Plans to restore Rome's crumbling Colosseum have hit another snag, after Italy's anti-trust watchdog declared that a €25m lifeline thrown by a luxury goods company breaks competition laws.

Italy's culture ministry said that it is investigating reports that bits of rock have fallen from the Colosseum.

Ricky Gervais says "losers" are the real "interesting" characters in life.

Down and out in Glasgow and London

A surf documentary in which the word "breaks" carries a fateful double meaning. Director Justin Mitchell celebrates the teenage wave-riders of Rio, but his real focus is the precarious fortunes of 13-year-old Fabio and his 12-year-old mate Naama, from the dangerous Favela do Pavao, a high-rise slum overlooking Arpoador Beach.

Struggling JJB Sports is to tap investors for £65m in an attempt to stabilise its precarious financial position.

Shirley Jackson's brilliant kind of American Gothic is offered up for our consumption in this, her final novel, first published in 1962. She liked to mix the gothic and the domestic and much of her writing centred on houses; a reflection, perhaps, of how the domestic sphere impinged on women's lives after the Second World War.

England 20 New Zealand 12

House Doctor

Marcel Theroux conveys in this novel a sense of how precarious and precious our technologically maintained liberal democracies are. Makepeace is the last inhabitant of a failed settlement in northern Siberia, established before war brought the civilised world crashing down. In conversation with a fellow inmate at a slave camp, she remarks that it only takes three days for hunger and desperation to overcome all civilised instinct in a person. Her friend smiles and replies that she has a bleak view of human nature – in his experience, it's closer to four days.

A late surge, sparked by two tries from their young winger, Lee Smith, saw Leeds launch the defence of their Super League title with a precarious victory.

Finishing straight proves as testing as anything that has gone before on a trip which has stretched the soul

The more detailed the study of the Butler report, the more worrying its revelations about the quality and assessment of the intelligence in the run-up to war. And, it has to be said, the more precarious the position of John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee at the time and the new head of MI6 from this autumn.

I'VE ALWAYS wanted to try my hand at those quizzes in women's magazines designed to identify character types (Are you a jealous sort? Does green suit you?), and a little moment of paranoia in my private life led me to think one up the other day. If your lover hasn't called when she promised she would, what goes through your mind? Do you imagine a) that she must have been held up by an innocuous event, b) that she has been run over, or c) that she has abruptly realised you're horrible and has gone off with someone else?