THE Tory leadership contest in Britain remained mired in a controversy over drugs last night, with one senior Tory claiming he was the victim of a “smear campaign”.

THE latest entrant to the health insurance market, Vivas health, has complained to the European Commission that the State is protecting the VHI from real competition.

BRITISH MP George Galloway yesterday described allegations that he was in the secret pay of dictator Saddam Hussein as a “deeply wounding dagger through my political heart.”

A human identification expert has told a murder trial jury this morning that there was evidence that the DNA profile of one of two men accused of murder matched extracts taken from the victim's body.

A call made to a Cork Garda station shortly after a woman was murdered threatened a Garda the caller would "do it again" if the gardaí didn't go to where they said the murdered woman could be found, a murder trial jury at the Central Criminal court heard today.

Legal argument in the absence of the jury continued today at the Central Criminal Court trial of two men accused of murdering a woman in her Cork city flat.

A teenager told a murder trial jury today that one of two men accused of murdering a woman in her Cork city flat told her that they had done it.

Two men accused of murdering a woman in a neighbouring apartment in Cork were heard whispering in their flat before she was killed and were seen leaving the block afterwards, a court heard today.

Two Cork men robbed then strangled a 50-year-old neighbour with a piece of electrical cable before making a "crude" attempt to make it look like suicide, a court heard today.