There was, finally, some good news for President François Hollande today.

And you thought Vladimir Putin commuted to the Kremlin topless on the back of a lion. Nope, the President gets around the Russian capital like millions of other Muscovites: via its notoriously snarled-up streets. So bad is gridlock in Moscow that the President has now taken to working from his suburban home to save angering his subjects with his massive motorcade, for which everything must give way.

Former fugitive business tycoon Asil Nadir, convicted of stealing nearly £29 million, today claimed to be penniless.

It's called a Moonlight Flit: the crime of fleeing without paying. Usually it's done by financially strapped, but plausible-seeming, folk exiting through the window at 3am, hoping their landlady won't hear.

One minute we're rioting; now we're flag-waving. We're an odd lot

Raymond Scott, who died on 14 March, was a flamboyant antiques dealer who was jailed for handling a stolen first edition of Shakespeare's plays. Scott, who passed himself off as a wealthy playboy before his conviction, was pronounced dead after being found unconscious in his cell at Northumnberland Prison, where he was serving an eight-year sentence.

North Korea's next leader escorted his father's hearse in an elaborate state funeral on a bitter, snowy day today, bowing and saluting in front of tens of thousands of citizens who wailed and stamped their feet in grief for Kim Jong Il.

He lost one empire to Granada, but now hotel magnate Rocco is well on the way to building another

President Obama's movements during his whirlwind trip to Australia this week were choreographed in painstaking detail – as an Australian journalist who found a classified copy of his schedule in a Canberra gutter can testify.

The extent to which Rebekah Brooks has cut ties with News International was questioned yesterday as it emerged that she has kept her chauffeur-driven car paid for by the company.

For generations of British television viewers yesterday was a sad day. Four years after broaching the idea, the BBC announced that it had put Television Centre at White City in London on the market. Loved and hated, probably in equal measure, the complex is nonetheless a national landmark. Over half a century, it has received dignitaries and celebrities of all ages from all corners of the world. As Bush House has been to international radio, so the image of the limousine gliding up to Television Centre is to national television.

China's southern boomtown of Guangzhou has a new hero – "Rollerman", a mysterious bespectacled foreigner on rollerblades who has taken to challenging government vehicles seen violating traffic rules.

"Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves," W H Auden declared, in the nation's most oft-repeated funeral poem. Perhaps riot gear would be the more sensible sartorial selection, because road rage against funeral cortèges is apparently on the rise.