In a controversial move, Spain's Catalonia region has voted to outlaw bullfighting.

It is only the second region in the country to do so, following in the footsteps of the Canary Islands.

The bill went to the regional parliament after a petition was signed by 180,000 people.

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The ban in Catalonia is expected to come into force in 2012, when the last remaining bullring in Barcelona will be shut down.

In an audio tape posted online Tuesday, Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri slammed France's move to ban Islamic face veils, saying Muslim women must hold on to their veils at any cost.

"What France is doing, which is spreading across Europe and the West, should prompt us to hold on to our true religion in face of their deviant ideologies," he said in the tape posted on an Islamist website.

Today the Home Office launched a consultation to review alcohol licensing laws, deeming the `24-hour drinking' reforms brought in by the last Government a failure.

The relaxation of the law has been strongly criticised by some sections of the press for having been counter-productive in the effort to tackle alcohol-related problems in Britain.

Indeed this appears to be an interpretation shared by Home Secretary Theresa May, who this morning claimed that in the aftermath of the new law, there had been a rise in alcohol-related crime.

The race to replace Gordon Brown is warming up, with rumours Ed Balls may throw in the towel. "This is Labour at its best, out of office, and squabbling like cats in a sack," writes political analyst Peter McHugh for Channel 4 News.

General Sir Richard Dannatt came before the Chilcot folk with their gentle, leisurely questioning of various people involved in what critics describe as the UK's greatest foreign policy disaster of modern times.

Whether that is the case or not, it remains fascinating to watch the rather Earl Grey gentility of this process. Will it all be another anodyne whitewash or does there lurk, beneath the almost soporific pace and style, some kind of iron fist waiting in there, deeply hidden, to deliver the killer punch at some day long in the future?

Well, today has been very much nuts and bolts. Procurement in fact.
Critically the problem the army faced going into Iraq in having as its vital light movement vehicle the Landrover. The British army calls them Snatches (much to the amusement of their US military bosses in Iraq and Afghanistan). But leaving cheap jokes aside it has been a huge issue for the army, going into Iraq with what was basically a soft-skinned vehicle used in Northern Ireland and barely fit for that long job, now coming into the violent desert theatre of southern Iraq, in and around Al Basrah.

In his Ankara speech of 27 July, British PM David Cameron expressed anger at the slow pace of negotiations and promised to fight for Turkey's membership of the EU. Former Europe minister for the Labour party Denis MacShane initially welcomes the news in the pages of the Guardian. "David Cameron's adoption of Tony Blair's Turkophile diplomacy in Ankara today should be welcomed," he writes, reminding readers that it was the former British PM who "single-handedly moved the European council to agree a start date for EU accession negotiations for Turkey."

However, Cameron faces "a different EU political landscape", with Germany and France, formerly in favour of the Blair initiative, now downright hostile to Turkey joining the EU. MacShane points out that "Cameron's decision to walk out of the main centre-right political group where Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, plus most other ruling EU parties, confer means that Britain's voice is absent in the key EU political debate on Turkey."

David Cameron today sparked a furious diplomatic row with Islamabad after accusing elements of the Pakistani state of promoting the export of terrorism.

In the strongest British criticism of Pakistan so far, the prime minister warned Islamabad it could no longer "look both ways" by tolerating terrorism while demanding respect as a democracy.

But in an angry response, Pakistan's high commissioner to Britain accused Cameron of damaging the prospects for regional peace, and criticised him for believing allegations in the Wikileaks documents published in the Guardian earlier this week.

The stand-off between striking truck drivers and authorities in Greece intensified today hours after the government issued an emergency order to force protesters back to work.

With fuel shortages stranding thousands of tourists and disrupting supplies of food and medicines nationwide, prime minister George Papandreou resorted to emergency legislation, more usually used at times of war or great natural disaster, to end the walk-out.

But hopes of a return to normal were quickly dashed when riot police fired tear gas at thousands of truckers gathered outside the transport ministry this morning.

"The order is coming through to [drivers] but I have no idea how they are going to react to it," said Giorgos Stamos, a member of the truck drivers' union. "It is highly unusual that after just three days of going on strike we should be mobilised in this way."

George Osborne delivered a rebuke to the defence secretary, Liam Fox, when he declared that the costs of Britain's new Trident nuclear deterrent will come from the main defence budget.

In a sign of the Tory's leadership's growing impatience with Fox, who has embarked on what Downing Street sources have dubbed as "freelance" missions, the chancellor said there could be no special accountancy exemptions for the defence budget.

Speaking to Bloomberg in New Delhi, Osborne said: "The Trident costs, I have made it absolutely clear, are part of the defence budget. All budgets have pressure. I don't think there's anything particularly unique about the Ministry of Defence. I have made it very clear that Trident renewal costs must be taken as part of the defence budget."