Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin got so drunk during a visit to Washington that he was found standing outside the White House in his underpants trying to hail a cab to go and buy a pizza.

The following night he was mistaken for a drunken intruder when he was discovered stumbling around the basement of his guest house by secret service agents.

The drunken behaviour of Yeltsin, who was known for his fondness for vodka and died two years ago aged 76, were revealed by former US president Bill Clinton.

Clinton, who is no stranger to indiscretions of his own, sat down with historian Taylor Branch to give an “oral history” of his presidency.

The results of 70 taped interviews between Clinton and Branch, who were former flatmates from the 1970s, is a new book “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President.”

Branch, a Pulitzer prize winning writer, was chosen by Clinton to be the unofficial historian of his eight years in power.

He taped all the interviews with Clinton who in 1998 survived a call for impeachment over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

His relationship with Lewinsky is the one area that Clinton does not expand on during his taped conversations with 62 year old Branch.

Branch said Clinton told him he “just cracked” under political and personal pressure.

The book also details an “explosive” row between Clinton and Al Gore after the vice president lost the 2000 election campaign to George W Bush.

According to excerpts of the book published in USA Today newspaper, Clinton told Branch they had a heated two hour discussion in which Gore said the president’s scandalous behaviour had cost him the election.

The book reveals that Yeltsin’s drinking binge while staying at Blair House, the guest accommodation used by visiting dignitaries in 1995, almost ended in an international incident.

Mr Clinton told how he was briefed by secret service after they found Yeltsin standing outside the building dressed in his underwear trying to hail a taxi.

In a slurred speech he told the agents he wanted a pizza.

The following night he eluded his Russian bodyguards to climb out of Blair House into the basement where he was initially mistaken for an intruder.

The 707 page book, which is published next week,was sent to Clinton to proof read.

Branch said he did not ask for any alterations.

Other subjects covered included Clinton’s view of George Bush, describing him as “unqualified” to be president.

Despite the growing awareness, bullying is still common in schools these days. Some kids are bullied and some bully others. But, as a new study finds, kids with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may have an even harder time with bullying, being many times more likely than their neurotypical siblings to have experienced it in their lifetimes. Even more disturbing, autistic kids may be intentionally triggered into having meltdowns by bullies who know how to push the right buttons.

The new study, from Kennedy Krieger’s Interactive Autism Network, surveyed families with autistic and non-autistic siblings from all over the country, asking about their experience with bullying in the past and present.

Almost two-thirds of autistic children had been bullied at some point in their lives, and they were three times more likely than neurotypical kids to be bullied in the past three months. This was even true for home-schooled autistic children, who were sometimes educated at home precisely because of the bullying issue. “After a horrible year in 3rd grade,” said one mother, “where he was clinically diagnosed as depressed (he has always been anxious), I pulled my son out of public school and am homeschooling him this year. He is doing much, much better without the constant name calling and being singled out for his ‘weird’ behaviors!”

The three most common types of bullying were verbal, or, in other words, psychological in nature: “being teased, picked on, or made fun of” (73%); “being ignored or left out of things on purpose” (51%), and “being called bad names” (47%). But almost a third of autistic children also experienced physical bullying – being shoved, pushed, slapped, hit, or kicked.

Even more disturbing was the fact that over half of the autistic children surveyed had experienced intentional triggering of meltdowns or had been “provoked into fighting back.” One mother said, “Often kids try to upset her because they find it funny when she gets upset and cries. She is overly emotional, and they seem to get a kick out of this.”

Bullying was most pronounced in regular public schools (43%), but better in special education public schools (30%), and lowest in regular private schools and special education private schools (28% and 18%, respectively).

Oddly, when the team broke down bullying as a function of the different types of autism (Asperger syndrome, autism, and “other ASD”), they found that children with Asperger syndrome were actually the most bullied group. Since Asperger is a higher functioning form of autism, this is peculiar. The researchers aren’t sure why this is true, but one hypothesis is that it’s because people with Asperger are often highly intelligent but can still have considerable social deficits, which makes them, in effect, the “perfect target.”

Children with autism are also more likely to bully others: About 20% of kids with autism bullied (vs. only 8% of neurotypical children). According to the report, many of these kids may actually be both bully and victim, which is somewhat more common in children with developmental or emotional problems. Children with ASD who bully may do it unintentionally. “My son doesn’t realize he is bullying,” said one parent. “He is trying to get other kids to pay attention to him so he does it by grabbing their ball away from them or getting ‘in their face’ when they say to stop.” Another parent said, “Our boy… may take an object from another child or scream when unhappy but any purposeful cruelty, he would never do.”

And for autistic children who are being bullied and bully in return, they may not have the social skills to avoid or to get themselves out of the situation. According to the report, “Unlike victims who are more passive, bully-victims insult their tormentors or otherwise try to fight back in a way that only makes the situation worse.”

Finally, a critical issue that the report brings up is whether bullying may cause people with autism to develop more mental health problems as a result. Some studies have suggested that any child who is bullied has a greater risk for everything from headaches and stomachaches to anxiety, depression, and suicide.

Parents, caregivers and schools work hard to help kids with autism gain social skills and emotional tools, and the idea that bullying could negate this work is disheartening. “Bullying can undo all our efforts,” Connie Anderson, of the Interactive Autism Network, told NPR. “I think that’s the most devastating thing about it. Children on the spectrum can be anxious anyway. This can just put them over the top and undo all the good that everyone’s trying to do.”

Stephen King once famously said, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”

In survival-horror games, or really any kind of moderately violent video game, the gross-out is easy to come by. We’ve all seen a lot of titles where you can walk through a puddle of fresh blood and track it everywhere, or vaporize a zombie’s entire head in a gory explosion of brains and bone.

Horror’s a little rarer. Genuinely startling moments in video games tend to be of the Resident Evil, monster-coming-through-the-window-aiiiieeee type, and that kind of scare has a real problem with diminishing returns. You grow to expect it. Your gamer senses start tingling when you see an unattended window, or a gleaming quest item out in the middle of nowhere. So horror’s hard to maintain.

Terror, on the other hand, is the rarest thing of all. Ever since Alone in the Dark started, and Resident Evil revitalized, the horror adventure genre, there have arguably only been three games to manage to generate and sustain a genuinely terrifying atmosphere. One is Tecmo’s Fatal Frame, a ghost story and multigenerational murder mystery which also offers you the opportunity to watch ghosts try to jump down the lens of a camera at you. Another is Silicon Knights’ Eternal Darkness, which among other scares, has a brilliant moment where you realize that the giant dying mass of eyes and mouths you’ve encountered deep below a Cambodian temple is also the closest thing to an ally you have.

The last and greatest, of course, is Silent Hill.

Konami has this weird habit, I’ve noticed, of occasionally putting out a kind of game that they’ve never touched before, and their title will, of course, be one of the best of its kind. They’d never released a console RPG before Suikoden, and that series is among the best CRPGs out there. Silent Hill is the same way; they jimmied the lock on the door and ran screaming into Resident Evil’s turf, making the latter game look like a pallid and unexciting imitation.

Silent Hill took an ordinary man, who was in way over his head about thirty seconds into the game, and pitched him headlong into a small American town that occasionally turned out to be something very like hell. It hit every single nerve an average person has—an elementary school that becomes a place where children are tortured, a hospital where the nurses are mad and there’s something terrible waiting in the basement, someone’s daughter alone and frightened somewhere in the distance—and played them like a violin. I challenge anyone to get through that game without so much as a shudder.

The sequel was a bit of a letdown, when all’s said and done. It made a few missteps, such as the infamous ten-minute walking sequence that serves as its prologue, or its slightly more mundane feel, but worse, it didn’t build on its predecessor. Silent Hill left quite a few questions unanswered, and a couple of plotlines dangling; Silent Hill 2 dealt with the bulk of them by ignoring them, and focusing instead on the story of James Sunderland, with occasional deviations into the history of the town itself. While it was a fine game, and has plenty of its own merits, it wasn’t really a sequel so much as a sidestory.

Silent Hill 3, on the other hand, is a true sequel to the original. To say a lot about it would be a fairly massive spoiler; more to the point, anyone who’s played the original to completion could probably get a fairly good idea as to how.

The important thing is that Silent Hill 3 is an improvement for the series in almost every way. We all already knew it was going to be graphically impressive, but it takes that to a new level. The in-game engine is powerful enough to handle cutscenes without the need or use of rendered movies; characters move, smile, frown, shout, and gesture realistically. While the graphics do still have a little ways to go—Heather’s hair makes her look grubby, and a couple of the NPCs aren’t as well-animated as they could be—they’re still spectacular by any stretch of the imagination. The sound’s just as good as it’s ever been, forming a natural counterpoint to the surreal and frightening backgrounds you’ll find yourself in.

For my money, though, the storyline and dialogue are where this installment truly shines. Heather, unlike James and Harry before her, is a lively character, who communicates her personality and history through her reactions to the phenomena around her. Harry and James were almost blank slates, who would regard a bloody corpse on a gurney with a dispassionate glance; Heather will freak out or demand to know what it’s doing there.

Silent Hill 3’s story begins, unusually, well outside of Silent Hill, in a shopping mall near Heather’s house. During a shopping trip, she dozes off, and has a nightmare of fighting monsters in the ruins of an amusement park. Waking up suddenly, she calls home, right before a detective named Douglas Cartland finds her. He’s been hired to find her, and ask her a few questions, but Heather wants nothing to do with him. She ditches him by crawling out a restroom window.

When Heather goes back inside via an employee entrance, though, things have changed. The mall has abruptly emptied, and most of the stores have closed for the night. Trying to find a way to the front of the mall, Heather ducks under the shutter of a clothing store… and inside, finds a monster like the ones she fought in her nightmare. The mall is suddenly full of them, and the only other living human Heather can find, Claudia, tells her that this was all done by the hand of God.

To go much further into the story would ruin it. It’s very much a love letter—albeit a bloody love letter tattooed on the freshly-flayed skin of a screaming human being—to the fans of the first game, and to some small extent, the second. Cameos, references, and explanations abound, particularly as you get further into the game and Heather learns more about why all of this is happening to her. Anyone who’s been looking forward to SH3 would do well to play through the original game again and go for one of the Good endings (find Kaufman in the motel near the waterfront), so you know exactly what’s going on near the endgame.

The only real complaint that I have about Silent Hill 3 is that its gameplay is very much the same thing again. Heather’s weaponry is, for the most part, functionally identical to the arsenal from previous games, although with a couple of tweaks; she can find a silencer for her handgun, for example, or distract some monsters with a bit of beef jerky.

More importantly, the game is just as linear as its predecessors, and this seems utterly ridiculous in a series that tends to give you an entire town to run around in. While I can appreciate that programming an entire area would be hard work, and would result in us getting a new Silent Hill game even less frequently than we already do, it does disappoint me, to some extent, to run past entire hallways of doors I can’t open and entire streets full of shops I can’t enter.

Past that, Silent Hill 3 is a worthy sequel to the single most frightening video game of all time, and has its own visceral impact. The people who made this game know exactly how to frighten you, by trapping you in what may be another world entirely, with only a flashlight and what seems like a wholly insufficent weapon to protect yourself. Further, they’ve finally figured out that a horror movie, or a horror video game, is much, much more effective when you care about the people that horrible things are happening to. A likeable heroine, a truly frightening video game, devious puzzles, and enough gore to scare your little brother out of the room: what else do you want?