The Ulster Unionists and Sinn Fein were today preparing for a Belfast High Court showdown over a hotly disputed General Election result.

Sinn Fein’s Fermanagh and South Tyrone candidate Michelle Gildernew has seized upon the IRA hunger striker’s stunning victory in the 1981 by-election as a template for republican success.

Former US president Bill Clinton was today set to meet survivors of the IRA Poppy Day bombing massacre and launch a peace project on the site of the 1987 blast which killed 11 people.

A decision by Northern Ireland’s Alliance Party to pull out of the North Down constituency in favour of David Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party was one of the toughest decisions it has had to make, leader Sean Neeson said tonight.

Ulster Unionism has drifted from its core principals by trying to strike a deal with the Alliance Party, DUP deputy leader Peter Robinson claimed today.

Jim Dixon, a survivor of the Enniskillen bombing in 1997, has announced he will stand as a candidate during the upcoming Westminster elections in the North.

The DUP says there will, after all, be an anti-Agreement candidate in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone parliamentary elections.

The Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble has denied that his party was involved in any "dirty tricks" against an independent unionist candidate in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone constituency.

Last night's claim by the anti-Agreement unionist candidate for Fermanagh/South Tyrone that he is the target of a smear campaign is likely to dominate today's press conferences by the UUP and DUP.