Chechens who have left the city in the last few days said that many of those left were too old or too poor to leave. The intensity of the Russian bombardment suggests that the commanders are threatening the heaviest use of artillery and air power against a European city since 1945. "You are surrounded," read a leaflet dropped by Russian aircraft "All roads to Grozny are blocked You have no chance of winning The United Troop Command gives you a last chance. RUSSIAN ARMY commanders issued a chilling ultimatum yesterday to the 100,000 civilians remaining in Grozny: to leave the encircled Chechen capital by Saturday or die. Britons tip 23 professions, slightly less than Mexicans and Brazilians. The Norwegians tip seven or eight trades, and only came bottom because of the disqualification of the Icelandics.Leading article, Review, page 3. This assurance should appeal to people who tend to be anxious and nervous more than to emotionally stable people,'' he says.The report shows that Americans will hand out to 32 trades, followed by the Egyptians (29), Greeks (28), Spanish (27) and the Portuguese (26).

While Norwegians will tip in little more than half a dozen trades and professions, the neurotic American will tip almost anyone in 32 different jobs.The research, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, says tipping is dictated by national characteristics: Put simply, the more neurotic or extrovert the population, the greater the tip.Anxious and neurotic people tip because they see it as a way of ensuring they will get served well and won't have any of the waiter's DNA in the soup."There are vast differences across countries in the number of service professionals it is customary to tip,'' says the report's author, Michael Lynn.He looked at tipping practices and national characteristics in 21 countries (before being forced to exclude Iceland) and found that: "The number of tipped professions increased with national levels of extraversion and neuroticism and decreased with national levels of psychoticism.''He suggests that one of the reasons extroverts may be more likely to tip is because it is way of showing off, or as he puts it, "a form of conspicuous consumption or status display.''Neurotics tip more because it makes them feel safer: "Tipping provided service workers with an incentive for delivering good service which increases consumer confidence that they will be treated in a friendly and professional way. They are simply introverted and non-neurotic, if the researchers are to be believed. They and their fellow Scandinavians are, it seems, among the world's most dismal tippers. Their neighbours the Finns are almost as bad, and the Icelandics performed so dismally - they didn't tip anyone - that researchers threw them out of the survey on the basis that no one could really be that mean and there must have been a technical error. But the apparent aversion of the Scandinavians to tipping is not because of any inherent meanness, no, no, no. "NEI, JEG insisterer, behold pengene'' (No, I insist, you keep the change), is not an expression that trips lightly from the tongue of the average Norwegian.

Yet they prove well capable of handling such sleazy classics as "China Girl" and the mechanical funk of "Stay", possibly one of the coldest, most coked-up tracks ever recorded. And although Hours may not be the new Hunky Dory, "Seven" is lovely enough to deserve the comparison. The set concludes with the killer combination of "Changes" and glamrock's greatest moment, "Rebel Rebel", the latter proving that it costs a lot of money to make a snare drum sound that cheap. The timely choice of "Repetition", a chilling account of domestic violence punctuated by eerie synth shrieks, provided the best of the encores, though "Cracked Actor" was not far behind. David Bowie might be years past his best work, but this enjoyable rifling through his less frequently performed songs was surprisingly good fun. A version of this review appeared in later editions of Saturday's paper. It's not great, but it's fun to hear where he sprang from. His backing musicians, including regular bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, and two extremes of American sartorial style in guitarists Mark Piati and the ascetic looking Page Hamilton, are a clean-cut bunch. He even performs his first single as David Bowie - 1966's "Can't Help Thinking About Me". The opening "Life on Mars", with piano accompaniment by his Seventies collaborator Mike Garson, is greeted with excited yelps as Bowie leads the singing. The band appears, and the set flips between eras (mercifully leaving out most of the Eighties and the Tin Machine). He might be dressed in a fetching pink V-neck jumper and tight black flares, but the voice and the charm remain intact.

This may prove to be the second most influential act of his long career, after his popularisation of that peculiar short-at-the-sides, long-on-top hairstyle that is so beloved by guests appearing on The Jerry Springer Show. Friday night's show, in this relatively small venue, sees this fiftysomething apparently comfortable with himself and his back catalogue. But with a new album, Hours, touted as a return to former glories, it seems that the old chameleon has at last settled into a respectable dotage, rather than trying madly to keep up with whatever the young folk are doing. Not that he needs to worry. His Internet obsession is well documented, yet more revolutionary has been his spectacular financial success in floating himself as a corporate entity Yes, you too can own a piece of David Bowie. Currently it seems that David Bowie couldn't receive more adoring coverage if he passed away suddenly in a tragic pile-up on the information superhighway, or perhaps released a revolutionary Christmas single featuring a surrealist collage of, say, The Lord's Prayer and "Auld Lang Syne". But with a new album, Hours, touted as a return to former glories, it seems that the old chameleon has at last settled into a respectable dotage, rather than trying madly to keep up with whatever the young folk are doing. Currently it seems that David Bowie couldn't receive more adoring coverage if he passed away suddenly in a tragic pile-up on the information superhighway, or perhaps released a revolutionary Christmas single featuring a surrealist collage of, say, The Lord's Prayer and "Auld Lang Syne". He said, "Madeline Kahn really was one of those people who when you stood around her, she gave off this unbelievable glow."Tom VallanceMadeline Kahn, actress: born Boston, Massachusetts 29 September 1942; married 1999 John Hansbury; died New York 3 December 1999..

It is my hope that I might raise awareness of this awful disease and hasten the day that an effective test can be discovered to give women a fighting chance to catch this cancer at its earliest stage." (Kahn's close friend, the comedienne Gilda Radner, died of the same disease in 1989.) In October, Kahn had married her long-term beau, lawyer John Hansbury, who told The New York Times, "It took me a long time to persuade her to get married."In her last film, Judy Berlin, due to open in February and directed by Eric Mendelsohn, who won the best director's award for the film at this year's Sundance Festival, she plays a suburban housewife described by the director as "full of neurotic energy yet warm and loving". The same year Kahn made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's Kafkaesque comedy Shadows and Fog, and more recently she had a role in Nixon (1995) and provided one of the voices for the hit cartoon A Bug's Life (1998).Since 1996 Kahn had been playing the role of Pauline, a neighbour, in the television series Cosby, and in August this year started to work on her fourth season with the show, but after taping four episodes she announced that she was taking a leave of absence.At the beginning of November, she let people know her secret, announcing, "During the past year, I have been undergoing aggressive treatment for ovarian cancer. Kahn also starred in several unsold pilot shows, and appeared with George C Scott in the series Mr President (1987-88). In 1989 she starred with Edward Asner in a Broadway revival of Born Yesterday, with mixed reaction - inevitably her performance was compared to that of the role's creator Judy Holliday.But three years later Kahn had an unquestionable triumph with her performance of the ditsy matron Gorgeous Teitelbaum in Wendy Wasserstein's play The Sisters Rosensweig, winning the Tony Award for a truly hilarious performance that will be talked about for years to come. She returned to the screen in The Cheap Detective (1978), Neil Simon's collection of gags based on such films as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon - Kahn played the Mary Astor role in a pastiche of the latter movie - and she was one of the guest stars in The Muppet Movie (1979).In 1983 Kahn had her own television show Oh Madeline, based on the British series Pig in the Middle, in which she was a bored housewife trying to put some zip into her life by sampling every trendy diversion that came along, but the show ran for only one season. Though Kahn had more Broadway roles, it is generally considered that her withdrawal hurt her chances of becoming a Broadway musical star and probably damaged her career.