The England Under-21s manager, Stuart Pearce, feels Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain can only get "better and better", both for club and country.

Low-fare airline easyJet is to fly to Iceland for the first time.

The Festival

The London Mela is Europe's largest celebration of South Asian culture, with music, food and outdoor arts filling Gunnersbury Park.

Go to Londonmela.org

Alphabet Saints are singer Robert Christie and multi-instrumentalist Hamilton Lee, and Raptureland channels the spirit of early Suicide, Eno-era Roxy, Lou Reed circa Berlin and Bowie circa Station To Station.

Stoke's first Europa League tie will see them face Croatian giants Hajduk Split in the third qualifying round.

That rugged Icelandic glacier, Detective Erlendur, is away from Reykjavik and a disturbing case is handled by his female sidekick, Elinborg. The female perspective creates a different kind of novel from those built around Arnaldur Indridason's withdrawn and isolated loner. Here we have a detective worrying about her family while handling with sensitivity the victims of a serial rapist who drugged his victims with Rohypnol.

The Australian experimental composer Ben Frost is in London to meet his mentor Brian Eno, ahead of their joint project at the Reykjavik Festival in Iceland this weekend.

Jodie Foster said yesterday it was "natural" for her to ask Mel Gibson to star in The Beaver. She said: "I've been friends with Mel for over 15 years and we've had many, many long discussions about life and so it was a natural place to go."

Icelanders rejected for a second time a plan to repay €4bn (£3.5bn; $5.8bn) to Britain and the Netherlands from a bank crash, results showed today, and the prime minister said economic and political chaos could follow.

Dieter Roth is probably most famous for his artist’s books and the sculptures he fashioned from chocolate, cheese and other organic matter. But his career as an artist, composer and poet took many forms, some more conventional than others.