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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."

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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.

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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.

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Bill Millin was the "Mad Piper" who played allied commandos ashore under heavy German fire at Sword Beach in Normandy on D-Day, on the extreme eastern flank of Operation Overlord.

He was the only piper to lead allied troops into battle that day following a War Office ban which said pipers would attract sniper fire. But his commander, Brigadier Lord Lovat – Simon Fraser, hereditary chief of the Clan Fraser – was a law unto himself. "Ah, but that's the English War Office, Millin," Lovat told him. "You and I are both Scottish so that doesn't apply."

Millin recalled: "Lord Lovat said this was going to be the greatest invasion in the history of warfare and he wanted the bagpipes leading it." On the landing craft sailing out of the mouth of the River Hamble in southern England, "he said I was to play and he would worry about the consequences later."

The "Mad Piper" label came from both Millin's own comrades and the German defenders of Sword Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer, who said after capture that the only reason they didn't shoot him is that they thought "he must have gone off his head."

Although one man was shot dead alongside him on his landing craft, and he saw many of his comrades floating face down in the surf, he said the sound of his pipes drowned some of the gun and mortar fire. "I didn't really notice I was being shot at myself," he said. "The water was freezing. The next thing I remember is my kilt floating in the water, like a ballerina." He launched into one of Lovat's favourites, "Hielan' Laddie", as he waded ashore. Lovat, firing his old non-service issue Winchester rifle and brandishing a walking stick, gave him a thumbs-up.

On the beach, in the heart of the battle, Lovat asked him, "Would you mind giving us another tune, Millin? How about 'The Road to the Isles'?" Millin half-jokingly replied: "Now, would you also want me to walk up and down, Sir?"

"Aye, Millin, that would be nice. Aye, walk up and down."

The piper recalled the tremor of mortars in the sand as he walked up and down Sword Beach three times amid thick smoke and dead and wounded comrades yelling for medics. "When they heard the pipes, some of the lads started cheering but one wasn't very pleased and he called me 'the mad bastard'. Well, we usually referred to Lovat as the mad bastard but this was the first time I had heard it referred to me."

drive form www.independent.co.uk

Researching images for this week’s fiction story, “The Erlking,” by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, I imagined the fantasy world a young girl inhabits. Tim Walker’s image “The Dress Lamp Tree, England” (2002) opens the story. The ethereal quality of the dresses, the luminous lighting, and the surreality of dresses hanging in a tree seem to embody this magical world. I was happy to hear from Walker that this is one of his favorite photographs. His 2008 monograph, “Pictures,” gives insight into the inspiration and intense process behind the creation of these spectacular photographs. Below is a selection of other favorites that have a strong fantasy element, along with quotes from the book.

Walker’s inspiration for this image, which was originally photographed for L’Uomo Vogue, came from seeing ball dresses hanging from the ceiling in a vintage shop in Bath. “In the winter the lights would glow through them,” he writes. To capture this image required “a still night at Eglingham, and it was perfectly calm. If they had moved they would have been ghosts on the film.”

drive from www.newyorker.com

He has become the outspoken voice of the Liberal Democrat left – yesterday calling for the party's MPs to be given the power of veto over contentious Coalition policy proposals.

Last weekend, Simon Hughes, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, firmly rejected suggestions that Tory and Lib Dem candidates should step aside in each other's safest seats at the election. He has also made clear his disquiet over moves to raise VAT and encourage the opening of "free schools".

But far from being a thorn in the side of the Liberal Democrat high command, senior colleagues said yesterday they were not dismayed by his candid style, or by his enthusiasm for appearing in front of television cameras.

In fact, the left-winger is deliberately acting as a useful lightning conductor for discomfort among members about the difficult decisions the Coalition is taking – and may not be as far away from the leadership as some suggest.

His presence helps to remind the public, and reassure activists, that the Liberal Democrats – the Coalition's junior partners – are maintaining their separate identity in office. That is a crucial task for the party in the face of plunging opinion poll ratings.

"His job is to give us a distinctive voice and he is doing that very successfully," a senior Liberal Democrat figure said. "We would be concerned if he was harming the Government, but that isn't happening."

Mr Hughes's pronouncements also help Mr Clegg remind Mr Cameron that there is a limit to how far the Liberal Democrats can be pushed. However, Mr Clegg's allies dismiss "conspiracy theories" that his deputy's interventions are planned in advance and sanctioned to demonstrate the distance between the two governing parties. They argue that Mr Hughes is such an "unspun" character that schemes of that kind would be impossible to achieve.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Hamir Soomro points to vast stretches of water: "That's where my land used to be," he says. For as far as the eye travels, there is little sight of the soil his family has cultivated for decades. Only the very tips of the rice stalks can be seen. In the distance, there are the remains of crumbling brick houses, abandoned when the waters crept in a fortnight ago.

"All that's left is a nice sunset," Mr Soomro says, staring across his family's 1,200 acres, which grew rice in the summer and wheat in the winter. The water shimmers brightly as a full orange sun dips in the distance.

Beyond the death and human misery that has struck Pakistan, the unprecedented floods now threaten to devastate its agricultural economy. Millions of acres have been submerged. Crops have been ruined. The people who worked on the land have flocked to relief camps in nearby towns. They will remain without work for months to come

Two days ago, the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, said that the floods may have destroyed crops worth around $1bn. About a quarter of Pakistan's economy is derived from agriculture, and nearly half of its workforce are employed by the agricultural sector. The damage is on top of the cost of 1,600 lives, two million people driven from their homes, and the lives of 20 million – fully 12 per cent of the entire population – disrupted across the country. Six million still need food, shelter and water, and yesterday the first dread case of cholera – a water-borne disease that can be devastating in the wake of floods – was confirmed.

"The rough estimate is that there is a billion dollars of lost crops," Mr Zoellick told a news conference in Sigulda, Latvia, during a visit. "All of us will have to pitch in to help." The damaged crops include rice, sugar cane and cotton, some of Pakistan's most prized exports. It will also affect wheat crops, scheduled to be grown in the winter. Most of the wheat seed stored by farmers has been destroyed.

Pakistani officials say that the cost may be higher. Javed Saleem, the former head of Pakistan's Crop Protection Association, has said that more than 17 million acres of agricultural land have been lost to the floods. Over 100,000 animals have been killed. On the road to Rahimabad, the carcasses of buffaloes lie on the side of the road, with wild dogs ravaging them under a cloud of flies. Mr Saleem estimates that the cost to the cotton-growing economy alone is $2bn.

drive fromwww.independent.co.uk