Forget all your preconceptions about actors' memoirs: this is one of the richest and subtlest family histories of recent times.

The Caster Semenya saga took another peculiar twist yesterday when a press conference that was expected to announce she had been cleared to compete again was cancelled under firm instruction from the IAAF, the sport's world governing body.

The last of 10 Americans detained while trying to take 33 children out of Haiti after the January earthquake has been freed after a judge convicted her but sentenced her to time already served in jail.

The Tories are trying a new tack today in the controversy over Lord Ashcroft's peerage and "non-domicile" tax status.

Outlook As for the political interventions in the Cadbury/Kraft saga, at best they look naive and at worst positively dishonest. When Lord Mandelson piped up last month, insisting he wouldn't allow foreign companies to move into Britain looking for "a fast buck", he knew full well his comments would be seized upon by those hoping to keep Cadbury British. He also must have known there was nothing he could do to prevent Kraft buying Cadbury – his comments were made with marginal seats in mind.

Great songs, beautiful girls, lovely costumes and an artist in constant flux are emphasised in Joann Sfar's imaginative, beautiful looking and at times bizarre musing on the life of Serge Gainsbourg.

The government has announced a new consultation into credit cards, proposing a raft of measures designed to "clean up the industry" and bring an end to practices it deems unfair.

The mother of the six-year-old boy once feared missing inside a runaway helium balloon has admitted the whole saga was a hoax. Mayumi Heene told sheriff's deputies that she and her husband Richard "knew all along that Falcon was hiding in the residence" in Fort Collins, and that the incident was meant to make the family more marketable to the media.

"One could not hide from this crisis, not even on a chunk of volcanic rock in the north Atlantic". Especially not there: Boyes's utterly gripping account of how Iceland swiftly became the "microcosm" of a planetary market panic yields as crisp and bleak a saga of the downside of globalisation as you will ever read.