Warning: this news contains GM ingredients

HOW WELL do you follow the news? Quite well, you think? Well, here's a small test. All you have to do is study the following six news stories (of which five are made up) and decide, using your skill, memory, luck and sense of smell, which one is true. Are you up for it? Then let's go!

1. Hanif Kureishi, an author often thought to base his stories on personal experience, is being sued by an ex-girlfriend because of the use he has made of her in his fiction. However, she is complaining precisely that he has NOT used her as a character.

"I always thought that my relationship with Hanif was really intrinsic to us," she says, "so you can imagine how devastated I was to find that he had never turned it into the stuff of fiction. What makes it worse is that because I don't feature in his works, my friends don't believe me when I tell them that he and I used to be a steady item."

It is thought to be the first time a novelist has been sued for failing to misrepresent a living person.

2. Shaken by recent public relations disasters, the GM food industry has determined to regain the moral high ground by genetically engineering something that people genuinely want - a nut which will not affect people who are allergic to nuts. "We should get there OK," says scientist Otto Krembacher. "After all, people who live in places where nuts come from don't keel over with allergies. They must have some gene we could make use of. And when you think of it, everyone in Europe in the Middle Ages must have been allergic to peanuts, even though peanuts were unknown. So it must be possible to have the opposite happen as well."

3. President Clinton has made himself even more unpopular with the Northern Irish by apologising for comparing them to two drunks who started fighting just when they're leaving the bar after a reconciliation. "Not only did it sound offensive," he said, "it was plain wrong. The two communities in Northern Ireland are more like two married partners who keep going to marriage guidance sessions, then go home and beat each other up because they haven't listened to a word of advice and still blame the other for everything. Also, they're both dead drunk."

4. Eric Phelps, 43, went for a walk with his dog in the fields near his Berkshire home, and kept his dog lead strung round his neck as he walked. When Phelps fell off a stile and knocked himself out on a rock, the dog, not knowing why his master was so still, pulled at the lead and effectively strangled him. At the inquest, the cause of death was found to be "murder by dog or dogs unknown, or, in this case, known". The dog (who cannot be named for legal reasons) is now in care, and police are trying to find if there is any law under which they can prosecute him.

5. German scientists looking for a cause of BSE have noted that the only European countries where the disease has been reported are those in which rugby is played. It is possible that the infection may be passed on in the privacy of the scrum. They are now waiting to see if there are going to be any outbreaks of BSE in countries such as New Zealand and Fiji that have recently played France.

6. A pianist is suing a composer on a charge of Grievous Bodily Harm. Modern classical pianist Shaim Acheim, who specialise in avant-garde works, recently reached inside a Steinway grand piano during a Seattle recital to pluck the strings, as directed in composer Stanley Rubin's score, only to have the piano lid fall on him. He is still recovering from injuries received, and blames Rubin's "foolhardy instructions" for his loss of earnings. "You never get pianos falling on Mozart specialists," he says.

Rubin is counter-claiming that Acheim should have checked the piano first, or at the very least worn a crash helmet while playing.

Well, how did you get on? That's right! All the stories were false except the one about Jeffrey Archer having Ken Livingstone assassinated in the course of his new novel.