Riots spread to the centre of a French city for the first time on Saturday night as police clashed with youths in Lyon. Meanwhile, Paris was under siege on Saturday as thousands of police guarded key tourist sites such as the Eiffel Tower and enforced emergency laws, including a ban on groups of people gathering.

The newly elected leader of Israel’s Labour party, Amir Peretz, is so attached to his trademark walrus moustache that he refuses to shave it off … unless the facial hair issue is put to a referendum. "This trademark doesn’t just belong to me any more. It is no longer my personal property. It is public property," he said.

In a rather flaky piece on Noam Chomsky, headlined "Chomsky: As flaky as the next man", reprinted from the London <i>Guardian</i> in these pages last week, someone called Emma Brockes clearly sets out to take issue with the great Guru of the Left’s anointment as the w orld’s greatest public intellectual by an interesting British journal called <i>Prospect</i>.

There has been vigorous debate since democratisation about the best economic way forward. An idea expressed by people in business and the government is that labour-intensive production in South Africa cannot compete with developing economies in the East.