Former Northern Ireland Assembly speaker John Alderdice launched a legal action today against newspaper allegations that he vanished to buy a holiday home in France amid a deepening crisis in the peace process.

Bomb disposal experts in the North have defused two pipe bombs found in Randalstown, Co Antrim, overnight.

Ten members of the SDLP tonight put their names in the hat for the party’s nomination for this June’s European Parliament election.

Detectives investigating the murder of Catholic teenager Ciaran Cummings were today examining a black motorcycle they found during a search of a garage on the loyalist Ballycraigy Estate in Antrim.