Ancient institutions are in rude health for UK students

Bringing together three Bartók suites with the funeral music composed in his memory by his admirer Witold Lutoslawski, Dennis Russell Davies here offers convincing confirmation of the former's influence on the latter.

Aharon Appelfeld, who lives outside Jerusalem, was born in 1932 in Czernowitz in Bukovina, now in Ukraine. German was his mother tongue. "I come from a deeply assimilated Jewish home," he told me last week. "My parents thought of themselves as Europeans, not particularly Jewish. But my grandparents were very observant Jews."

An octogenarian Holocaust survivor has won The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for a novel loosely based on his experiences during the Second World War in which he escaped from a labour camp.

Romania added three more apparatus gold medals to their team title yesterday to dominate the European gymnastics championships and establish themselves as leading challengers for the London Olympics.

An official said that 32 people were injured after a bus crashed in southern Romania.

Eastern European migrants are arriving in London in "unprecedented" numbers, flooding the capital with beggars, pickpockets and prostitutes before the Olympics, officials have warned.

I don't know whether you've ever examined your bank account to find an unexplained cash withdrawal from an ATM in Chigwell, but if you have you might find it comforting to know that the unpleasant shocks can travel in the other direction. In one of the more gratifying moments in Fraud Squad, two Romanian card skimmers arrived back home halfway through a police search of their flat. Alerted to their arrival outside, everyone inside suddenly hushed up, as if they were throwing a surprise birthday party. No sooner had he put his key in the door than the guest of honour found himself face down on his kitchen floor with two burly men on his back. By the look on his face, his heart and his stomach were still outside on the landing: "Fuck! You scared me, guys!" he said in aggrieved tones, as if they'd taken a prank a little too far. "I just came from work, guys, I'm a floorlayer." You are now, sir.

Spanish police say they have made 11 arrests as they broke up two gangs that allegedly forced young Romanian women to work as prostitutes and arranged marriages for them to non-EU citizens.

Georgina Harding's third novel is deeply and patiently concerned with a principal character who can neither hear nor speak. Augustin, the only child of Paraschiva, the cook on the Valeanu family estate at Poiana in the Romanian countryside, is discovered early in his life to have a remarkable gift for drawing.

Gary Neville believes Manchester United have been forced to take one step back to start getting some forward momentum again in Europe.

Romanian friends reunited against the elegant sweep of class, love and history

The cigarettes giant British American Tobacco still managed to fire up its rewards to shareholders despite a continued decline in smoking in western Europe and the United States.