SIMON Cowell finally got his wish last night as cheesy crooner Christopher Maloney was booted off X Factor — in a show marred by a

A CAR burns in Belfast as police prepare for another night of “flag riots”. A protest by 2,000 Loyalists had largely passed off peacefully — but

VIETNAMESE crime gangs muscling in on Scotland’s cannabis trade are shipping SLAVES here from the Far East to man their drug farms. The workers, usually

At the centre of Shehan Karunatilaka’s remarkable debut is W G “Wije” Karunasena, a Sri Lankan sports writer and souse. Having spent years carousing in Colombo,

Six decades into his remarkably consistent career, Fame has made one of his best albums: a bare-bones trio recorded in Slovenia with guitarist Primoz Grasic

This band of South African exiles formed in London in 1974, and over two years produced two albums, both of which feature on this CD Miriam

First out in the US in 1984, Padgett Powell’s delightful debut was finally published in the UK this year. Offbeat, playful and very, very funny, it

For a 21st-century pop megastar, Bruno Mars doesn’t half sound old-fashioned. If you were to carbon-date the content of Unorthodox Jukebox unseen, you’d estimate it came

Leigh Francis’s fake-tanned, sleazy northern businessman, as seen on ITV2’s Celebrity Juice, gets a feature-length caper which will please his fans while baffling and/or disgusting

Canadian opera soprano Zeffira came to attention through her Cat’s Eyes collaboration with The Horrors’ Faris Badwan. The Deserters is her first solo album, and it

At first, Teju Cole’s Open City comes across like a modern, urban rewrite of Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, as the protagonist Julius, a

Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger … how can so many pensionable men be involved in a film which seems to have been

To the River belongs to that happily renascent tradition of literary nature writing. In it, Laing describes a walk along the length of the River Ouse

Brooklyn-made art-country, long on the circuitous search for “home”, short on the sort of textural embroidery which can overwork such material. Vocally, Merritt occupies space in

You want to like bassist/singer/auteur-gone-rogue Ndegeocello’s oddball homage to La Simone, but she doesn't make it easy. The arrangements for a small rock band are rudimentary,

Regional branches of Tunisia's General Labour Union (UGTT) on Thursday (December 6th) mounted strikes in Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine, Gafsa and Sfax, Espace Manager reported. According to

Johannesburg — Former president Nelson Mandela was admitted to a Pretoria hospital for medical tests on Saturday, just short of a year since

Maputo — Mozambican President Armando Guebuza declared in Dar es salaam on Saturday that it is through dialogue that consensus is sought, and that peace

Prolonged control of areas of northern Mali and a shortage of kidnap targets in the north has led MUJWA to expand its operations to new

There is no certain winner yet in Ghana's presidential election even though incumbent President John Dramani Mahama is thought to be in the lead. After three