But is it all just a double bluff to make him seem less power-driven – and all the more electable?

Want to shift those pounds? Lose weight fast? Reader, you're in luck. It's clear that there are any number of companies keen to takes pounds off your bank balance and seriously lighten your wallet. Snake oil is obviously going to be huge this year, as is the waist size of anyone who really believes that the singlet/leggings/ cycling shorts they wear will make them trim.

Head of Costa Cruises opens door to lawsuits as skipper says he was encouraged to show off

On Saturday night, in a cinema in Dalston, the audience clapped. They may or may not have clapped after the event that took place next, which was a "happening", involving live, human beings, and which sounded to me as weird as the outfits of the trilby-headed hipsters I had to squeeze past. But what they clapped when I was there wasn't human, and it wasn't alive. What they clapped was a film that had just finished called The Artist.

Johann Hari is to leave The Independent, it was announced last night.

Influenza experts have agreed to a two-month voluntary ban on research into a highly dangerous strain of bird-flu virus because of fears that it may escape from their laboratories to cause a global human epidemic.

Three senior judges ruled today that some journalists can remain anonymous when giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into press standards.

The press in Britain is under-regulated but over-legislated, damaging genuine investigative journalism but allowing scandals like phone hacking to go undetected, the proprietor of The Independent told Parliament yesterday.

An Iranian actress who posed in the nude for a French magazine has been warned not to return home.

The UK's regional press has a "very good reputation" for behaving ethically and should not be tarnished by the phone hacking scandal, the Leveson Inquiry heard today.

Celebrity magazine editors gave a cautious welcome today to a proposal for an official register of famous people who want to remain private.

Paul Haggis, the Oscar-winning director who publicly resigned from the Church of Scientology in 2009, has claimed that private detectives are examining his rubbish bins to find information that might discredit him.

Defender makes transfer request with Tottenham, QPR and Paris St-Germain waiting in the wings

State regulation of the press would be "completely the wrong direction to go" but there must be a way to ensure all newspapers sign up to any body that replaces the current system, the Culture Secretary said today.