Russia is to expel a US diplomat it claims was caught disguised in a blond wig while trying to recruit a Russian agent in Moscow.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon urged Syria’s regime against using its stockpile of chemical weapons today, warning of “huge consequences” if President Bashar Assad resorts to such weapons of mass destruction.

President Bashar al-Assad scotched any suggestion he might flee Syria and warned that any Western military intervention to topple him would have catastrophic consequences.

A study has found that YouTube is emerging as a major platform for news, and one to which viewers increasingly turn for eyewitness videos in times of major events and natural disasters.

Liverpool striker Luis Suarez has reopened the racism row which dogged his - and the club’s – season by describing his eight-match ban as strange and insisting his “conscience is clear”.

A secret cargo and not just timber may be on board a missing ship whose last known radio contact was with British Coastguards, it was suggested today.

MEMORIES of late Limerick man Seán Bourke were revived this week, as a notorious Cold War spy George Blake received one of Russia’s top honours.

The chief suspect in the killing of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko today claimed that British intelligence services had a hand in the poisoning – an assertion likely to further damage relations between Moscow and London.

Andrei Lugovoy, named as a suspect in the radiation killing of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London, today said Britain tried to recruit him to provide intelligence.

A Russian man who met with Alexander Litvinenko on the day that the former KGB spy believed he was poisoned today said he had been questioned by British officials in Moscow, and again denied any involvement in his death.

Russia’s new government-funded, English-language satellite TV channel began broadcasts yesterday, as Moscow seeks to polish its image abroad.