In brief: Hilton’s mum joins in Obama ad row

The blonde American socialite Paris Hilton is, probably rightly, held up as the benchmark of being famous just for being famous. And now, even her mother thinks so. Kathy Hilton, a John McCain donor, has dismissed as "a waste of money" a Republican television ad that used her daughter and Britney Spears to portray Democrat Barack Obama as more celebrity icon than political heavyweight. In a blog on the Huffington Post website, mother says: "It is a complete waste of the country's time and attention at the very moment when millions of people are losing their homes and their jobs. And it is a completely frivolous way to choose the next President of the United States"... In London, the Daily Mail reports that the Garrick Club, the gentlemen's watering hole of four former Conservative Chancellors of the Exchequer - Lords Lamont, Lawson and Howe and Kenneth Clarke - is in a tizzy because a rule going back 177 years requiring a tie to be worn at all times has been watered down. Now, members may be tieless between 4pm and 6pm, and even remove their jackets. "I'm appalled. Some people even turned up tieless at lunchtime last week," complained one unnamed member... The net is buzzing with stories about the FBI and Anne Hathaway, the 25-year-old star of The Devil Wears Prada and Becoming Jane, who is being called 'the new Audrey Hepburn'. Compromising photographs of the actress have begun to circulate since she parted from her Italian boyfriend, Raffaelo Follieri and are expected to surface somewhere in cyberspace, reports Fox News. Follieri is alleged to have hired a top-name photographer to take them and Hathaway's brother is reported to have attempted to recover them from a storage depot only to find that the FBI had beaten him to it by 24 hours.