Politicians typically blame stress, overwork and "personal issues" for being forced to step down early, but Ryu Matsumoto may well be the first to cite his blood group.

Japan's new disaster reconstruction minister resigned today after his widely criticised behaviour during a visit to the quake-devastated north east coast, where he refused to shake a governor's hand, scolded the official and threatened to withhold aid.

Like the oxymoronic title of Jenn Ashworth's haunting second novel, its insidious and unsettling power resides in the tension created by opposites. The tenderness and delicacy of the 14-year-old girl is juxtaposed with a capacity for great brutality. Set in a northern town as claustrophobic as the relationships depicted, Cold Light unflinchingly tells the sad story of teenage friendship gone awry in the most devastating way.

A dazzling £400m refit has given Moscow's famous theatre a fresh start after years of alleged corruption

Survivors of devastating floods sought solace in church services yesterday while emergency workers searched wrecked homes for victims.

The mother of Joanna Yeates has offered to take part in a TV reconstruction of her daughter's last-known movements in Bristol.

Goodness know who came up with the notion that secondary school offers the best days of your life. Whoever it was clearly hadn't spent much time in the classroom (bunking off down the park might, conceivably, count as the best days of your life, though that rather hinges on the prospect of adulthood being very dull indeed). At any rate, as anyone who has ever donned a uniform and picked up a pencil case will know, school – particularly when you are an angst-ridden, parentally constrained adolescent – is far more rubbish than we like to admit. How much infinitely worse it must be when the gloomy spectre of bullying – or "big black cloud" as schoolboy Billy called it last night – is added to the equation.

Ireland's World Cup winger, Damien Blanch, has suffered another major setback which will keep him out of the early rounds of the Super League season.

Declaring "this is not the time for revenge!", and addressing supporters waving red flags and chanting "Yes, he could!", Mauricio Funes led a party of former communist revolutionaries to success in El Salvador's bitterly fought presidential election.