Everton are trying to price Manchester City out of the market for their coveted England defender Joleon Lescott.

City have made it known they will not offer any more than £15million for Lescott. Everton hope that their refusal to entertain any fee short of £20m will see the player stay at Goodison.

But now City are aiming to push the player into asking for a transfer, with a salary offer in the region of £80,000 a week – double Lescott’s present Everton deal.

City were encouraged when Lescott offered a non committal response to questions about his future when asked after England’s recent World Cup qualifier against Andorra.

Everton believe that Glen Johnson’s £17m transfer to neighbours Liverpool is a marker for their £20m valuation of their six-cap England international.

David Moyes does not want Lescott to leave, and negotiations for the year-long loan of striker Jo from Manchester City have been conducted without Lescott’s name being involved.

The fear is that City’s ability to offer a staggering pay rise may be too much for Lescott to ignore.

Liverpool Echo.co.uk - Everton FC - News - Everton aiming to price Joleon Lescott out of Manchester City move

French investigators trying to find out why an Air France plane crashed in the Atlantic say they believe it broke up on contact with water, not in the air.

They also found that the plane’s speed sensors had been "a factor but not the cause" of the crash.

Teams looking for the plane’s flight data recorders will continue operations for another 10 days.

Alain Bouillard, of France’s BEA accident investigation agency, said the crash had been an extremely difficult one to understand.

"Between the surface of the water and 35,000ft [10,700m], we don’t know what happened," Mr Bouillard said. "In the absence of the flight recorders, it is extremely difficult to draw conclusions."

But he said an examination of the recovered wreckage led them to believe the plane probably hit the water "in the direction of flight and with a strong vertical acceleration".

BBC transport correspondent Tom Symonds said if the plane had broken up in the air, pieces of the fuselage would have been found twisted in a variety of directions.

Instead they showed signs of compression in one direction, resulting from the plane hitting the water on its belly.

There has been speculation that the old-style speed sensors may have given the plane’s pilots faulty information.

But Mr Bouillard said they had been "a factor but not the cause" of the crash.

In the wake of the crash, Air France accelerated an existing programme to replace speed monitors on its Airbus planes.

Mr Bouillard told reporters that investigators found "neither traces of fire nor traces of explosives."

He said there was also concern about the length of the delay - six hours - between the crew failing to contact air traffic controllers in Dakar, western Africa, as planned and the alarm being raised.

He said his team was "a long way from establishing the causes of the accident" but that the search for the Airbus A330’s data recorders would be extended to 10 July.

The French investigation appears to contradict earlier reports attributed to Brazilian pathologists.

They said last month that the injuries sustained by the passengers whose bodies had been found suggested the plane had been in pieces before it hit the sea.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Air France jet ‘broke on impact’

Two RAF air crew have been killed after a Tornado jet crashed during a training flight in Argyll.

The plane came down on a hillside near the Rest and Be Thankful beauty spot in Glen Kinglass, near Arrochar, at about 1145 BST.

The Ministry of Defence said that the Tornado F3 was based at RAF Leuchars in Fife and that next of kin had been informed.

The weather in the area at the time of the crash was said to be overcast with thick clouds.

Andy Graham, 60, a retired rigger who moved to Arrochar three years ago, said he saw two Tornados flying low in the area around lunchtime.

He said: "We get jets flying over here on training exercises quite regularly. It’s not unusual to see them and you definitely hear them.

"But today they seemed to be flying much lower than normal. We watched them fly along the loch, up through the glen and towards the Rest And Be Thankful."

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Glasgow, Lanarkshire and West | Two killed in RAF Tornado crash

Today The Pirate Bay has been sold to Swedish software company Global Gaming X in a 60 million kronor (£4.7m) deal which will make it legit. The news follows similar moves in the past with the likes of Napster and Kazaa. GGFX has also purchased ‘next generation file-sharing technology’ firm Peerialism.

"The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary," said GGFX CEO Hans Pandeya. "Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers’ need faster downloads and better quality."

Pirate Bay Sells Up & Goes Legit - Software News - TrustedReviews

Home Secretary Alan Johnson has dropped plans to make ID cards compulsory for pilots and airside workers at Manchester and London City airports.

The cards were due to be trialled there - sparking trade union anger.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said that the reverse in policy was "an absurd fudge" and "symbolic of a government in chaos".

As a result of Mr Johnson’s announcement, foreign nationals living and working in the UK will be the only group of people who will have to have the cards, with 50,000 already having been issued.

BBC political correspondent Jo Coburn said the government’s original vision for ID cards was that the scheme would eventually become compulsory.

ID cards were initially promoted as an anti-terror measure, but Mr Johnson said they should not have been sold as the "panacea for tackling terrorism" which he said had been responsible for "messing up" the debate.

Mr Johnson added: "People who worked airside were resenting the fact there was compulsion involved.

"Now we can have a much more constructive discussion about the issue if we remove that one element of compulsion.

He added that ID cards were "an important tool for tackling terrorism", but were not "the whole toolbox".

But Mr Grayling said the climbdown was indicative of a government in disarray.

"They have spent millions on the scheme so far - the home secretary thinks it has been a waste and wants to scrap it, but the prime minister won’t let him," Mr Grayling added.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Climbdown on compulsory ID cards

The UK should consider slashing defence spending by up to £24bn and revisit plans to renew its Trident nuclear deterrent, a think-tank report says.

Britain cannot afford much of the defence equipment it plans to buy, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) report says.

Its authors include former defence secretary Lord Robertson and the ex-Lib Dem leader, Lord Ashdown.

It comes after news of a £1bn cost overrun on two new aircraft carriers.

The original budget for the two carriers for the Royal Navy was £3.9bn but the BBC has seen a memorandum revealing the programme will come under "severe pressure" because of the cost escalation.

The government is committed to renewing Trident at an estimated cost of £20bn. The policy is backed by the Tories but opposed by the Liberal Democrats and many Labour backbenchers.

The report’s authors also claim that the mission in Afghanistan is on course for possible failure unless it is changed to include a joint civilian-military stabilisation and reconstruction taskforce.

It also draws lessons from the Mumbai attack in India, appealing for new preventative measures in case the UK has to face a terrorist attack at multiple locations in one of its major cities.

That would be a job for strengthened special forces, not the police, the report argues.

BBC NEWS | UK | UK ‘must slash defence spending’

Life could soon be easier for millions of mobile phone users across Europe.

A deal’s been done between industry bosses and the European Commission in Brussels to work towards a ‘one size fits all’ charger.

It would mean an end to users having to hunt around for the right type of charger for their handset and should help cut waste.

Perfectly good chargers can often be thrown away if someone gets a new type of phone handset.

The deal isn’t legally binding though and, at this stage, is only voluntary.

But it means a universal charger, which will use a micro-USB connection, should be available by next year.

Under the accord, the companies, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Motorola, Research in Motion and Samsung, are committed to developing the charger.

It will work for data-enabled mobile phones that support USB data exchange.

BBC - Newsbeat - Technology - Universal phone charger deal done

A £1bn cost over-run is threatening the future of the publicly-funded project to build Britain’s biggest aircraft carriers, the BBC has learnt.

A memorandum from the lead contractors seen by the BBC suggests there will "be a fight for the programme’s survival".

The memo also discusses ways to cut costs, including the possibility of 400 to 500 redundancies.

The Ministry of Defence said it was currently re-costing the programme and accounts would be published in July.

Work on the two warships - the HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Price of Wales - had been delayed in December but was due begin soon.

They were due to come into service in 2014 and 2016, as the biggest and most powerful warships the UK has ever built.

The project’s cost is now expected to rise from £3.9bn to around £5bn.

BBC NEWS | UK | Navy carriers ‘£1bn over budget’

The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson’s death.

Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack.

Millions of people who searched for the star’s name on Google News were greeted with an error page.

It warned users "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".

"It’s true that between approximately 2.40PM Pacific and 3.15PM Pacific, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page," said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker.

It was around this time that the singer was officially pronounced dead.

Google’s trends page showed that searches for Michael Jackson had reached such a volume that in its so called "hotness" gauge the topic was rated "volcanic".

The BBC news website reported that traffic to the site at the time of Jackson’s death was 72% higher than normal

Google was not the only company overwhelmed by the public’s clamour for information.

The microblogging service Twitter crashed with the sheer volume of people using the service.

Searches for topics related to Michael Jackson peaked at 3PM Pacific

Queries about the star soon rocketed to the top of its updates and searches. But the amount of traffic meant it suffered one of its well-known outages.

Before the company’s servers crashed, TweetVolume noted that "Michael Jackson" appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web slows after Jackson’s death

Motorsport boss Max Mosley has claimed Formula 1’s peace deal could be jeopardised by continuing antagonism between him and the sport’s teams.

He accused the F1 Teams’ Association (Fota) of misleading the media after an agreement to end the sport’s civil war.

"If you wish the agreement we made to have any chance of survival, you must rectify your actions," Mosley said.

Mosley, who had said he would not stand for re-election in October, added that he now considered his "options open".

In the letter, written on Wednesday to Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo, the chairman of Fota, Mosley accused Fota of falsely stating he had behaved like a dictator and that he had been forced from office.

And he hinted that he might reconsider the deal that secured an end to the political row in the sport.

In that deal, Mosley abandoned his plans for a cost cap but secured the commitment of the teams to F1 until 2010 and agreed not to stand again for the FIA presidency in October.

"A fundamental part of [the deal] was that we would both present a positive and truthful account to the media," Mosley wrote.

"I was therefore astonished to learn that Fota has been briefing the press that Mr (Michel) Boeri (president of the FIA Senate) has taken charge of F1, something which you know is completely untrue; that I had been forced out of office, also false; and, apparently, that I would have no role in the FIA after October, something which is plain nonsense, if only because of the FIA statutes [which grant former presidents a place on the senate]."

In the letter, leaked to news agencies, he added: "There was no need for me to involve myself further in Formula 1 once we had a settlement.

"Equally, I had a long-standing plan not to seek re-election in October. It was therefore possible for me to confirm both points to you yesterday.

"Given your and Fota’s deliberate attempt to mislead the media, I now consider my options open. At least until October, I am president of the FIA with the full authority of that office.

BBC SPORT | Motorsport | Formula 1 | Mosley warning over F1 peace deal