Kate McGough

The day that became known in Northern Ireland’s history as Bloody Sunday – when thirteen civilians were shot dead by British soldiers at a civil rights march in Londonderry on January 30, 1972 – remains a controversial flashpoint in Northern Ireland’s history. It triggered three decades of bitter and sectarian violence known as the Troubles, which claimed more than 3,600 lives.

But on Tuesday, the longest and most expensive legal inquiry in British history found all thirteen civilians innocent. British Prime Minister David Cameron said the deaths were “both unjustified and unjustifiable.”

A former nurse appears in court in Minnesota this morning charged with two counts of aiding suicide. His weapon? Words. For years, William Melchert-Dinkel, 47, allegedly spent hours in online chat rooms with suicide themes, posing as a young female nurse and befriending vulnerable people contemplating suicide. He encouraged them to end their own lives, gave them tips on how to do it, and entered into suicide pacts with some - pacts police say he never intended to keep. At least two of the people he advised took their own lives – a 32-year-old British man in 2005, and an 18-year-old college student in Canada in 2008. Now Melchert-Dinkel is being charged with their deaths.

The authorities in Thailand say they've received a new offer of a ceasefire from anti-government protesters, who've been engaged in a violent stand-off with the army in Bangkok.

Here’s a cracking idea! Aardman Animations, the makers of the Oscar-winning animation series Wallace and Gromit, have opened their first animation academy, hoping to train the next generation of world-class animators.

Nothing unusual so far, except this academy is in a South African township – a place where any opportunities to receive world-class training are thin on the ground.

Afghan president, Hamid Karzai meets with President Obama in Washington this week. High up on the agenda will be talking about the Taliban, particularly in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions. However, we look deeper into Pakistan with the BBC’s Owen Bennett-Jones. He has just returned from the Punjab, Pakistan’s economic powerhouse, which is a region far away from the border with Afghanistan where the Taliban is gaining in popularity among the poor and disenfranchised.

For many, the prison on Bagram air base in Afghanistan is synonymous with a dark period in U.S. military history. In 2002, two prisoners were killed in the Bagram prison while in U.S. custody after being suspended from the ceilings of their cells and brutally beaten.

The BBC’s Hilary Andersson gained rare access to the new prison on the Bagram air base, and also spoke to ex-prisoners who claim they have been abused in a separate "secret jail" at the Bagram air base.

It’s decision time in the U.K. today: Voters in Britain are casting their votes in the general election – and it’s the most unpredictable election in a generation.

Laura Lynch is the London-based correspondent for PRI’s The World. She’s already exercised her right to vote this morning and will be heading down to Parliament green to cover the election later today.

The attempted bombing of Times Square by a naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin got the attention of the world, but has uncomfortable echoes for Britain in particular. The London underground bombings in July 2005 were committed by UK citizens of Pakistani descent and the UK has been dealing with many attempted acts of “home-grown terrorism” since then.

American and Russian negotiators are meeting for the second day today in Moscow to discuss the issue of adopting orphans from Russia. Following a series of incidents including the abandonment of an orphan adopted from Russia, all adoptions from Russia to the U.S. were suspended this month. The Russians are drawing up a draft treaty which they want the U.S. to sign before Moscow will allow American families to adopt any more orphans.

Rastko Pocesta, a 12-year-old boy in Serbia is under police protection and has become an unlikely symbol of the struggle between the liberal, pro-western minority and the Serbian nationalists, who still have strong anti-American feelings after NATO bombings during the late 1990's.

Despite the giant strides made in recent years to provide effective drug treatments to combat HIV and AIDS, there's still a long way to go. Particularly in Africa, where the virus has hit hardest and thousands continue to die every year. One of the biggest problems in tackling the epidemic is the reluctance of those carrying the virus to come forward for testing. But an extraordinary group of women in Zimbabwe has found a new way to beat the stigma of HIV by forming a womens soccer league where all the players are HIV positive.

Since 2001 almost two million American service personnel have been deployed in either Afghanistan or Iraq. These conflicts have taken their toll on the mental wellbeing of many veterans — thousands have come home suffering from various levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Our partner, the BBC, has been investigating some innovative new programs to help identify, treat and prevent PTSD at Walter Reed military base in Washington D.C., and Fort Hood in Texas.

Small beauty salons, with 3 seats or less are being privatized in Cuba. Fidel Castro nationalized all small businesses in 1968 and now his younger brother, Raul Castro is trying to modernize the system without jumping to full scale capitalism. The move is significant for small business owners who are not accustomed to working for themselves and will now have to pay rent for their locations and pay taxes.

In rural village of Khataba Afghanistan, one bereaved man, scarred more than most by the war, became the recipient of an unusual American apology.

The top U.S. special operations commander Afghanistan, Vice Adm. William McRaven traveled to the village to ask for forgiveness. He offered condolences to Haji Sharabuddin, the patriarch of a family that lost  five members when a U.S. special forces raid went awry. But it wasn't the personal appearance of top brass that made the moment so unusual, it was that the American forces made a traditional Afghan offering of two sacrificial sheep. 

Flooding has caused the death of at least 95 people in Rio de Janeiro, and more rain is expected in the next few days. The downpour is the worst in decades. It has caused huge mudslides that swept away homes in hillside shanty towns. The city of Rio has been paralysed and the authorities have declared it a disaster zone. The BBC’s Paulo Cabral is in Rio de Janeiro and joins us with the latest.

A senior Taliban commander has been secretely released early from jail in Kabul. Akbar Agha had been sentenced to sixteen years in jail in 2004 for kidnapping three United Nations workers. Friends of the Taliban commander told BBC reporter, Kate Clark, that he received a presidential pardon and was living in a government house. 

For some, it’s one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Vietnam War. Forty years ago today, April 6^th 1970, Sean Flynn, son of Hollywood legend Errol Flynn, was working as a war photographer when he set off on his motorbike from Phnom Penh with fellow journalist Dana Stone to cover the expansion of the conflict into Cambodia. They were never seen again. But now two amateur excavators are claiming they have discovered what happened to the men 40 years ago.

Villavicencio is a rural town in Colombia and a place associated with left-wing guerilla movement FARC, but it is also the home of the annual Cowgirl World Championships.

Census workers have begun to go out into the streets to get an accurate number of homeless, itinerant and otherwise "uncountable" citizens. Meanwhile, we go to India, where the world's biggest census starts today as the country aims to get an accurate picture of their 1.2 billion citizens.

In the 1920s, developments in physics from relativity to quantum mechanics were front page news stories. Only today have scientists been able to build machines able to test theories thought up decades ago that predict what matter and energy look like in extreme states. Scientists in Switzerland came a small step closer to testing some of those theories, as the Large Hadron Collider started smashing particles yestserday.