mess

On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna Wyatt's mother disappears into the fog - "a kiss no more than a brush of breath and powdered cheek" - and fails to return. On the same day, five Soviet agents are arrested in connection with the theft of Admiralty documents from the Portland naval base.

The general election will be decided by votes cast in key marginal constituencies – many of them on Britain's coast. What's going on in voters' minds in these seashore seats? Paul Vallely tests the water in Hastings, Weymouth and Blackpool

Building work at London base, along with Salford and Glasgow sites, will cost £2bn

Gordon Brown today dismissed calls for legalising assisted suicide by warning that frail and vulnerable people would be put at risk of dying before they were ready.

media The BBC Trust, the watchdog entrusted with getting the best out of the BBC for licence payers, has spent £3.2m on new premises. It signed a £2.2m, eight-year lease for the new headquarters in central London's Great Portland Street, one of the capital's most exclusive addresses. Another £1m was spent on refurbishment. A spokesman for the Trust said: "The Trust's current office in Great Portland Street was chosen on the basis that it offered the best value for money of all the options considered."

A prominent civil rights leader called the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man an execution and criticized plans to allow the officer to return to regular duty this week.

There is hope for us all in the knowledge that Mary Delany, whose intricate paper flowers are the highlight of an exhibition opening this month at Sir John Soane's Museum in London, only began making these collages at the age of 73. All her life she had sketched and painted and embroidered in the polite, desultory way common to many women of the 18th century, who had no need to work for a living. But in a letter to her niece, written on 4 October 1772, Delany suddenly announced that she had "invented a new way of imitating flowers". During the next 10 years she produced almost a thousand "paper mosaiks", as she called them, astonishingly detailed plant portraits built up from coloured tissues stuck down on a black background.

Over the course of three novels, and many albums with his band, Richmond Fontaine, Willy Vlautin has mapped out his own territory. It's a version of the American West in which the principal cities are the gambling town of Reno, Nevada and the steel town of Portland, Oregon. Vlautin's version is about as far from the tourist brochures as you can get. He unearths a world Steinbeck would have recognised: a place of flophouse motels and fading racetracks, where the American underclass still resides.