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This Monday 'Dave and Nick', as the PM and his deputy are to be known, gave a press conference backing their ambitions for the next five years. This government would be “a radical, reforming government where it needs to be and a source of reassurance and stability at a time of great uncertainty,” said Nick Clegg. He may not have known it, but he was delivering a Spartan manifesto.

Most equate Spartans, not altogether wrongly, with the impossibly chiselled warriors from graphic shock-fest 300. Yet Sparta's awesome army was propped up by a rigid governmental system, at the front of which stood not one but two kings. The kings presided over a privy council of 28 elders, five of which, the ephors, decided policy and made sure each king had the state's best interest at heart.

It worked perfectly. While enemies quarrelled over affairs Sparta's two kings could do it all at once. Neither king could outweigh his opposite's veto, so decisions were swift and final. It meant both could wage war separately, or govern back home. This autocratic stability was at odds with the Athenians in particular, whom Sparta would defeat in 404BC, who obsessed over rhetoric and debate.

Did having two kings create tension? You bet. “Two royal houses – twice the potential for the rows that all monarchies are prone to,” points out historian Bettany Hughes in her recent Ancient Worlds series. “The Spartans explained this arrangement by claiming that their kings were direct descendants of the great-great grandsons of Herakles, the strongman of Greek myth.”

Nick and Dave's ancestry are well-documented: Clegg the grandson of Russian nobility; Cameron the blue-blooded offspring of a Baronet's daughter. Neither can claim to be the son of a god, yet. And they can tick rowing off the list having called each other 'arrogant' and 'a joke', among other pleasantries, during the election campaign.

Eventually Sparta's dual kingship would prevent it spreading its wings - “Some historians call this stability 'political stagnation',” says History Walker Herald - and by the end of Sparta's renaissance its two kings were little more than ceremonial generals pandering to radical councillors. With Britain facing economic turmoil and a pair of unpopular wars, Nick and Dave's partnership might not last beyond the next election. But if their coalition is questioned in future, maybe a line from Gerard Butler's Leonidas would be apt: “Madness? This is Sparta!”

drive from www.independent.co.uk

With a diplomatic push from US President Barack Obama, Israeli and Palestinian leaders start direct peace talks today overshadowed by scepticism on all sides and violence in the volatile West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet at the State Department, relaunching talks after a 20-month hiatus and seeking a deal within one year that will set up an independent Palestinian state side-by-side with a secure Israel.

Obama, who has staked considerable political capital on the Washington talks during a pivotal US congressional election year, urged both sides to grasp the chance for peace after separate meetings at the White House yesterday.

"This moment of opportunity may not soon come again. They cannot afford to let it slip away," Obama said after a day of personal diplomacy on a problem that has confounded generations of US leaders.

But opponents of a settlement and the concessions that would be required to reach it threatened to sabotage the talks.

In Gaza, Hamas said its militants would keep on attacking Israelis in West Bank settlements, where Palestinian police have rounded up more than 500 Hamas suspects after a member of the Islamist group shot dead four Jewish settlers on Tuesday.

"Mahmoud Abbas does not have the right to speak for the Palestinians," said a Hamas spokesman.

Jewish settlers announced plans to launch new construction immediately in their West Bank enclaves, defying the Israeli government's moratorium which has three more weeks to run.

A settlers spokeswoman said the freeze was over and building would resume in 80 settlements without further delay. A spokesman for the Palestinians said Israel must stop any activity aimed at "sabotaging the peace efforts".

The issue of settlements looms large over the peace talks. Abbas has warned he will walk out unless Israel extends its self-imposed moratorium before it expires on 26 September.

Today will see both sides get down to business after the pomp of their White House reception. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will host the State Department talks.

US Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell, who has been shuttling between the two camps for months to lay down the parameters for the negotiations, will give a public briefing after talks conclude to explain what - if anything - has been accomplished.

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Social networking websites such as Facebook can pose a serious risk to adopted children who can be easily tracked down by birth relatives they may not be ready to meet, a charity has warned.

While there are no precise figures on the number of children who have been contacted in this way, David Holmes, chief executive of the British Association for Adoption & Fostering (BAAF), says the phenomenon is a growing concern.

"It's not just Facebook, it's the whole phenomenon of social networking and social media. There is a very positive side to it, because it's a way of keeping in contact with lots of people very easily... But equally, by having lots of friends and posting identifying information online, that information could be misused in the wrong hands," he told The Independent.

"For children who – for whatever reason – may need to keep some privacy and to be quite careful about online safety, this is a real issue."

Under the Adoption and Children Act 2002, a birth relative would normally have to wait until the adopted child turns 18 to initiate contact. This would usually be done via a third party – such as the adoption agency or a local authority – with procedures in place designed to protect the confidentiality of both sides.

As some children do not know why they were placed in care, BAAF says, they may not understand the risky situation they may be putting themselves by disclosing personal details online or exchanging messages with a birth parent.

In cases where a child is not necessarily in physical danger, the charity's primary concern is theemotional impact of such a sudden and unexpected reunion.

"The problem is that this form of contact is potentially so fast and so immediate that all of the careful planning that would normally go into contact arrangements goes straight out the window," Mr Holmes said.

"If you were going to make contact with a birth relative, you might do it through an exchange of letters, or even through an exchange of photographs. Through this [social networking] route you can cut through this completely and find that within 10 minutes or an hour you're having an online conversation."

BAAF's advice for adoptive and foster parents includes: refraining from "tagging" their children in photos on Facebook; helping them adjust their privacy settings so that their profile cannot be seen publicly; ensuring they do not share their date of birth, address or school details; and making sure they know how to block other users if they are contacted and the contact is unwelcome.

According to Holmes, it is not just children who can become distressed due to unwanted contact from their birth relatives; adults approached by a child they gave up for adoption can find the situation equally upsetting. "There are lots of difficult issues wrapped up with adoption; there are lots of personal and emotional issues, and suddenly this form of networking can cut through all of those," he said. "It's an issue for birth families too."

There are dozens of Facebook groups dedicated to reuniting families separated by adoption. Most users post details of their or their child's birth in the hope that someone may recognise them. A few have written comments about successful reunions. "My first daughter found my second daughter on one of these sites, and now she has found me too," wrote one user from Northampton.

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Wigan have signed Manchester United midfielder Tom Cleverley on a season-long loan.

The England Under-21 international has previously had loan spells at Leicester and Watford in the last two seasons and has now gone to the DW Stadium to continue gaining experience.

"Tom is a very exciting young player and we are delighted he is coming to us," said Wigan manager Roberto Martinez.

"He can play in a number of positions and will provide us with some good new options, and add great competition to the squad.

"We have been watching him for some time and feel he is the right sort of player to join our squad; young, hungry, desperate to play for the club in the Premier League and to grow with us."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Vladimir Putin emerged from a yellow Lada sports car in the Siberian city of Chita yesterday, after driving more than 1,200 miles to complete a road trip across Russia's Far Eastern regions.

Fitting in to what appears to be a growing PR campaign to boost his image ahead of a potential return to the Kremlin in 2012, the powerful Russian Prime Minister set off on the journey late last week, sporting a pair of dark glasses and a cream polo shirt.

Mr Putin had a small fridge of drinks in the boot and a Beatles CD to keep him company – as well as an entourage of dozens of journalists, broadcasting the trip to Russians across the country.

In one interview, given while at the wheel of the Lada to the Kommersant newspaper, Mr Putin admitted he was indeed contemplating a return to the Russian presidency in 2012. He also said that pro-democracy protesters deserved to be "beaten around the head with truncheons".

The Russian Prime Minister was testing out a highway that has been in construction for decades and is the last link in a paved road that connects Moscow and Vladivostok, several thousand miles and seven time zones apart. He was also playing up to his "man of the people" image, in a month that has seen a remarkable flurry of televised stunts, even by his standards.

During the fires that ravaged European Russia earlier this month, he was pictured co-piloting a plane that dropped water on a burning forest ("Did I hit it?" he was recorded asking the pilot. "Yes, a direct hit!" was the response). Then last week he added to his animal-related escapades, which have already featured tigers, polar bears and leopards, when he boarded a dinghy off the Kamchatka Peninsula and fired darts from a crossbow to collect skin samples from a grey whale.

Mr Putin described the car journey as "the first break I've had for a decade or so", but even if he really did enjoy speeding through the Siberian landscapes, there was no doubt that the trip was as carefully choreographed as his other exploits. The television cameras were never far away, and any exchanges he had with ordinary Siberians along the way were filmed and made into packages for the evening news bulletins on Russian television.

During the trip, he gave one of his most open interviews in recent years to Andrei Kolesnikov, a journalist with Kommersant who has covered Mr Putin during his entire tenure as President and Prime Minister, and is allowed far more free rein for criticism and sarcasm in Mr Putin's direction than most other Russian reporters.

"You understand that you have made mistakes, you just don't want to admit it," remarked Mr Kolesnikov to Mr Putin at one stage in the interview, after the Prime Minister had said that during his whole decade in power he could not think of a single mistake he had made. "Maybe we could have done some things more carefully, effectively, wisely..." said Mr Putin, but reiterated that no serious mistakes had been made.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

One of the most interesting nuggets in the "critique" of our current health policy chaos by Royal College of General Practitioners president, Professor Steve Field, was his praise for Food Dudes. This is a scheme that shows you can get young children to eat and enjoy fruit and veg – if you use similar marketing techniques to those that major brands use to peddle junk food.

Several years ago, I showed a video of this scheme to an audience of food advertising industry marketeers and they paled. Until then the industry had almost a monopoly of the use of ethics-free food psychologists' tricks to lure children into making the "wrong choices". It doesn't take much to convince an impressionable child that they "need" sweets, or sugary cereals, or fizzy drinks. But as the World Health Organisation (WHO) recently recognised in adopting a global health ministers' resolution on marketing to children, the food and beverage industries have cynically preyed upon children's vulnerability for generations.

What began as an experiment by psychologist Professor Fergus Lowe at Bangor University won the WHO best-practice award in 2006 – a success story begging to be put into action as we agonise over childhood obesity.

Strangely, it is only in Ireland that children have benefited from an extensive roll out of the Food Dudes programme. Even though Food Dudes received a gold medal in public health awards made by the then Department of Health chief medical officer, Liam Donaldson, this was only for the scheme adopted by Wolverhampton City primary care trust, which aims to see 20,000 children in 91 schools take part in the programme over three years.

Across the whole of England, only 2,500 children in 11 schools benefit from what are still termed pilot schemes. Yet California and Sicily have taken up the Food Dudes scheme, which won the accolade "exemplar case study for health behaviour change" by the National Social Marketing Centre in London.

Ironic then that Professor Field should be tempted to wag, if not point, his finger at blameworthy parents, when Food Dudes, with its well-recognised potential contribution to support our "Change4Life" has had such half-hearted support from government and little support from the food industry (with the honourable exception of Unilever and the fruit growers themselves). Much of his critique is well made, but probably goes right over the heads of the parents, politicians and even the Department of Health bureaucrats who have now been forced to hand control of the nation's dietary health campaign to the makers of crisps, pop and chocolate.

Parents do need to take responsibility, but this should start even before conception, says Professor Field, who notes that obesity in pregnancy is a worrying trend. For many years world leaders in research at Southampton University have proclaimed the critical role of pregnancy in conditioning an infant's life-long predisposition to obesity and its metabolic consequences, particularly cardiovascular disease. They even coined the term "foetal programming", which should be on the national curriculum to be drilled into every pubertal school child – most of whom sadly are already programmed. Can they help to "de-programme" the next generation?

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

I think it was on the fourth day of our holiday that I realised it was time to stop looking at the internet. I had turned around in my seat in front of the computer to ask my boyfriend if he'd heard of a BBC weather forecaster named Tomasz Shafernaker. "Because apparently he was caught on camera flipping the bird to a newsreader! Look, there's a video of it!" The mouse cursor hovered over the 'play' button on the YouTube clip. Just as I moved to play the video, I thought of the two novels sitting by my bed, waiting to be read. I looked at the skies outside, beginning to brighten after two days of rain. I had a choice: I could watch this utterly pointless clip, or I could pull the plug on this machine and go outside. It's a decision that seems to get harder every summer.

If the addictive quality of the internet means that it can interrupt holidays, it stymies any serious effort to work, think or create. Even the greatest minds confess that they often find themselves struggling in the invisible snare of the world-wide web. In an interview with Time magazine this week, Jonathan Franzen described the extreme lengths he went to in order to cut himself off from virtual distraction while writing the follow-up to his 2001 bestseller, The Corrections.

He wrote every day in a hired office, a bare room containing just a table, chair and a basic laptop. But a room is never truly one's own if it's Wi-Fi-enabled. Franzen not only removed the wireless card from his Dell laptop but, just to be sure, permanently blocked its Ethernet port.

"What you have to do," he explained, "is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw the little head off it."

Not all of us need to forcibly disable our internet connections with glue and a hacksaw, partly because the world and his agent isn't waiting for us to produce a 1,000-page Great American Novel. And I don't compare my desire to relax in the sunshine and enjoy a holiday with a writer's desperate need for long-term solitude (Franzen's new book took nine years to complete, despite his precautions.) But lots of us will recognise the frustration his actions reveal.

The internet is a fascinating and liberating medium. You'd have to be a loon, or the now-disgraced Tomasz Shafernaker, to argue otherwise. But it does need to be switched off on occasion, perhaps more often than that, and we don't all have the self-discipline to do the disconnecting ourselves. I sometimes long for those childhood moments when, as I sat in front of the TV, a parent had entered the room, strode over to the box and pressed the 'off' button with a stern "That's enough."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

MEPs caused outrage yesterday by rejecting a colour-coded system of food labelling which health campaigners said would inform consumers about levels of fat and sugar and halt rocketing levels of obesity.

Instead of the traffic light labelling system devised by the UK Food Standards Agency, the MEPs backed the Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) system favoured by food manufacturers. The GDA scheme, which has the support of Pepsico, Danone, Kraft and other multinational food corporations, is expected to be introduced across Europe by 2013, unless blocked by member states in the EU's Council of Ministers.

As reported in The Independent on Tuesday, food manufacturers had mounted one of the biggest lobbying campaigns ever seen in Europe ahead of the vote.

Yesterday one Conservative MEP, Struan Stevenson, described how hundreds of people from the industry had been trying to meet him. He said he had held five meetings with the Italian chocolate company Ferrero Rocher alone.

He told the BBC: "The lobbyists have now penetrated the inner sanctum of the MEPs and they're walking into our offices very often without any appointments at all. People are objecting to that and saying we should have more control about where lobbyists are allowed to go. But on this issue there are armies of them. I've never seen anything like it."

MEPs voted on a series of food labelling measures. They backed the European Commission's proposal for mandatory front-of-pack labelling of quantities of fat, saturates, sugar and salt – and calories – expressed per 100g. They also voted for details of protein, fibres and transfats to be included elsewhere on the packaging.

Compulsory country of origin labelling will be extended to all meat, poultry, dairy products and other single-ingredient products, rather than just on certain foods such as beef, honey and olive oil, as is the case currently.

The traffic light vote pitched the socialist and green groups, including the Labour Party, which backed the system, against centre-right and right-wing groupings including the Conservatives, who backed GDAs.

Renate Sommer, a German MEP in the centre-right EPP group who drafted the Parliament's report, said: "Personally, I am pleased that MEPs did not support traffic light labelling, but I also feel that we can continue to improve the current proposal to better inform consumers."

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Craig Levein will rely on experience as he tries to guide Scotland through their Euro 2012 qualifying campaign after recalling 40-year-old David Weir and Paul Hartley, 33, to his squad. The pair have been brought back for the double header against Lithuania and Liechtenstein next month with Levein, the manager, wanting the veterans around as Scotland begin "playing for real".

Weir, the Rangers captain, last played for his country against the Netherlands at Hampden Park almost a year ago and was left out of the manager's first two squads for the friendlies against the Czech Republic and Sweden.

However, in the wake of a 3-0 drubbing in Stockholm a fortnight ago, the former Hearts and Everton defender has been recalled and will win his 66th cap in the crucial opener against Lithuania in Kaunas on 3 September.

Levein has no qualms about turning to a player whose international career most people thought was over. "The thing about Davie is he is still playing at the highest level week in, week out," he said.

"The fact he is still turning in top-class performances means it was a pretty easy decision to make for me. I had a good chat with him and told him I was not just bringing him along for the ride. I had a look at a few people in the last couple of games but we are playing for real now."

Weir's inclusion came at the expense of Garry Kenneth after the 23-year-old took a lot of the blame for the defeat in Stockholm. However, Levein reassured the Dundee United defender he would not be discounted in future.

"My job is to pick the best players for each position and if you look around, Davie is probably as good as anyone," said the manager. "Garry will have his day. If he keeps improving he will come back in.

"It is dog-eat-dog and all I can do is give people an opportunity. It is then up to them to take it."

Hartley, the new Aberdeen captain, also returns after earning his last cap in March when he was in the final year of his Bristol City contract.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Most schools would expect to deal with a handful of troublesome parents at this time of year, when the exam results season understandably causes emotions to run high. But not all of them have to cope with the ire of a former England football captain.

Gary Lineker was embroiled in a very public row with his son George's private school last night after the 18-year-old failed to get into university. The Match of the Day presenter and former England striker had chosen to send his son to the exclusive £25,000-a-year Charterhouse School in Surrey, which recently ditched A-levels in some subjects to allow pupils to do the new "Cambridge Pre-U" exam.

The qualification is said to be tougher by education traditionalists, as it eschews coursework in favour of an emphasis on the end of year exam.

Lineker said: "We don't know what's going on at the moment. [George] did the Pre-U and they seem to have been marked much harder than the A-level papers. It's all a bit frustrating as it is the first year the Pre-U exams have been used so George has been used as a guinea pig. At the moment his university place has been withdrawn but we are hoping to find a way round this. We are all very disappointed."

George was more explicit about his alma mater on his Facebook page, saying: "Didn't get into uni... cheers school u massive knobbers!" He is now one of around 160,000 youngsters expected to miss out an a university place.

However, Charterhouse remained unrepentant about its decision to opt for the Pre-U. The Reverend John Witheridge, the school's headmaster, said: "We are delighted with our pupils' excellent results this year.... we do not comment on the performance of individual pupils."

Students who take Pre-U exams cannot resit them. Cambridge International Examinations, which sets the test, says it provides more time for "great teaching and deep thought" because all of the exams take place at the end of a two-year course.

drive from www.independent.co.uk