Given the improbable comebacks achieved in the quarter-finals of this season's Champions' League Chelsea clearly have reason to believe they can overturn the 3-1 advantage Monaco gained in Tuesday's semi-final first-leg. It will, though, take an improvement of immeasurably greater discipline than the one they produced in Monte Carlo.

THE MYSTERIOUS death of the billionaire banker Edmond Safra was not a contract killing, investigators said yesterday. They believe the apparent attack and fire that cost his life was an "inside job".

THE reputation of the tiny state of Monaco as the most secure square mile on Earth lies in ruins this weekend.

As Anna Melville-James discovers, you don't have to be a millionaire to enjoy yourself in Monaco - but it would help

Location

THIS CRITIC would queue to see Amanda Harris perform the shipping forecast. Indeed, there were moments during Take the Fire when I began to think it would have been preferable. The evening consists of four monologues by Jean Cocteau, in whose works the charlatan and the genius tantalisingly weave and dart. Unfortunately, when he composed these, the genius seems to have been en vacances.

A CROOKED lawyer went on a spectacularly unlucky gambling spree with tens of thousands of pounds stolen from a client, a court was told yesterday.

The week in radio

Main claim

FRANCE SHOULD consider turning off all the lights in the Principality of Monaco if the tiny country refuses to put its legal and financial house in order. This drastic threat to cut off the electricity - first used, with great success, by General de Gaulle 35 years ago - was re-activated yesterday by the august and influential newspaper Le Monde.

AS A Royal Ballet School student, Lynn Seymour wrote to her mother in 1954, "Beriosova is only 22 and began dancing at the Garden three years ago. She is very aristocratic-looking and I can hardly wait to see her dance." When she did, she found her breathtaking and radiant.

Monaco's charm is declining. Once the haunt of the old rich, even Russian mafiosi are now deserting it.

IRINA KAZAKHOV is sitting in her luxury flat in Kensington, west London, watching the news on Russian state television, picked up by her specially tailored satellite dish. "It's terribly sad what's happening," she says. "But," she adds, more cheerfully, "I think this means there'll be some more of my friends moving over to London."