Ten Things You Need to Know Today: Tuesday 22 Jan 2013

A 56-year-old grandmother from Teesside has been sentenced to death in Indonesia for drug trafficking. Lindsay Sandiford was arrested when she arrived in Bali on a flight from Bangkok in May and police found 10.6lb of cocaine in her suitcase. Prosecutors had recommended a 15-year prison sentence but judges said today there were no mitigating circumstances.

A cloud of foul-smelling gas that escaped from a factory in northern France has been affecting parts of southern England after it drifted across the channel overnight. The harmless gas, called Mercaptan, smells like a mixture 'sweat, garlic and rotten eggs', and is used to give odour to natural gas and propane.

President Obama began his second term in the White House yesterday with an ultra-liberal inauguration speech in which he mentioned gay rights, climate change and immigration and declared: "We, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it."

All sections of the British military have been put on alert for an “emergency deployment” to Mali to support French forces who are battling al-Qaeda forces in the northern African nation, The Times says. Military chiefs have also been given until the end of the week to draft a plan for such a mission which has been codenamed Operation Newcombe.

BBC presenter Sir David Attenborough says humans are threatening their own existence and that of other species as they use up the world's resources, and that only population control can halt the damage. "We are a plague on Earth. It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so," he told the Radio Times.