Whoever managed to persuade Ice Cube that he had any gift for light comedy deserves some kind of prize – and then a jail sentence.

When Margaret Mitchell wrote 'Gone With the Wind' to pass the time during an illness, she could never have foreseen its amazing popularity. As a musical of the novel hits the West End, Liz Thomson traces the life story of its reclusive author

On 25 June last year, professional wrestler Chris Benoit, his wife Nancy and seven-year-old son Daniel were found dead at their house in Atlanta. It was established that Benoit, regarded as a reserved, home-loving man, had strangled his family and then hanged himself. Four months later this book, consisting of five essays by various hands, was first published in the US.

Scan the crammed exhibition hall in downtown Atlanta where a beaming Hillary Clinton is on stage selling herself to more than 5,000 cheering Georgia activists and you will know at once that not everyone is ready to buy. Barack Obama's supporters are a little quieter – he is not in town tonight – but they are surely here.

Brilliant marine biologist who led the MBA Plymouth laboratory

Simon Redfern doesn't like lager or removing his shirt in public. So he tried a different kind of singles holiday

The obscure hamlet of Flowery Branch, 40 miles to the north-east of Atlanta along Interstate 985, is an unlikely venue for a sporting pilgrimage. There is little there, save for a petrol station, supermarket and, somewhere deep within this heavily forested corner of Georgia, the training camp of the Atlanta Falcons American football team.

Karen Kay talks to the American actor who has been so badly bitten by the craze that has swept Hollywood that he has it written into contracts that he must have time out from filming to play twice a week

When Hicham El Guerrouj fell just before the bell in the Olympic 1500 metres final in Atlanta and wept uncontrollably in the stadium tunnel, someone handed him a mobile phone. King Hassan II was on the line - "You are a champion in the eyes of the Moroccan people," the monarch told him.

A flashback to last year has kept Padraig Harrington's feet on the ground with Augusta a week away.

Your dollars are going further - and so can you. We show you how to leave the big city behind and discover the US heartland