Russian president Boris Yeltsin, famed for his erratic behaviour in public, showed this week that he is just as unpredictable in cyberspace. He took to the Internet to answer questions from a global public, and wound up challenging an American computer user to a sporting contest to prove that he was in good health.

Asked by an Irish web-surfer if his fine head of hair was proof of Gaelic ancestry, Mr Yeltsin politely dismissed the idea and said he owed his snowy coiffure to the care of the women in his family.

But questioned about former president Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr Yeltsin said: "I used to think badly of him. Now I don't think of him at all."