10 things you need to know this Monday

Slept through the Today programme? Never read the Sunday papers? Missed Andrew Marr? Not clear what became of that attempt to unseat Gordon Brown? The First Post  's Monday morning service, posted at 8.0 am, is designed to help...
LABOUR CHIEF SPILLS BEANS ON BROWN 'SHAMBLES'Peter Watt, the former Labour party general-secretary, has told in a memoir, Inside Out, serialised in the Mail on Sunday, that Gordon Brown reduced Number Ten to a shambles after taking over from Tony Blair. He said Brown had no strategy in place when he took over but has been running the country "by making it up as he goes along". The Mole...TOGO SQUAD PULL OUT OF AFRICAN CUPEmmanuel Adebayour of Manchester City was among members of the Togo football squad ambushed by terrorists in northern Angola on their way to the African Cup of Nations. Three team personnel died and two players were hit by gunfire. On Sunday, the team was withdrawn from Angola on the orders of Togo's prime minister despite some players arguing they should stay to "show that we are men". More...SENIOR DEMOCRAT 'RACIALLY INSENSITIVE' ABOUT OBAMAThe US Senate leader, Democrat Harry Reid, has been under pressure all weekend to resign following the revelation that two years ago he said privately that America would accept Barack Obama because he is "light skinned" and doesn't have a "negro dialect". President Obama has accepted Reid's apology and said on Saturday that in his view the issue was closed. But several prominent Republicans have demanded that Reid steps down. He insists he won't.

IRIS ROBINSON FORCED TO QUITIris Robinson, Democratic Unionist Party MP for Strangford and the wife of Northern Ireland's First Minister, Peter Robinson, was forced to resign from the DUP on Saturday following revelations about her love affair with a Belfast teenager and allegations by the BBC that she was involved in dubious financial dealings. Her lover was a 19-year-old café owner, Kirk McCambley, 40 years her junior. She is now said to be undergoing "acute" psychiatric treatment.

JACKO WAS MURDERED, SAYS DEATH CERTIFICATEThe death certificate for pop star Michael Jackson has been published online, and it shows that the original July 7 coroner's report was amended on August 31 to "homicide'. LA medical examiner Christopher Rogers concluded that the 50-year-old singer died of acute Propofol intoxication due to "intravenous injection by another". Jackson's physician, Conrad Murray, is said to have a legal team ready to defend him in case he is charged with murder.ANTI-BROWN COUP PLOTTED IN CURRY HOUSELast week's bungled coup by Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon to call a secret ballot of all Labour MPs to vote on Gordon Brown's continued leadership was concocted in a south London curry restaurant, Gandhi's, according to the Sunday Telegraph. The paper also claims that Bob Ainsworth, the defence secretary, was involved with the plotters and could resign from the Cabinet shortly. Brown will address his backbenchers today and say Labour can still win the election. The Mole...INARTICULATE TEENAGERS USE ONLY 800 WORDSThe Government's first children's communication tsar claims that many British teenagers today are using a vocabulary of only 800 words a day, when previous research has shown they should know 40,000 words. Jean Gross said teenagers are so inarticulate that a base of 20 words - including 'yeah', 'no', 'but' and 'lol' (the internet short-form for 'laugh out loud') - account for one-third of all words used. "We need to help today's teenagers... 800 words will not get you a job," said Gross.

SUNDAY MIRROR REPORTER DIES IN HELMAND The 39-year-old defence correspondent of the Sunday Mirror, Robert Hamer, died on Saturday when a US Marine convoy he was travelling in was targeted by a roadside bomb. As Robert Fox reports for The First Post today, the district Hamer was reporting from was supposed to have been cleared of Taliban insurgents only six weeks ago. More...AMANDA KNOX 'MISSING OUT ON LIFE' Amanda Knox, the American girl jailed for 26 years in Perugia for killing her British housemate Meredith Kercher, has written to her family in Seattle saying she is "missing out on life" and fears growing old in jail. Her downbeat letter arrived as her family hired an American attorney, Theodore Simon, to be their daughter's "US consultant" when her Italian lawyers present her appeal case in March. The appeal hearing is not expected to start until next autumn.

ROD LIDDLE 'TO EDIT INDEPENDENT'The former editor of the BBC Radio's Today programme, Rod Liddle, who how writes for an array of newspapers and journals, has been earmarked to edit the Independent newspaper should the Russian Alexander Lebedev, who last has already bought the Evening Standard, succeed in buying the paper in the next few weeks, according to reports. Liddle was forced to leave Today in 2002 when a column he wrote for the Guardian about foxhunting broke the Corporation's strict impartiality rules. Liddle wrote that any readers who may have forgotten why they voted Labour in 1997 would remember once they saw the people campaigning to save hunting. ·