Harold Beach, who has died aged 96, was the engineer with overall responsibility for the design of Aston Martin's most important and charismatic postwar cars. The DB4, DB5 and DB6 helped the firm prosper throughout the 1960s and epitomised everything an Aston Martin should be.

These cars put the firm on the map as the builder of Britain's finest and most glamorous GT cars, helped in no small measure by the familiar silver DB5 which, with lethal additions, appeared as James Bond's car in the films Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965). Subsequent V8-engined Astons - also conceived by Beach - were larger and, to some, less appealing, although they accommodated changing expectations in luxury and performance. His final task, before retiring in 1978, was to engineer a power-operated soft-top for the V8 Volante model.

If you're going to launch a killer April Fools' Day joke, you might as well put the full effort behind it. And that's exactly what they've done at Google. Apologies to the folks at the Googleplex for breaking the joke a day early but... c'mon, you didn't really expect us to fall for this one again, did you?

Let's play along for a second, shall we? Tomorrow, Google will announce Google TISP (Beta) - a free in-home wireless broadband service that installs in, well, your toilet. Of course, it's vacuum-sealed to prevent water damage. And, certainly, you can have it professionally installed - but please try to make sure your toilet is unoccupied at the time of installation.

Archaeologists excavating Shakespeare's final home in Stratford have unearthed the remains of an inscribed locket, apparently given to William by his mother Mary Arden.

Naming her son as Guillaume, and herself as Ardenne, Mary inscribed the locket with the date of execution of Mary Queen of Scots, giving further credence to the theory that Shakespeare's "lost years" may have been related to political Catholicism.

Labour's election strategy: bring on no-nonsense hard man Gordon Brown | Politics | The Guardian

In an audacious new election strategy, Labour is set to embrace Gordon Brown's reputation for anger and physical aggression, presenting the prime minister as a hard man, unafraid of confrontation, who is willing to take on David Cameron in "a bare-knuckle fistfight for the future of Britain", the Guardian has learned.