Fortune-tellers and astrologists will be bracketed with double-glazing salesman under the new Consumer Protection Regulations. The changes, which implement an EU directive on unfair commercial practices, require businesses for the first time to act fairly towards consumers and will outlaw diresputable trading activities.

Fortune-tellers will have to tell customers that what they offer is “for entertainment only” and not “experimentally proven”. This means that a fortune-teller who sets up a tent at a funfair will have to put up a disclaimer on a board outside.

Similar disclaimers will need to be posted on the websites of faith healers, spiritualists or mediums where appropriate, as well as on invoices and at the top of any printed terms and conditions.

ABC News' Sarah Amos reports: Former President Bill Clinton in South Dakota today delivered a harsh critique of how his wife has been treated during her presidential bid, telling the crowd that he has "never seen a candidate treated so disrespectfully just for running," and that, "she will win the general election if you nominate her. They're just trying to make sure you don't."

Clinton spent more than six minutes calmly discussing what he called a "frantic effort to push her out" of this race, saying that no one asked Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson or Gary Hart to end their presidential campaigns early.

Following on from some remarks in my column today, reader/blogger Sean Higgins raises an issue a lot of us have been wondering about: What is the nature of Barack Obama's religious convictions? Sean thinks the senator is a yuppie agnostic.

When I'm the president of the United States," he intoned, the voice still strong, "My country will never again torture a prisoner. When I'm the president of the United States, we will never again attack another country unless our security is directly threatened. When I'm the president of the United States, human rights will be the foundation of our foreign policy." He went on in that vein, with ringing declarations on global warming, a promise to honour international agreements and to bring "security and peace to Israel and all its neighbours and treat them all on an equal
basis."

The most intriguing exchange came when interviewer Philippe Sands QC pressed the former president on whether George W Bush, who recently admitted authorising interrogation procedures widely seen as amounting to torture, could face prosecution for war crimes. Carter replied that he hoped Bush would live a peaceful "productive life - in our country." Sands told me afterwards that he understood that as "clear confirmation" that while Bush would face no challenge in his own country, "what happened outside the country was another matter entirely."