The complex network of flood defences shielding Thailand's capital from the worst floods in nearly 60 years mostly held today as coastal high tides hit their peak. While the city centre was protected, Bangkok's northern outskirts remained inundated along with much of the rest of the country.

The threat of floods inundating Thailand's capital could ease by early next month as record-high water levels in the river carrying torrents downstream from the country's north begin to decline, officials said yesterday.

Jack Layton, a career politician, was the charismatic leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada's new opposition party. With his boundless energy and folksy yet feisty no-nonsense approach, he had battled cancer and a hip replacement to lead his left-of-centre party to an historic victory in last May's federal election. He had brought hope and optimism to federal politics and was arguably at the height of his political career.

Andy Murray was at a loss to explain why he was always on the back foot as he went down to a miserable 6-3 6-1 defeat to Kevin Anderson in the Rogers Cup in Montreal.

Beekeepers Wang Dalin, 42, and Lv Kongjiang, 20, battled it out over the weekend in Shaoyang, Hunan province, China in a competition known as 'bee bearding'.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge received a rapturous welcome in Canada during the first day of their historic tour of the Commonwealth country.

It's a good job the Duchess of Cambridge has been brushing up on her French. William and Catherine have been told to expect vocal protests from republicans and French-speaking separatists when their first overseas royal tour reaches Quebec this weekend.

More than 40 miles of dykes are in danger of being breached in an eastern Chinese province where floods have caused $1.2bn in losses, authorities said yesterday, as the country neared a critical point in battling seasonal rains.

Floods in south-western China have killed 14 people and left 53 missing while destroying roads, bridges and thousands of homes.

A tall, Canadian actor with distinctively wide, sunken eyes, Michael Sarrazin had a long career as a leading man to such actresses as Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand without ever attaining superstar status. His off-beat personality and predilection for quirky movies that failed to attract large audiences limited his profile, though he won praise for such portrayals as the intense drifter coerced into a doomed relationship in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), and his outstanding multi-layered portrayal of the monster in an epic television movie Frankenstein: The True Story (1973).

Part-documentary and part-portraiture, Christophe Agou's book is about the landscape and the lives of the farmers and families in his homeland – the rural Forez province of France.

The Broadway musical, as a habitat, tends not to throng with nature's great spellers. Gypsy's Mama Rose could probably get through "audition", without mishap, but the chances are that she'd put a middle "e" in "monstrous". And, even though it's her native German, how would Maria von Trapp cope with "Weltanschauung" – the word that happens to be the climactic clincher in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a musical comedy (by William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin), that redresses the balance, to an almost parodic degree, in favour of the non-orthographically-challenged?

The follow-up to Dickner's debut novel, Nikolski, follows the fortunes of 17-year-old Canadian Mickey, the scion of a cement dynasty, and Hope, a redhead who has just moved into town with her survivalist mother.

If you are a young professional, without a job or have lost your bonus, then Quebec could be the place for you.