Twenty-four hours after British Cycling president Brian Cookson launched his campaign for the leadership of the International Cycling Union (UCI), Pat McQuaid has come out fighting with a challenge to the Englishman to explain what he feels is a “half-baked” manifesto.

The pressure on embattled UCI president Pat McQuaid to resign increased last night after disgraced American cyclist Lance Armstrong branded comments made by the Irishman last October as “pathetic”.

Lance Armstrong was today stripped of his seven Tour de France titles but the sport’s world governing body the UCI were warned the battle against doping is far from won.

I think it is a good proposal from the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, to have an independent commission into all the history of what Fr Brendan Smyth did in assaulting so many children in the Republic and Northern Ireland over a 40-year period from the late 1940s to about 1990, but I think it needs to include the stories of American Catholic children he came into contact with in North Dakota and Rhode Island, and anywhere else in that country, and what the civil and Church authorities there knew about him.

For many Russians, reforms mean not freedom but a slow implosion of life’s possibilities, writes Owen Matthews

Chelsea football star Didier Drogba is taking a leading role in a bid to bring peace to his native Ivory Coast, torn apart by post-election violence.

NOBEL peace laureate Desmond Tutu is to retire from public life later this year when he turns 79.

Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu is to retire from public life later this year when he turns 79.

PEACE has brought economic prosperity to the North, but the threat from dissidents hasn’t gone away.

THE parents of the late Brian Murphy, the teenage student who was kicked to death in a fight outside Club Anabel in Dublin in August 2000 — gave a poignant interview this week following the inquest into the death of their son. They are left with a life sentence of the pain of their loss.

A South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission may not work in the North, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said today.

THE announcement by the British government that it is to examine unsolved murders that occurred during the Troubles in the North yet again throws into sharp relief the lack of a thorough response from the Government to issues that have yet to be addressed here in the South.

Israel has blocked a UN fact-finding mission to the Gaza Strip that was to be led by Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, officials said today.

The British government was today urged by a senior US politician to publicly acknowledge members of the police and British army colluded with loyalist paramilitaries during the North's Troubles.

South Africa today said goodbye to former president PW Botha, a man who in life was associated with some of the worst excesses of apartheid, but whose death has shown the strides a bitterly divided country has made toward reconciliation.

PW Botha, the apartheid-era president who led South Africa through its worst racial violence and deepest international isolation, died peacefully in his sleep. He was 90.

SOUTH Africa’s last hardline white president, PW Botha, has died. He was 90.

South Africa’s last hardline white president, PW Botha, has died. He was 90.

NOBEL peace laureate Desmond Tutu, the conscience of South Africa, turns 75 today — his acerbic tongue and irrepressible humour as sharp as during his anti-apartheid crusades.

DERMOT HACKETT was 37 years of age when, on May 23, 1987, he was gunned down as he drove his bread van along the Omagh to Drumquin road. He was hit by 15 bullets from a sub machine gun and was killed instantly.

After 25 years of fighting that left more than a million dead, Afghanistan’s government is considering setting up a special war crimes court and a truth-seeking commission to document atrocities, an official said.

The families of victims of Northern Ireland’s Troubles need a forum like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said today.

Eugene Terre’Blanche, the leader of South Africa’s neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement, was released from prison today where he was serving a five-year sentence for attempted murder and assault.

The people of Northern Ireland must want to come together like the once divided races of apartheid South Africa before they can begin reconciliation, Northern Ireland minister Paul Murphy said in Cape Town.

Ireland's main opposition parties are to mount a joint bid to force the abolition of the IRA and other paramilitary organisations.

CORY: INQUIRIES MAY NOT BEGIN UNTIL AUTUMN

Transport minister Dullah Omar, a leading human rights lawyer and anti-apartheid activist who was justice minister in South Africa’s first black-lead government, died today of cancer.

A £4bn (€5.83bn) lawsuit has been filed against the mining and diamond giants Anglo American and De Beers by former workers in South Africa who say the companies treated them like slaves under the former racist apartheid regime.

The public inquiry into the horrors of Bloody Sunday, which helped blight chances of peace in the North for nearly 30 years, is today reaching a crucial stage.

An independent public inquiry should be set up to investigate claims that the British intelligence conspired with loyalist death squads to target republicans, Sinn Fein said today.