Speaking on Loose Women, the veteran broadcaster was discussing allowing convicted rapist Ched Evans to return to play for his former club Sheffield United. The former Wales international was jailed for five years in 2012 after being convicted of raping a 19-year-old woman at a hotel near Rhyl, Denbighshire - but is now preparing to be released from prison within days. Ms Finnigan, who joined the panel of the ITV show last month, said: 'The rape and I am not, please, by any means minimising any kind of rape, but the rape was not violent. He didn't cause any bodily harm to the person. It was unpleasant, but in a hotel room I believe and she was - she had far too much to drink.'

You might think one cigarette 'can't hurt'. But it could cost a smoker almost 14 minutes of their life, according to new calculations. A new website has worked out how much time a smoker, or a drug addict will lose, each time they use. Smoking 20 cigarettes a day cuts ten years off a person's life, the website claims. Alcoholics cut their lives short by 23 years, while chronic cocaine users lose 34 years, it adds. Treatment4addiction, a website providing information people with drug and alcohol addictions, has calculated how many years an addiction to cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, methadone and heroine are cutting from their lives by continued use. Mephamphetamine addicts live to an average age of just 36, while heroin addicts don't fare much better, dying at on average at just 38 years old.

John Butler, 62, stabbed and slashed his estranged partner Pauline, 61, to death after the stress of featuring in BBC business makeover show, The Fixer, Leeds Crown Court heard. Celebrity consultant Alex Polizzi (right) tried to turn around the fortunes of the family's firms - Kettley's Furniture Store and Kettley's Funeral Directors - in Yeadon, West Yorkshire. But Butler had been resistant to the changes she made. The businessman denies the murder, but the couple's middle son, Richard, saw his father walk in with blood on his face, carrying a blood-stained orange towel. 

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: David Aspinall, 48, from Wigan, has described the terrifying moment the device blasted metal shards into his limbs - causing terrible injuries. The 48-year-old, from Wigan, nearly lost his flat in the blaze that followed - and spent nine days in hospital recovering from the ordeal. He claims that medics likened his injuries to bullet wounds - and says he is lucky to be alive. Mr Aspinall, who may need three years of skin grafts to recover, told The Sun: 'It glowed and burned in my hand. I dropped it and it exploded. 
'There was lots of blood, a huge hole in one leg and a gash in the other.'

The battle-hardened Peshmerga (bottom left) have proved the jihadis' most fearsome opponents, and have doggedly refused to give in to the fanatics' assault. The so-called holy warriors of IS will be humiliated by the fact that a woman is leading the stubborn fight against them, say their opponents. IS gunmen view women as little more than slaves so being killed by one will be doubly shameful. The commander of the Peshmerga forces is 40-year-old Mayssa Abdo, who uses the nom de guerre Narin Afrin (top left). Yesterday on social media she was being lionised by supporters. Abu Khattab al-Kurd (bottom right) is leading the Islamic State forces besieging Kobane on the Turkey-Syria border.

Yesterday GRAHAM NORTON told of his doomed love life, and in this extract from his rather naughty new memoir, he reveals how he’s dealt with the biggest divas in showbiz. The chat show host reveals that he was starstruck when Maddona, bottom right, appeared on his show and that Liza Minnelli, top right, invited him to her and David Guest's star-studded wedding in 2002. He writes about his 'special bond' with Dolly Parton, left, and shares a few nuggets about his trip to Dollywood, her personal theme park in Tennessee.

Sergei Kholodovskii, 28 (left) is the technical brain behind the Arizona-registered site, which hosts famously hacked images of Rita Ora, Kim Kardashian and Rihanna. It is 'erotic with elements of porno', said the IT worker from Samara, Russia, whose wife Yana Sotova, 25 (with him right) even considers his site-hosting work a 'normal job'. He claims some of the stars leaked the iCloud images themselves for 'good publicity' - but celebrities have branded the leak a 'sexual violation' and gross invasion of privacy.

Trainee nurse Bethany Jones, 18, (left) was killed on a hen party when lorry driver, Kevin Ollerhead, 45, (inset) smashed into the back of their minibus on the M62 in West Yorkshire. The minibus was either stationary or travelling at no more than 5mph due to a problem with the vehicle's clutch when it was hit, a jury was told. Ollerhead, 45, from Merseyside, denied death by dangerous driving at Leeds Crown Court. Bride-to-be Stefanie Firth, 24, was among the 21 people seriously injured in the crash, including Miss Jones's mother and sister. The coach driver, James Johnson, 64, from Bradford, pleaded guilty to causing Miss Jones's death by dangerous driving at an earlier hearing.

The balloon (left) was flying over Low Moor Farm in North Yorkshire when it fired its burners to gain height, but the noise terrified the pigs which ran off and ended up piled in a ditch. Three sows died after heart attacks and a boar died from his injuries the next day. The manager of the farm, Dan Gilbank (pictured in black trousers with colleague Mark Wilson) said: 'It was horrendous.' Professor Chris Fewster from the Department of Mathematics at the University of York, produced a report using a series of equations (inset top right) that put the balloon at around 300 metres from the pigs when it fired its burner.

Julia Hammans (left), married accountant Nicholas Hammans (right) in 1983 and, when she became pregnant in 1989, 'agreed' to give up her job as a company financial director, to care for the family. The couple enjoyed a high standard of living on the husband's 'very big earnings' until they split in 2004. However, after a judge divided the family fortune - which the wife values at £11m - she says her income is 10 times smaller than that of her ex, and she is being forced to sell her £1.75m home in Twickenham, Middlesex (inset).

Tania Clarence, 42, (inset) has admitted the manslaughter of four-year-old Olivia and three-year-old twins Ben and Max (pictured with their father Gary left) and will not face a murder trial. They all suffered from spinal muscular atrophy, also known as 'floppy baby syndrome'. She killed them in their beds on April 22 in their £2million house in New Malden, south-west London but failed to kill herself. Her banker husband Gary (right) was in court today. A note left by his wife in the house said: 'Gary, I don't want to be saved please. I can't live with the horror of what I have done'.

Shrien Dewani, is accused of arranging to have new wife Anni killed in a staged carjacking as they travelled through a notorious South African township. But the court heard that the bullet that killed her did not indicate it was an 'execution'. Mrs Dewani, 28, died from single shot that went through her neck and severed her spine. She also had bruises on her leg suggesting a struggle.

Visitors to Hyde Park in London say the seagull grabs pigeons by the neck before pulling them into the water and drowning them before the male bird and its female mate tuck into the prey. It is thought that the same distinctive-looking bird has been hunting pigeons for the past five years. Bird experts have said that the behavior is extremely unusual for lesser black-backed gulls - which usually survive on a diet of small fish, aquatic insects and crustaceans.

The Prime Minister happily posed for photographers with his daughter Florence at the Banbury Folk Festival on Saturday afternoon. The picture is likely to prove controversial, with the tradition of having blacked-up faces branded racist in the past.

Khoo Kay Peng (top left), 75, said he was 'shocked' by his wife Pauline Chai's claim - which she offered in court earlier this month as proof that she considers the UK her permanent home. The Malaysian couple are fighting in the Family Division of London's High Court over whether a final separation trial should be held in England or Malaysia. And to convince a judge to make the jurisdiction ruling in her favour - she claimed that keeping more than 1,000 pairs of shoes in her sprawling Hertfordshire estate meant the country mansion was her permanent home. Her billionaire husband today asked the judge: 'How are you going to wear 1,000 pair of shoes?' He added: 'I really don't know how many pairs of shoes she has. A wild guess... 20, 30, 40.' (Pictured, Ms Chai as Miss Malaysia in 1969, right, in her Hertfordshire home, middle, and sporting navy courts with a silver heel at court this month, bottom left))

Maggie De Block - who is Belgium's most popular politician and was once tipped as a future premier - surprised many when it was announced she would take up the role of Health Minister. The 52-year-old, who weighs in at more than 20 stone, was not considered to be exactly setting a good example in a country where obesity is a growing health problem.

A man was arrested at the scene in Stoke-on-Trent (pictured), where the victims are understood to have been stabbed. Police were called to an address in the Stanfields area of the city at 6.35pm last night. Neighbours have identified the woman as 28-year-old Marta Galikowska (left) and her two children, believed to be aged three and 18-months-old. Twitter was flooded with tributes and shock at the news. Local woman Beth Clews tweeted: 'RIP to the women and two children who have died in Stanfields. Such a shame.'

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault (left), on an island off Norway's northern coast, will be vital to ensuring food security in the face of climate change, warns the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which manages the vault (interior view top right). A series of deliveries of seeds to Svalbard this month will help in that fight. Four shipments from major genebanks based in Bulgaria, Colombia, India and Taiwan are delivering varieties from more than 100 countries. The shipments include types of wheat (bottom right), barley, corn, sorghum, peal millet, chickpea, groundnut, Asian and African aubergine.

Horrific details of the last moments of Flight 447, which claimed the lives of five Britons and three Irish doctors, have emerged in a disturbing new investigation into the 2009 disaster involving an Airbus 330. Published in the October edition of Vanity Fair magazine, it raises terrifying questions about safety aboard civilian passenger jets, and the 'culture' of the Air France pilots on board. Excerpts from recorded conversations reveal that plane captain Marc Dubois (bottom left), 58, had gone for a nap leaving ‘anxious junior pilot’ Pierre-Cedric Bonin (bottom right), 32, at the controls. So when the plane stalled over the Atlantic, the pilot did not dip the craft’s nose as he should have done but raised it, prolonging the stall and sending it plummeting into the ocean killing all 228 people on board. Moments before impact one of the pilots can be heard on the flight recorder shouting: ‘F***, we’re dead!’

It is a rarely performed ritual and then only in the Bali Aga village of Trunyan. The village people believe that they are the original Balinese as they were there before Majapahit migration from Java began in 1340. Only youths are allowed to participate in the dance and they have to be chosen, then purified and spend 42 days in quarantine. Passers-by try to steal the leaves and the dancers are equipped to beat them off with a whip (below right).

European Space Agency bosses have revealed this amazing image of the so-called 'butterfly nebula' taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The image shows planetary nebula NGC 6302, a complex nebula which lies roughly 3800 light-years away from us within the Milky Way. 

Delicate gold earrings, beads and ornaments have been discovered alongside pottery at the third century BC Thracian Tomb of Sveshtari in Bulgaria. The antiquity of Thrace dates back to ancient Greek legends and the first historical record of the group is found in the Iliad where they are described as allies of the Trojans in the Trojan War. According to archaeologist Diana Gergova the relics date back to around the end of the fourth or beginning of the third century BC. 

The photograph, which has been shared online, appears to show a crustacean of mythical proportions lurking in shallow water off the Kent seaside town. It shows the outline of a crab in the mouth of the harbour - dwarfing the fishing boats seen resting on the nearby pier. While some insist it is proof of 'Crabzilla', others argue that the shadowy figure is nothing more than an unusually-shaped sandbank - or is simply a playful hoax.