Last Week in Pictures: March 12-18

With so many big news stories breaking around the world last week it can be easy to have missed something important so just in case here's a recap of some of the bigger headlines.

In the United States 45th President Donald Trump fired his secretary of state Rex Tillerson last week following a range of disputes between the two men. Replacing him with former CIA boss Mike Pompeo Trump waited until Mr Tillerson was in Africa to announce the latest in a massive number of dismissals from the White House in his first term and no official reason for the sacking was cited although Mr Tillerson had reportedly called Donald Trump a “F*cking Moron” at least once.

In the UK the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia led to the British government expelling 23 Russian diplomats last week, a move mirrored in Moscow by the Kremlin. The attack using a Russian nerve agent on a former Russian spy using methods typically employed by the Russian intelligence services has been blamed on Russia by the UK, an allegation that Russia strenuously and repeatedly denied. President Vladimir Putin going so far as to call the accusation “nonsense” last week.

In Russia President Vladimir Putin won a fourth term in office last week with an impressive 73% of the vote in nationwide elections. The result saw his time as president of Russia extend to 2024 and made him the first Russian leader since Josef Stalin to serve more than two decades as leader despite there being widespread reports of ballot box stuffing and other vote rigging activities that were dismissed as “some irregularities” amid an election in which the turn out barely scraped to 60% of the population.

In sports Native River stayed strong to fight off Might Bite, the only real competition it had, to win the prestigious Cheltenham Gold Cup last week. In perhaps the seminal two-horse race the pair were neck and neck till the home straight when the favorite Might Bite went off the boil and Native River paced on to victory, the only question is can it do the same again in 2019? You'll have to read our daily news pages to find out.

Meanwhile in Romania last week a Mr Constantin Reliu became a 63 year old member of the living dead after a court failed to overturn a 2003 death certificate that was erroneously issued on the man after his wife had failed to see him for over a decade. Having appealed too late it would appear his living and breathing status in the courtroom was not enough to sway the bench in Barlad and it ruled he must remain dead however alive he might actually be. Franz Kafka eat your heart out, eh?