Today's top stories:

A scheme that allows parents to check if someone has a history of child sex offences is to be extended to eight more police forces in England.

Two men are still being questioned after a suspect package was sent to MI6 headquarters in London.

Great Britain's Jessica Ennis wins European heptathlon gold after dominating the 800m finale to fend off her closest rival Nataliya Dobrynska.

Pakistan's president is due in Europe later for a trip that will take in the UK, amid tensions over David Cameron's comments about terrorism.

Fuel tanker drivers could take industrial action later this year over job and pay cuts, a union has warned.

Babies born this weekend will be last in the UK to receive the full payment to Child Trust Funds, as the scheme's phasing out begins.

British troops targeting a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan have found a cache of bomb-making equipment, the Ministry of Defence says.

Cardiff needs to do more to attract its own people into the city centre at night warns an AM, as a survey of residents is launched.

A bank manager from Greater Manchester will attempt to become the fastest blind man on earth later in a land speed record attempt in west Wales.

A symphony featuring more than 200 amateur musicians and lyrics by a 98-year-old great grandmother will air later to celebrate Yorkshire Day.

Police are searching for a 6ft (1.8m) long snake which escaped through a bathroom window at a house in Essex.

A Herefordshire castle mentioned in the Domesday Book will be opened to the public for tours for one day only this weekend.

A man is arrested after a four-hour long stand-off with police at a property in Belfast.

A 27-year-old woman has died in hospital following a car crash in Cookstown, County Tyrone.

A former heritage minister says he is concerned there may have been a plot to oust S4C's ex-chief executive.

Residents of a village from where a nine-year-old girl from south Wales has died in a rafting accident in Turkey have spoken of their shock and sadness.

Accountants KPMG say politicians should give "detailed consideration" to changing the status of Scottish Water.

A 21-year-old man dies after being hit by a passing bus on a road in South Lanarkshire on Saturday afternoon.

A man died when the boat he was in "flipped over" during the European and British National Powerboat Championships in Essex.

Spanish police are hunting for a Liverpool man who is suspected of shooting a father-of-two dead in a crowded bar in the Costa del Sol.

Great Britain's Mo Farah wins the European 5,000m title to add to the 10,000m gold he won on Tuesday.

England are on course for a resounding win in the first Test after an unbeaten century from Matt Prior and three early wickets in Pakistan's second innings.

England fail to recover from a first-half mauling as they lose their Champions Trophy opener 4-2 to hosts Germany.

A touch-up job from the past has much to teach us about bringing our history up to date, says Lisa Jardine in her Point of View column.

MTV reality show Jersey Shore is the latest example of Italian-Americans being stereotyped on television. Why?

The Magazine's weekly quiz of the news, 7 days 7 questions - plus the Weekly Bonus Question.

Labour leadership contender David Miliband warns that the party could be out of power for years at the final hustings meeting before the vote.

The intelligence on Iraq's weapons threat was "not very substantial", former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott says.

Merging all tax credits and benefits into a single payment is one option being considered by Iain Duncan Smith in a "radical" welfare shake-up.

Punting would normally be seen as a tranquil way to pass a summer day on the river, but race punting is an altogether different affair.

Urban sounds may dominate the music charts but there is still a buoyant market for live rock events.

A north London grocery store is committing "wildlife massacre" by selling squirrel meat, an animal welfare group has claimed. Vegetarians International Voice for Animals (Viva) accused a branch of Budgens of supporting a "barbaric and needless cull" of grey squirrels.

London Mayor Boris Johnson sells the benefits of the London bike hire scheme to the world media.

Hundreds of amateur musicians have set the sights and sounds of Yorkshire to music.

The widow of a man believed abducted and murdered by the IRA in 1981 said she felt sad but relieved that her husband's remains appeared to have been found. Kathleen Armstrong talks to the BBC's Paddy O'Flaherty about her "very mixed emotions".

Incoming BP chief executive Bob Dudley has said it is time to scale back some parts of the oil spill clean-up in the Gulf of Mexico.

The families of the victims of the Potters Bar train crash say they would like a public inquiry into the incident which killed seven people.

Images of record-smashing rowing trip across the Atlantic

The government's academies may seem familiar, writes Mike Baker

Do UK diplomats have enough knowledge of the country?

Babe and 19 other films that make men weep

Nifty ways to star-spot and navigate the night sky

David Cameron's comments about Pakistan dominate

An anonymous reader writes "Paypal has quietly killed the Paypal plugin and the related virtual-card service. The service generated on-the-fly, one-time-use credit card numbers. When I called in and inquired about the service, I was told that the service has been discontinued, but may be relaunching something similar depending on interest. They are treating inquiries as a sort of petition, taking down names and contact info. The forums seem to be a lost cause, as no Paypal reps have replied to the numerous posts regarding virtual cards being discontinued. Does anyone know of a good alternative source of one-time-use credit card numbers?"

An anonymous reader writes "Imagine technology that allows you to get inside the mind of a terrorist to know how, when, and where the next attack will occur. In the Northwestern study, when researchers knew in advance specifics of the planned attacks by the make-believe 'terrorists,' they were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy in the lab, said J. Peter Rosenfeld, professor of psychology in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences."

oxide7 writes "Starting from August 1, Chinese Internet users will have to register using their real names for playing online games, China Daily reported on Saturday. The regulation, issued by the Ministry of Culture on June 22, is said to be part of a nationwide campaign to improve management of the virtual gaming industry and protect minors from unwholesome content. It applies to all multiplayer role-playing and social networking games."

theodp writes "Remember those old Lifecall commercials? Well, you've come a long way, Grandma! The NY Times reports on a raft of new technology that's making it possible for adult children to remotely monitor to a stunningly precise degree the daily movements and habits of their aging parents. The purpose is to provide enough supervision to allow elderly people to stay in their homes rather than move to an assisted-living facility or nursing home. Systems like GrandCare, BeClose, QuietCare, and MedMinder allow families to keep tabs on Mom and Dad's whereabouts, and make sure they take their meds. Perhaps Zynga can make a game out of all this

An anonymous reader writes "At the annual SIGGRAPH show, Microsoft Research showed new technology that can remove the blur from images on your camera or phone using on-board sensors

pitchpipe writes "A puzzling pattern in the cosmic rays bombarding Earth from space has been discovered by an experiment buried deep under the ice of Antarctica. ... It turns out these particles are not arriving uniformly from all directions. The new study detected an overabundance of cosmic rays coming from one part of the sky, and a lack of cosmic rays coming from another." The map of this uneven distribution comes from the IceCube neutrino observatory last mentioned several days ago.

wooferhound writes "Sophisticated synthesizers and computer-manipulated recordings are increasingly taking over orchestras. Sounding almost like real players, while costing much less, they're especially popular with provincial or touring companies. But until mid-July

hasanabbas1987 writes "It's just been a few months since a 45-gigapixel panorama of Dubai claimed the title of world's largest digital photograph, but it's now already been well and truly ousted

astroengine writes "After repeated calls from NASA to wake up Mars Exploration Rover Spirit from its low-energy hibernation mode, mission control is beginning to realize the ill-fated robot may never wake up again. After getting stuck in a sand trap in Gusev Crater and then switching into hibernation in March, rover operators were hopeful that the beached Spirit might yet be saved. Alas, this is looking more and more unlikely. In a statement, NASA said: 'Based on models of Mars' weather and its effect on available power, mission managers believe that if Spirit responds, it most likely will be in the next few months. However, there is a very distinct possibility Spirit may never respond.'"

An anonymous reader writes with news that security experts from Spider Labs released a kernel level rootkit for Android devices at DefCon on Friday. "As a proof of concept, it is able to send an attacker a reverse TCP over 3G/WIFI shell upon receiving an incoming call from a 'trigger number.' This ultimately results in full root access on the Android device." The rootkit was developed over a period of two weeks, and has been handed out to DefCon attendees on DVD.

destinyland writes "For the first time, the majority of cell phones are accessing data services

josath writes "Texas Instruments' flagship calculator, the Nspire, was hacked to allow user-written programs earlier this year. Earlier this month, TI released an update to the OS that runs on the calculator, providing no new features, but only blocking the previous hack. Now, just a few weeks later, Nleash has been released, which defeats this protection. The battle rages on as users fight for the right to run their own software on their own hardware."

eldavojohn writes "Gizmodo's got an interesting scoop on a list of IPs acquired from Peer Block revealing who is downloading the Facebook user data torrented this week: Apple, the Church of Scientology, Disney, Intel, IBM and several major government contractors just to name a few. The article notes that this doesn't mean it's sanctioned by these companies or even known to be happening, but the IP addresses of requests coming to one of the users' machines match to lists of IP blocks for each company."

TravisTR sends word of research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance which found that direct subsidies for renewable energy from governments worldwide totaled $43-46 billion in 2009, an amount vastly outstripped by the $557 billion in fossil fuel subsidies during 2008.

Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft will issue an out-of-band patch on Monday for a critical vulnerability in all of the current versions of Windows. The company didn't identify which flaw it will be patching, but the description of the vulnerability is a close match to the LNK flaw that attackers have been exploiting for several weeks now, most notably with the Stuxnet malware. The advance notification from Microsoft on Friday said that the company is patching a critical vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild and affects all supported Windows platforms. The LNK flaw in the Windows shell was first identified earlier this month when researchers discovered the Stuxnet worm spreading from infected USB drives to PCs. Stuxnet has turned out to be a rather interesting piece of malware as it not only uses the LNK zero day vulnerability to spread, but it had components that were signed using a legitimate digital certificate belonging to Realtek, a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer."

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