National / International News

Jason Webster looks at the flash mob flamenco phenomenon - the latest version of an art form that has reconnected flamenco with its origins in social protest.

President Obama delivered an angry message to lawmakers, who shot down a gun control measure.

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First Minister Peter Robinson and a number of other guests from Northern Ireland are attending the funeral of Baroness Thatcher in London.

Sam Allardyce says Robin van Persie's equaliser should have been disallowed as West Ham draw 2-2 with Manchester United.

Roberto Martinez is confident Wigan will stay in the Premier League if they repeat their performance against Manchester City.

The president had put his political weight behind expanded background checks. But if he couldn't get an important win on a popular measure in a Democratic-controlled Senate, what's in store for other parts of his second-term agenda?

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US President Barack Obama has branded the decision to reject an expansion of gun-sale checks a "shameful day for Washington".

The PFA hopes football's equivalent of the NFL's "Rooney Rule" will address the lack of black managers in the game.

A mother and son talk to the BBC about the 'binders full of women' she kept while trying to arrange a marriage for him.

The Queen leads mourners at St Paul's Cathedral in London, as more than 2,000 funeral guests pay their last respects to Baroness Thatcher.

The number now stands at 52, the U.S. military says. The news comes just days after guards raided a section of the facility to move prisoners to single cells from their communal holding area because the detainees had covered security cameras.

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John Terry's double and a spectacular David Luiz strike help Chelsea beat Fulham to move above Arsenal in the table.

FBI images show a backpack and fragments of a pressure cooker which may be linked to the deadly attack on the Boston Marathon.

In the last three years, there has been a concerted effort by those in Washington to reduce government spending and reign in the national debt. One reason for the budget cuts? Research by two Harvard economists, Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. The pair found that when a country owes more than 90 percent of their GDP, it slides into recession.

Except Reinhart and Rogoff made a glaring mistake in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet they used to calculate their averages. "They left off five countries. And that changed things pretty significantly," says Tim Fernholz, a business reporter with Quartz. Instead of a mild recession, carrying that much debt means a country is probably going to have mild growth -- slow, but growth all the same.

The Reinhart-Rogoff spreadsheet, via qz.com

But why did this one paper have such huge implications on budget policy? When a country is faced with recession, it has two choices -- stimulus, or austerity. Pump more money into your government, grow your debt, and hope that you're creating enough jobs along the way to work your way out of the slump. Or you can start making cuts to slow the amount of money your country will need to borrow. "In the long term, economists think that having less debt is going to be better for the economy. But if you're coming out of a crisis, you have to make a decision then and there."

And this was especially true with Reinhart and Rogoff's paper. The pair met with 40 senators in 2011 and "they told them, you need to act now and that we can't afford to spend more money to stimulate the economy." Also reading research by the two Harvard economists were budget chairs from both parties, then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the Simpson-Bowles Commission and financial leaders in countries overseas. "When we were talking about the budget deficit and the debt in 2010, 2011 and 2012, everybody had this 90 percent threshold on their minds," says Fernholz.

In their defense, Reinhart and Rogoff point to other studies that show high debt leads to slow growth. But Fernholz says "it's not clear if countries that are growing slowly have high debt or if high debt causes countries to grow slowly." The Reinhart-Rogoff research suggested causation instead of correlation.

"When politicians around the country and in fact around the world were deciding what to do to save the economy after the recession, they were reading this paper and it was scaring them," says Fernholz. "And it was making them think, we need to cut the debt now if we want to save the economy."

This was true, for example in the United Kingdom which quickly implemented austerity measures. The country's economy is in bad shape today. Meanwhile, in the U.S., there was a stimulus and Congress moved slower to make budget cuts. And while the economy here isn't exactly sparkling, both debt and unemployment are going down.

They don't want to offend Hispanic voters, but they don't want to turn off the GOP base either, says Ron Bonjean, a former Republican leadership aide. And competing for Hispanic votes is not a top priority for the sizable number of Republican rank and file who still see the bill as amnesty.

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Karim Wade, the son of Senegal's former president, is formally charged with corruption in connection with his vast fortune.

Robin van Persie's controversial equaliser sees Manchester United come from behind to draw at West Ham.

Carlos Tevez's late effort earns Manchester City a win over Wigan that keeps their slim title hopes alive.

Ricin is a naturally occurring toxin that's found in castor beans. Castor-oil plants, the source of beans, are popular with gardeners. You can get sick by eating beans. But purified ricin can be made pretty easily and used for no-good.

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A new sat-nav system targeted at lorry owners warns drivers when they are approaching an area where they are at greatest risk of hitting a cyclist.