They are words of typically forthright advice that have come back to haunt Gordon Ramsay. During the first season of the US version of his Emmy-winning show Kitchen Nightmares, the celebrity chef berated the owner of the failing Campania restaurant in New Jersey, telling him that unless he sorted out his lacklustre food and poor service his business was "about to fucking swim down the Hudson".

Yesterday, police confirmed that a body found floating in the same river was that of Joseph Cerniglia, the troubled owner of the struggling local Italian restaurant which was successfully rescued following the intervention of the British culinary superstar three years ago.

It is believed that Mr Cerniglia, 39, jumped off the George Washington Bridge on Friday.

He is the second chef to have apparently committed suicide after appearing with the famously caustic Ramsay – a woman who appeared in the 2006 series of his other hit show, Hell's Kitchen, shot herself a year later.

In a statement, Ramsay paid tribute to Mr Cerniglia, who leaves behind a widow and three sons. "I was fortunate to spend time with Joe during the first season of Kitchen Nightmares. Joe was a brilliant chef and our thoughts go out to his family, friends and staff," he said.

During the filming of the Fox show in 2007, the three-Michelin-starred chef became increasingly vexed at Mr Cerniglia's poor management skills. As well as providing overly generous portions of uninspiring food cooked and served by somnolent staff, the restaurant had become mired in debt and was losing its customers.

Confronted with the chaos around him, an exasperated Ramsay asked Mr Cerniglia: "Why did you become a chef-owner if you haven't a clue how to run a business?"

The former executive chef at Manhattan's celebrated Gallagher's Steak House admitted there were "big problems", that he was $80,000 in the red and that he feared he would be forced to close within the year.

"I'm financially in trouble – the debt of the restaurant alone is overwhelming. My personal debt – wife, kids mortgage – that's a lot of debt," he told Ramsay.

Mr Cerniglia's wife, Melissa, broke down during filming and said she was deeply worried about her husband, who was under intense pressure because of the problems he faced. "People like us put everything on the line for a dream, and I just want to see him have the time to succeed. If this business fails, we will lose everything," she said.

But despite the on-screen appearances of conflict, those who knew the Cerniglias said yesterday that Ramsay helped them turn around the ailing business after a grand re-opening – transforming it into a thriving enterprise which was packed out each weekend.

Evelina Grzymala, 22, who worked at a tanning salon next door, said the late restaurateur had been grateful to the British chef. "He said Ramsay was intense but that he turned out to be a nice guy, that in the end, he helped him out," she recalled. The Cerniglia family posted a message on his Facebook page yesterday thanking friends for their condolences.

The tragedy follows the death of 41-year-old chef Rachel Brown, who appeared in Ramsay's other TV hit Hell's Kitchen in 2006. She had been eliminated by the fifth episode but was invited back to assist in the final. She shot herself at her home in Dallas the following year.

Kitchen Nightmares has proved a huge hit for Ramsay, scooping a Bafta and an Emmy. The chef won a libel action against the Evening Standard newspaper in 2006 after it claimed that scenes in the show were faked. At the time he said: "I won't let people write anything they want to about me. We have never done anything in a cynical fake way."

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Book 'em, Danno! Thirty-five years after it first hit TV screens, Hawaii Five-0 made a high-profile return to US airwaves last week, as one of a slew of new programmes that suggest the nation's ailing networks are suffering from a 1970s flashback.

The cop show still boasts its famous theme tune, and still takes place on beaches inhabited by women in bikinis and muscle-bound surfers. But despite the iffy financial climate, not to mention the troubled state of the increasingly fragmented television industry, it boasts none of the low-budget charm of the original, which starred Jack Lord as detective Steve McGarrett.

Instead, CBS, the network that has relaunched the show, has bet big on its revival, putting an estimated $15m (£9.5m) into a slick 45-minute pilot episode which made use of dozens of helicopters, cargo ships and fast cars, together with expensive pyrotechnics more normally seen in a well-budgeted action movie.

While the old Hawaii Five-O revelled in the seedy underbelly of island counterculture, the new version is altogether glossier, and its drama revolves squarely around chases, shoot-outs and personality clashes between its protagonists, played by Alex O'Loughlin, Scott Caan, Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park. It was written and produced by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the modish scribes behind the films Mission Impossible: 3, the Transformers series and the last Star Trek movie.

The big question, of course, is will the gamble pay off? Initial evidence is varied: the programme sold to a some lucrative foreign markets (including the UK, where it will be broadcast on Bravo next month) and its debut episode was the most watched network show in the US on Monday night, attracting an estimated 13.8 million viewers. However, critics were measured. The Washington Post, for example, dubbed it "a big bag of dumb fun". Cynics wondered if it will be able to sustain interest, and noted that its viewing figures were down 12 per cent on the show that debuted in the same slot last year.

Compared with other new arrivals on American television, Hawaii Five-0 was nonetheless flying high. In a week that saw almost all of the nation's "big five" networks step back in time, flooding the airwaves with new shows inspired by the hits of yesteryear, an overwhelming majority of the debuting shows were dead on arrival. The most notable flop was Lone Star, an oil industry soap set in Texas, which recalls Dallas and stars Jon Voight. Despite almost universally strong reviews, it opened to public apathy with such a tiny audience that Fox was rumoured to be preparing to axe it after just one episode. In the event, they allowed it to stay on for a second week.

Other familiar faces from previous decades who had a somewhat disappointing return to the US airwaves in new TV shows last week included William Shatner, whose Shit My Dad Says was critically panned, Tom Selleck, the Magnum PI star in Blue Bloods, and Blair Underwood from LA Law in The Event. Dara Delaney also debuted in Body of Proof, a procedural that recalls the 1980s hit Quincy M E.

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Four people were killed after an armed woman went on the rampage in a German town, which ended in a shoot-out at a hospital.

The woman was killed in a gun battle with police after she entered the St Elisabethen-Krankenhaus hospital in Loerrach, southern Germany, and started shooting. She had been seen running from a burning apartment building near by, in which firemen later discovered the bodies of a man and a child.

The woman shot dead one person in the hospital, thought to be a member of staff, and badly injured a police officer. She was killed after she started shooting at police.

Investigators said they were relieved that no one else was hurt during the shoot-out in the hospital. "There was a very heavy exchange of gunfire in the hospital that had the potential to be very dangerous, but based on what we know right now ... no one else was injured," said a state prosecutor, Dieter Inhofer.

The alarm was raised at about 6pm local time when shots were heard after an explosion in the apartment block where the bodies were later discovered. The gunwoman was seen running into the hospital from the apartment block and it is thought that the third person to die was known to her.

What the motive for the shootings were, however, remained unclear last night as the authorities began investigating the tragedy. Mr Inhofer said it was believed the deaths were all linked but he was unable to say what the relationships were between the killer and the victims.

The injured police officer, who was last night critically ill, is understood to have been at the hospital when the woman entered brandishing a gun, rather than being part of the armed response team who shot her dead.

It was unclear what the relationship was between the gunwoman and the man and child who were killed in the apartment. They are believed to have been shot but investigators are awaiting confirmation from a post-mortem examination.

A spokesman for the fire brigade said: "Firefighters were called out to an explosion at an apartment in a street near the hospital. Soon afterwards, firefighters found two bodies in the apartment."

Police said two people were killed inside the hospital and that a police officer was seriously wounded. They added that the bodies of a man and a child were found in the apartment block, having previously said a woman and a girl were found dead there.

Germany has been debating tougher controls on gun ownership since a teenager went on the rampage in March 2009 in the southern town of Winnenden near Stuttgart, killing 15 people at his old school before shooting himself. The boy's father went on trial on Thursday charged with failing to secure his gun properly. Both Winnenden and Loerrach are in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.

Germany's worst school shooting was in April 2002, when a gunman killed 17 people, including himself, at a high school in the eastern city of Erfurt.

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Murray Sayle, who has died aged 84 after suffering from Parkinson's disease, was a journalistic legend, but he was also much more interesting than most of that breed. He was a complex, self-contradictory character, sardonic but warm, cynical but principled, who lived in several avatars and in three very different cultures: Australia, where he grew up and to which he returned in old age; Britain, where he made his reputation as the most forceful of Fleet Street's finest; and Japan, where he spent more than 30 years of his life and did some of his best work. He was an adventurer, an autodidact and a man of many parts, an intellectual who climbed Everest and sailed the Atlantic single-handed, and was always willing to have an argument on almost any subject, on or off licensed premises.

Murray's professional reputation was established by a number of memorable scoops. From a plane he had parlayed himself on to, he spotted Francis Chichester's globe-girdling yacht as it rounded Cape Horn. He tracked down Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle. Most memorably of all, having the insight to guess that the communist spy Kim Philby would, ideology notwithstanding, collect his dividend cheques from London at Moscow's central post office, he waited until he was able to step forward and greet the middle-aged English gent the world's press was hunting with a Livingstonian "Mr Philby?".

Large, shrewd and with many of the characteristics of an armoured vehicle, Murray had plenty of the "rat-like cunning" advocated by his colleague Nick Tomalin when it came to that basic reportorial talent of getting oneself in the right place at the right time. Later he developed a graceful writing style and an instinct for seeking out the larger, less obvious truth.

His work as a war reporter, in Vietnam and in the India-Pakistan war of 1971 (flavoured occasionally, some thought, with imaginative obbligati) was always courageous and colourful. Near the end of his life, he had the belated satisfaction of seeing his documentary novel of life on a Fleet Street Sunday – A Crooked Sixpence (2008), banned for almost half a century as a result of a libel action – hailed as a classic.

Perhaps his very best work was his reporting of Japan, controversial and original as ever, with the insight that came from living in a small Japanese town, in a Japanese house, where his English wife taught in the Japanese school that their three tall, blond children – two sons and a daughter – attended. A short film about the odd taste of the Japanese for eating as close as they dared to the poisonous parts of the fugu fish was a masterpiece of the recherché. His contrarian account of the role of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima in hastening Japan's surrender, which took up an entire issue of the New Yorker in 1995, exemplified his passion for detail and his willingness to shock, which it certainly did.

Friends and colleagues remember him for conversation that was rich in humour, erudition and paradox, and for his invention of some of the ruling catchphrases of journalistic culture. It was Murray who first cited a reporter (a fictional version of himself), assigned to expose a prostitution racket, insisting that he "made excuses and left"; it was Murray, too, who laid down that there were only two basic stories – "We name the guilty man!" and "Arrow points to defective part".

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In the days before they were gung ho about the need for spending cuts, the Liberal Democrats  used to be equally gung ho about the need for Britain to join the single currency. Indeed, Danny Alexander, the Treasury minister wielding the spending axe, was the spin doctor for Britain in Europe, the pressure group dedicated to seeing that the pound was scrapped.

To be fair, Alexander was not alone. All the other Lib Dem big guns – Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, Vince Cable – were as insistent then that failure to join monetary union would be an error of historic proportions, as they are insistent now that there is no alternative to austerity.

Joining the single currency is no longer a Lib Dem priority. Despite Clegg's somewhat bizarre claim in yesterday's Observer that the Conservatives have "completely changed" their view of Europe, it is his party that has done the U-turn.

Given that the coalition was forged in early May, when the eurozone was embroiled in a colossal crisis, it is perhaps unsurprising that membership of the single currency has been ruled out for this parliament. By which time, there may no longer be a euro to join.

While UK politics has been dominated by the deficit these past four months, the crisis in the monetary union has not gone away. Events came to a head in the spring, when the European Union and the International Monetary Fund organised a bailout for Greece amid extreme market turbulence. The markets calmed down for a while, but pressure gradually built up again. By early this month, the evidence of distress was as powerful as it had been in the spring.

One key indicator of trouble is the difference between the interest rate on German bonds and the interest rate on bonds issued by other governments in the eurozone. When this gap – or spread – is narrow, it means that bonds of, say, Greece or Ireland are considered almost as safe as those in Germany. When the spread widens, it is a sign that investors are getting nervous.

The worrying news for governments in Athens, Lisbon and Dublin is that bond spreads are back to where they were in early May, despite the €750bn (£627bn) bailout. The reason is simple: financial markets do not believe the lines of credit solve the underlying problem, which is that the debts of the weaker eurozone countries are unsustainable without much stronger economic growth. And the flawed structure of the eurozone makes stronger economic growth unachievable. The upshot, as even supporters of the single currency now admit, is that the whole project is at risk.

What has happened is this. Joining the single currency involved countries pooling their monetary policies, jettisoning the right to set their own interest rates or alter their exchange rates, and adopting a common 2% inflation target.

But in a common currency zone, differences in economic performance are quickly magnified. If labour costs in country A rise by 1% a year on average for 10 years while labour costs in country B rise by 5% a year on average, country B becomes less and less competitive and its trade deficit will widen.

Trade deficits have to be financed, so capital flows into the debtor nations. If interest rates are low, the inflows of "hot money" lead to speculation and asset price bubbles. When the bubbles burst, the credit dries up.

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David Cameron is under pressure to backtrack by appointing more political advisers to bolster the position of Nick Clegg and other Liberal Democrat ministers.

Before this year's election, the Conservative Party pledged to cut the number of special advisers – party political aides funded by taxpayers – after their work attracted controversy under Labour. Their ranks have been cut from about 78 to 68 since May.

A report published today by the Institute for Government, a think-tank with close links to Whitehall, argues that their numbers should be restored to pre-election levels to allay fears that Mr Clegg and his Liberal Democrat colleagues are being overstretched in the Coalition.

It also proposes that Mr Clegg is given more civil servants to help him carry out his role as Deputy Prime Minister, and that he should head a "branded" department with its own identity and website.

The analysis of how the Coalition is working chimes with the private views of some senior Liberal Democrats. Although the personal relationship between Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron is strong, some Liberal Democrats fear their party lacks clout in Whitehall departments.

Today's study notes that the Cameron-Clegg "dual leadership" has been imposed on a Whitehall system designed for a government led by one person. Although there are five Liberal Democrat ministers including Mr Clegg in the Cabinet, they do not run big spending departments, it points out. The 14 Liberal Democrat ministers outside the Cabinet have a "heavy burden" as they represent their party's interests across all policy areas in their departments, well beyond their personal brief.

Meanwhile, the report says Mr Cameron should appoint a Liberal Democrat minister to those departments which do not have one: Culture, International Development and Environment.

Danny Alexander, the Chief Treasury Secretary, is described as "stretched" in the report. As well as overseeing the government-wide spending review, he is also the Liberal Democrats' policy supremo.

Mr Clegg has about 60 staff working on constitutional and political reform, but he is trying to cover 90 per cent of the Prime Minister's remit with less than half the back-up.

The call for more special advisers gives Mr Cameron a dilemma because of his election pledge to cut their numbers. The Liberal Democrats are believed to be sympathetic to the idea. Officially, government sources said the study was independent and that its proposals would be examined in the normal way.

The report suggests that, far from the Coalition being a one-off, partnership governments in Britain may become more common as the combined share of the vote won by the Tories and Labour decreases. The Whitehall machinery should be overhauled to reflect this, it argues.

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Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the wife of the French president, obtained police and intelligence service reports to discover who was spreading rumours that she and her husband were having affairs, a new authorised biography claims.

The authors of Carla and the Ambitious say Bruni-Sarkozy used confidential records of telephone calls and text messages to confront plotters who were allegedly trying to oust her, including the former justice minister Rachida Dati.

The allegation comes as President Nicolas Sarkozy faces an embarrassing investigation into reports that the Elysée Palace ordered France's counter-espionage services to spy on Le Monde journalists to identify the source of leaks in the political scandal surrounding the L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

Unsubstantiated and vehemently denied rumours that both he and his wife were having affairs emerged in March.

It was suggested at the time that the couple had called on the security services to find out who was behind the rumours, but no firm evidence of this emerged. Now, journalists Michaël Darmon and Yves Derai say the Elysée received a full police report suggesting there had been a plot by Dati, a former favourite of the president who was later sacked from the cabinet, and a second woman once married to Sarkozy's younger brother.

The authors say agents identified the plotters through phone calls and text messages and suggested the culprits tried to involve others, including the head of a lobby group. Believing Bruni-Sarkozy to be the president's "weak link" and an easy target, the plotters allegedly aimed to persuade Sarkozy's former wife, Cécilia Attias, from whom he had split a few months after he was elected in 2007, to return to his side.

Le Parisien newspaper said that as soon as she had the report in her hands, Bruni-Sarkozy called her predecessor, who now lives in New York, informing her: "Two people with whom you are in contact are behaving in an unacceptable manner towards us … I am not talking about suspicious or malicious gossip. I have a police report that you are welcome to see. I know you have nothing to do with them but I suggest you keep your distance."

Darmon and Derai say police examined the phone records of several well-known "personalities" suspected of being involved in spreading the rumours.

In April Dati (below) issued a statement in which she "protested with indignation against allegations in certain press organs that she was responsible in any way for the propagation of absurd and inadmissible rumours about the private life of the presidential couple."

But quickly Sarkozy took his revenge. Here official car and bodyguards were withdrawn while she was doing a television interview on the evening of the regional elections.

TheyDarmon and Derai said Dati, distressed at being dumped from the government, would "stop at nothing to return to such dizzying heights". She and a second alleged plotter, Sophie Douzal, the former wife of the president's brother François Sarkozy, are nicknamed the "Stiletto Heel Firm" in the book.

Once she had the evidence implicating the two women Bruni-Sarkozy apparently rang Douzal, who calls herself Sophie Sarkozy, to berate her and tell her that she no longer had the right to use the president's family name.

The book, which came out today is the second biography of Bruni-Sarkozy to appear in a week. Carla – A Secret Life was an unflattering portrayal of her as a Marie-Antoinette figure more concerned with ex-boyfriends and cosmetic surgery than representing France on the world stage.

Darmon, an Elysée accredited journalist for the broadcaster France 2, and Derai are close to the presidential couple. The journalists' book was written with Bruni-Sarkozy's co-operation and approval.

The claim that the presidential couple made use of the secret services also comes at time when Sarkozy is facing domestic and international censure over France's deportation of nearly 1,000 Romas and a second case of unauthorised use of spies.

This week, Le Monde launched a lawsuit for breach of confidentiality of sources, accusing the Elysée of using illegally using the domestic intelligence agency, the DCRI – the equivalent of MI5 – to trace the source of leaks from police interviews with witnesses in the Bettencourt party-funding scandal.

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The father of Loyalist Volunteer Force leader Billy Wright is expected to take legal action if today's report into the death of his son inside the Maze prison fails to conclude there was collusion between the state and his son's republican killers.

The inquiry into Wright's death, which has cost £30m, is expected to be highly critical of security around the jail in December 1997 when the loyalist leader was shot dead by two Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) inmates.

The Guardian understands that David Wright is already receiving legal advice on his next move if collusion is not at the centre of the report.

One of Wright's killers, John Kennaway, claimed that "security was a joke" at the time they shot the LVF founder, but Kennaway, who later died in Maghaberry jail, denied any collusion between the INLA and any branch of the security forces.

The report is due to be published this afternoon after the Northern Ireland secretary, Owen Paterson, addresses the House of Commons and is expected to be highly critical of the Prison Service.

The murder, just two days after Christmas, threatened to wreck the tense all-party political negotiations in the months before the signing of the Good Friday agreement the following year.

Wright, from Portadown, Co Armagh, who was linked to up to 20 murders of mostly Catholics, was sitting in the back of a prison van waiting to be taken to meet his visiting girlfriend when he was shot seven times.

Three republican prisoners belonging to the INLA, a republican breakaway faction, were involved.

Two of the three, Christopher "Crip" McWilliams and John Kennaway, had been transferred into the same H-Block as Wright the previous May, just weeks after Wright was moved from Maghaberry prison, also near Lisburn, Co Antrim, to serve out an eight-year sentence. The INLA had previously tried to kill Wright in Maghaberry.

The two men and a third man, John Glennon, armed with a semi-automatic pistol and a double-barrelled .22 Derringer, moved in to kill him after hearing his name announced over the prison public address system.

They surrendered themselves to prison staff after negotiations with a Catholic chaplain and were later sentenced to life imprisonment but released early under the terms of the 1998 peace deal.

McWilliams later died of cancer while Kennaway took his own life while being held in Maghaberry prison.

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