"Report back to me when it makes sense," the CIA boss tells an underling midway through the Coen brothers' deliriously confusing comedy thriller, which opened the Venice Festival last night. Infidelity, divorce, murder, online dating, personal fitness, spying and cosmetic surgery are the ingredients in a plot which pulls in many directions at once.

They are famed for their shapely hips, tidy ponytails and colourful sun visors, but the growing number of foreign golfers on America's women's tour will soon have to prove they possess brains as well as beauty – by learning to speak English.

This year's Venice Film Festival got off to a cliché-ridden start: the sun beat down, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, Italy's favourite Americans, flashed their dazzling Hollywood smiles and signed autographs for adoring fans, the water taxis threatened to go on strike and the new festival complex was only half-built (it will be ready by 2011).

Zimbabwe's opposition leaders accused President Robert Mugabe yesterday of abandoning talks aimed at forming a unity government, saying he would fail if he tried to rule alone.

Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, could be the next flashpoint in the new Cold War. And any violent disturbance in Crimea could provide the political seismic shock to split Ukraine itself along its existing fault lines of ethnicity, language and religion.

For more than a decade, Marcus Wareing was Gordon Ramsay's publicity-shy "shadow", toiling over the stove for up to 18 hours a day to meet the exacting kitchen standards set by his motormouth boss.

There's something Oedipal, even Shakespearean, about Marcus Wareing's eclipsing of his former mentor and boss, Gordon Ramsay, in the hierarchy of top London restaurants. It's part of a syndrome in which a former protégé rises to match, then overtake, his beloved master. It happened with Gordon Ramsay who, after enduring years of training, abuse and belittling by Marco Pierre White, left him to go it alone, and comprehensively outclassed him in stars and media recognition.

The delicate hair cells of the inner ear that are crucial to hearing have been grown successfully in mice for the first time by scientists who believe that the technique may one day be used to restore hearing in profoundly deaf people.

Britain has made a claim to extend its territorial boundary around Ascension Island in the South Atlantic to give it exclusive rights over any natural resources that may be found in the sea or on the seabed up to 350 miles from the island.

One of Britain's biggest exam boards, Edexcel, has been called in to help re-mark this year's national curriculum tests after record requests from schools. Teachers have asked for more than 40,000 reviews of pupils' scripts from the tests for 11- and 14-year-olds.