Nineteen-year-old Yashika Bageerathi due to be flown out from Heathrow on Sunday without her mother and siblings
A 19-year-old Mauritian schoolgirl who was to have been deported at 5pm on Sunday has won a further reprieve although it was unclear why she was not being sent back to Mauritius as planned.
According to Lynne Dawes, the principal at the Oasis Academy Hadley in north London, where Yashika Bageerathi is studying for her A-levels, Air Mauritius refused to take her. "We believe that Air Mauritius refused to fly her," Dawes told Sky News, adding that there had been no official word from the Home Office on why the deportation was not going ahead.
Defence cuts have 'hollowed out' armed forces and left navy cut to the bone, says Nato's outgoing deputy supreme commander
Restructuring the army is "one hell of a risk" that will weaken the armed forces, one of Britain's most senior generals has said.
General Sir Richard Shirreff said that the "jury is out still" on plans to cut troop numbers in the regular army and substitute them with reservists, saying if the idea is going to work "the nation needs to get behind" it.
As the clocks change from GMT to British Summer Time, Rebekah Higgitt looks at the history of Britains standard time
It has become something of a tradition on this blog to mark the biannual change of the clocks and, although I no longer work at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, its a habit that sticks. This time, as we say farewell to it until the autumn, it seems a good opportunity to reminisce about Greenwich Mean Time.*
Why Greenwich time? And whats mean about it?
Gold, paintings and property confiscated, and 300 relatives and allies held or questioned in huge investigation into corruption
Chinese authorities have seized assets worth at least 90bn yuan ($US14.5bn) from family members and associates of retired domestic security chief Zhou Yongkang, who is at the centre of China's biggest corruption scandal in more than six decades, two sources said.
More than 300 of Zhou's relatives, political allies, proteges and staff have also been taken into custody or questioned in the past four months, the sources told Reuters.
Football Federation Australia has denied any wrongdoing amid allegations its 2022 World Cup bid team paid discredited former FIFA vice president Jack Warner almost half a million dollars in the belief it would secure his vote.
UK tabloid the Daily Mail reported on Sunday the allegations have been made by an Australian whistleblower to Michael Garcia, the American lawyer leading FIFA's investigations into claims of corruption in the bidding for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Cross-checking eliminates dozens from list of potential victims in disaster as search teams continue to battle harsh conditions
The number of those believed missing following a deadly mudslide in Washington state has plummeted to 30 after many people were found safe, authorities said late Saturday.
Officials previously set the number of missing people at 90, but said they expected that figure to drop dramatically as they worked to find people and cross-referenced a list that included partial reports and duplicates.
Workman fell to his death helping to install seats at the Sao Paulo stadium where Brazil will play the opener on 12 June
A worker died Saturday after falling at the construction site of the stadium that will host the World Cup opener in Sao Paulo, marking the seventh death in accidents at World Cup venues in Brazil.
Fabio Hamilton da Cruz, whose age was not disclosed, fell about 8 metres (26ft) while helping install temporary seats at the Itaquerao stadium, construction company Fast Engenharia said in a statement. Firefighters said the worker fell from about 15m.
As the channel celebrates its half-centenary, key figures behind some of its landmark programmes from Arena and The Office to Boys From the Blackstuff pay tribute to the channel that tore up the TV rulebook
As a BBC trainee in the late 90s, Stephen Merchant made a short film in which he cast his friend, Ricky Gervais, as the awful boss of a small paper firm. The short eventually became The Office, a sitcom first broadcast in 2001 which ran for two series and won multiple awards, including a pair of Golden Globes. With Gervais, Merchant went on to write and appear in two further BBC2 sitcoms, Extras and Life's Too Short. Now 39, he recently created and starred in the HBO comedy Hello Ladies.
The prospect of unpopular electricity generators being taken to task by no fewer than three regulators has been widely welcomed. But as Terry Macalister reports, there are hard truths to tackle beyond ever-increasing utility bills
This is the biggest investigation of the British energy markets since privatisation and deregulation began in the 1980s. But the inquiry, triggered last week by a trio of watchdogs led by Ofgem and to be undertaken by the new Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) immediately sparked dire warnings that go to the heart of Britain's energy policy paralysis.
British Gas owner Centrica and a raft of analysts said a probe that could last two years will freeze investment in much-needed power stations and make blackouts more likely. Ofgem and energy and climate change secretary Ed Davey countered that a proper and full investigation would clear the air and rebuild trust among consumers.
On the eve of the release of a film celebrating her life, Jane Bown, the Observer's veteran photographer, reflects on her glittering career and her troubled early years
Jane Bown's work in pictures
'I spent my whole life worrying," Jane Bown says, "about time and light. If I had time it was something, but if I had light it was even better. Often, though, I had neither. I remember doing a picture of Danny DeVito: I had five minutes to squeeze him into a little window bay in the Dorchester to catch the last light. I got very quick on the draw. I think I know light, if nothing else."
Talk with Jane, who earlier this month celebrated her 89th birthday, and whom I have known and worked with for 20 of her 60 years at the Observer, quickly falls into a familiar rhythm. She punctuates her conversation which is full of shorthand memories about the people and places she has photographed, or gossip concerning her surrogate family at the newspaper with brief expressions of an ever-present internal dialogue. One part of her is forever apologising ("I'm not at my best today, I'm afraid"; "I'm not sure this is going to work out is it"; "I promise I will calm down in a minute") while another voice is always countering ("We're not doing too badly, are we?"; "This is going rather well"; "Wasn't that fun?"). It's her home counties version of a Samuel Beckett monologue: "I can't go on, I must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
Benedict Cumberbatch last week became the latest actor to take on the part of the great Dane. After 400 years, should the Prince be given a rest?
To judge from the world's social media, thousands are delighted that Benedict Cumberbatch has just announced he will be returning to the London stage, affording fans of Sherlock their first opportunity since the National's Frankenstein to see someone who is rapidly becoming a card-carrying screen idol actually acting in person before their very eyes. I'm pleased too, primarily because he has made such an intelligent choice of play.
There's still time to dash out for a present. Or you can post your mum a message here
Have you remembered it's Mother's Day? Quick! Dash out to the petrol station and grab whatever bad chocolate or limp flowers they have left! Or you could do something slightly more meaningful and post your mum a message below. Explain what she means to you and then send them the link (by clicking on the paper clip next to your comment) of you marking their greatness in public. If your mum isn't around any more, do share your memories too.
The Scottish referendum debate has become a narrow discussion of economics and does no justice to our nation
How could you fail to have an argument about identity in Scotland and at a time like this? A referendum on independence should be the very definition of the moment to have it. You'd have thought the Scottish cultural air would be thrumming with an accrued history of intellectual fighting and flyting over who we are, dating back to the unions of crowns and parliaments, through the Enlightenment and into all the scientific and artistic legacies of 19th and 20th-century Scottish culture, as manifested now, at a constitutional crossroads.
But this is a strange time. The argument about Scottish culture is not being had. The accusation aimed at the Better Together campaign is that it has no positive vision of the UK. But, by exactly the same token, the yes campaign has little more than economic promises, based on speculation that an independent Scotland could be better off financially. In this reductive economic standoff, Scots are defined only by geographical residency, our identity dependent on resolving the currency problem, our future pegged on the dubious question of EU membership. There is lots of angry smoke in the debate, but no real fire.
There are other privileges the justice minister could add to his proscribed list
Admit it: when you heard that books had been banned for prisoners, did you feel a wave of envy for the old lags? I think we can all see the upside if we faced a similar ban ourselves. We'd be off the hook with the latest experimental Polish novel, for example. As we flicked through the literary supplements, gloomily thinking: "This 500,000 word plotless reworking of the Icelandic sagas is very well reviewed; I suppose I ought to read it", we would remember with a rush of delight that books are banned and we could simply settle down in front of an old Poirot instead.
When it comes to prisoners, they have enough to feel guilty about without adding "reluctance to get stuck in to the latest Michel Houellebecq" to the list.
When Tess Morgan's son came home with a tattoo, she was griefstricken. She knew her reaction was OTT (he's 21) but it signalled a change in their relationship
Anfield manager backs Liverpool to play through the anxiety at the Premier League summit and says big-spending Tottenham are the ones feeling the strain
Your days are dwindling and you don't want your children to find those rubbery items you hid at the back of the wardrobe
This article originally appeared in the New York Times
The chief medical officer worries that obesity is becoming seen as 'normal'. Let's stop this focusing on extremes of body shape
Chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies worries that being overweight is in danger of being "normalised". Davies points to "vanity sizing", larger shop mannequins, cheap drink, big portions, supermarket bulk buys and news stories featuring photos of the morbidly obese, making the overweight feel (comparatively) slim. Davies, who also calls for a sugar tax, feels that all this makes once-shocking obesity seem unexceptional, standard, a new kind of normal. Maybe, but with this ongoing polarised focus on extremes of body shape, could it also be true that we're losing sight of what normal is?
There is a complex backdrop to what Davies says. First, if obesity is being normalised, this is at least preferable to the "fat-shaming" that still goes on, making the lives of countless overweight adults and children a daily misery. Then there are economic concerns. For many food and drink outlets, and their customers, value for money isn't a marketing conceit, it's a necessity. Likewise, clothes shops find themselves stuck between a retail rock and a hard place: criticised for using skinny mannequins (promoting food disorders), but also for using bigger ones (patronising their customers).
Though they have the best away form in the Premier League, United don't perform at home because of the manager's mindset
When I joined Liverpool in 1992, the first game of the season was a Charity Shield match at Wembley. We lost 4-3 to Leeds and, as we all piled back on the team bus, I'll never forget the bus driver "Helmet", we called him saying to me: "Don't worry, lad, we go to Wembley at least once a season here."
That was my introduction to Liverpool. The club that expects to go to Wembley. The club that expects success. As we now know, that was also the beginning of the end of Liverpool's dominant period, and later that season, Helmet took me aside once more to say, incredulously: "I can't believe we're not going to Wembley," as though it should have been a given.
Scottish secretary slams complacency in unionist camp and says: 'By the time we wake up it may be too late'
The cabinet minister in charge of Scotland has issued a stark warning that the country could sleepwalk into a split from the UK because unmotivated unionists are failing to wake up to the threat posed by Alex Salmond's nationalists.
Amid clear signs of tension and division in the no campaign, the Scottish secretary, Alistair Carmichael, said he believed the nationalists had greater "hunger" for victory and could create an unstoppable momentum.
Mark Menzies quits as a parliamentary private secretary to Alan Duncan following Sunday Mirror investigation
A Tory MP has resigned as a ministerial aide following allegations reportedly made by a Brazilian male escort.
Mark Menzies quit as a parliamentary private secretary to international development minister Alan Duncan following a Sunday Mirror investigation into his personal life.
Gun and grenade attack in Kabul as insurgents try to disrupt presidential ballot on 5 April
Taliban fighters who were disguised under burqas stormed the heavily fortified headquarters of Afghan election organisers on Saturday the second suicide attack in Kabul in less than 24 hours, as the country prepares for a crucial but much threatened election.
At least three men took over a campaign office of the presidential candidate Gul Agha Sherzai, and used it to fire guns and rocket-propelled grenades over the security forces protecting the Independent Election Commission.
Lawyers tell of victims facing abusers without representation and children stuck in legal limbo while parents dispute custody
Cuts in legal aid are creating chaos in the family courts, according to legal experts, who warn that the resulting delays are having a serious impact on the children of warring parents.
Couples disputing access and custody of their children now mostly have to represent themselves in court, and this causes lengthy delays in determining the best outcome for the children, they say.
Statement to Observer signed by public figures including sculptors Anthony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, presenter Griff Rhys Jones and Royal Academy's Charles Saumarez Smith
Interactive: what will London's skyline look like?
Some of Britain's most influential figures in the arts, politics and academia have launched a campaign to save London's skyline from being dominated by more than 200 additional skyscrapers.
In a statement in the Observer today, signatories from sculptor Sir Antony Gormley to philosopher Alain de Botton, author Alan Bennett, Stirling prize-winning architect Alison Brooks, and London mayoral hopefuls Dame Tessa Jowell and MP David Lammy warn: "The skyline of London is out of control."
Lib Dem energy and climate change secretary speaks out on eve of publication of major UN report on environment
Britain must lead the international battle against global warming, says energy and climate change secretary Ed Davey, who added that not to do so would be "deeply irresponsible".
His comments, made on the eve of a landmark UN report on the impacts of global warming, are in pointed contrast to chancellor George Osborne's statement in September that he did not want the UK to be "the only people out there in front of the rest of the world".