for the good ol' days

Relive them at the Paris' Arab World Institute on the Seine til October 21st:

Jewel-incrusted suits of armour, scimitars and cutlasses: a Paris exhibition on the art of war in Islam offers a journey back to an age of mediaeval chivalry, far from the suicide attacks and snuff movies of today's Islamic "Holy Warriors."

"We wanted to show that conflicts were fought in a spirit of chivalry and respect for the opponent, unlike the current mindset of terrorism," said Eric Delpont, curator of the show "Furusiyya," which means "Horsemanship" in Arabic.

Spanning 10 centuries of Islamic history, from the eighth-century Abbassid dynasty to the Ottoman Empire, 400 artefacts gathered from India to Persia, are on display, loaned from a friend of the Saudi royal family.

"In the Islamic world, there is no art for art's sake. Art takes shape in everyday objects," explained Bashir Mohamed of the Liechtenstein-based Furusiyya Art Foundation, which manages the rare collection.

Swords, sabres and daggers, chain-mail, archer's rings, helmets and horse armour: each piece is a jewel in itself. Gold, jade and emeralds glisten on the protective thumb rings worn by Moghul archers when tightening their bows.

Arms are incrusted with delicate patterns showing animals, flowers or verses from the Koran, using the finest materials -- jade, ivory, cristal, leather, velvet and wood.

Daggers, designed for body-to-body combat, are ornate goldsmith's works with diamond-encrusted or sculpted ivory handles, stylised blades and intricately patterned sheaths.

A 17th-century Ottoman archer's shield is a light disc of steel coated with arabesques of red, white and green woven silk.

From the same period, in Iran, a bronze helmet is split into segments bearing the name and attibutes of the 12 divinely-ordained Imams of the Shia Muslim faith.

"The pieces in the collection, however beautiful, all had a use. A beautiful object, defines your status, your power. It also gives you a duty to be worthy of it," said Mohamed.

"War is not just about defeating an enemy but about finding a spiritual path in life," he said.

It's Sake to Me?

It may have been to Rowan & Martin, but it's white rice wine in Paris:

Seiko Lulubell Hirabayashi, the eldest daughter of a family of brewers reaching back 18 generations from the mountains of Nagano province on Japan's main island of Honshu....

Her family brewery specialises in a high-end type of sake called "ginjo" whose flavour -- light and mineral, with green, fruity notes -- is more akin to a white wine than the rustic, gin-like aroma of a traditional sake.

Sake is made from grains of rice that are whittled down to around two-thirds of their initial size to remove the husk and protein-rich outer layers.

The grain's smooth, starchy white heart is rinsed, soaked, cooked and fermented with the help of an enzyme called koji-kin, producing a clear beverage with about 16-percent alcohol content.

Much of the sake consumed in Japan -- and exported around the world -- is a mixture of this basic rice wine, raw alcohol and sugar.

Ginjo is at the other end of the spectrum: it is made from a unique type of rice called Yamada Nishiki, whose grains are reduced to between half and a quarter of their initial size.

...."Most people used to see sake as a dry, simple, drink -- they didn't look for flavour," she said.

"But as Japanese consumers discovered imported French wine, they got used to more complex flavours -- and they started turning to more refined sakes."

One of half a dozen high-end Paris cellars to have opened their doors to ginjo -- thanks in part to a Japanese in-house oenologist -- the Caves Legrand sells about a dozen bottles a month.

But around the corner, a Japanese delicatessen called ISSE workshop is working hard to convert trendy young Parisians to the stuff, as they pop in for takeaway sushi or an after-work Japanese cookery class.

Kei Miyagawa, 45, the workshop's sommelier, readily serves up a selection of ginjo or more refined daiginjo, as well as exclusive dassai -- made with rice whittled down to 23 percent of its size -- to curious Parisians.

He uses wine glasses -- never traditional shallow cups -- to reveal the wine's full aroma, and to break the association with cheap after-dinner sake.

...."Sake is a niche here, it will never be a mass consumer market," says Miyagawa, who imports ginjo directly from four selected Japanese producers, selling some 400 bottles per month.

The typical French sake drinker is a chic, 30-year-old male, ready to splash out on a bottle whose price can range from 35 to 65 euros (50 to 90 dollars) as a gift, or to impress friends.

The real growth area is with restaurants, Miyagawa believes. High-end ginjo is served in no more than 50 of the 600-odd Japanese-style eateries in the Paris region, whose number has soared in the space of five years, according to him.

But he is determined sake should not be pigeon-holed to Japanese cuisine: as the perfect meal for a glass of ginjo, he suggests not yaki-zakana -- Japanese salt-broiled fish -- but braised sea bream with with an emulsion of foie gras.

Going Un-Postal

The European Union votes to end postal monopolies:

EU telecommunications ministers gave the green light on Monday to end state monopolies for delivering letters, the European Union's presidency announced.

The measure will come into effect on January 1, 2011, although 11 EU member states will get a two-year grace period, said Herve Novelli, French minister of state for businesses and foreign trade after reaching agreement with his EU colleagues.

....The European Union's executive arm is eager to build on the perceived success of Britain, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden, which have already opened their postal market to competition.

It has predicted few changes for consumers, saying that new competitors would probably try to differentiate themselves from existing state-controlled post offices with lower costs and tailor-made services.

Work for Free Today

Tax free overtime in Sarko's France begins now:

A key economic reform introduced by President Nicolas Sarkozy to stimulate growth kicked in on Monday in France, as rules came into force removing tax and social charges from overtime hours.

After featuring high on the president's election manifesto in May, the measure was part of a Law on Work, Employment and Spending Power voted through parliament at the start of August.

The reform is intended to encourage staff to work longer hours, and companies to make more work available. From Monday all hours worked beyond the statutory 35 hours in the week will be free of charges for both employer and employee.

No duerme en the subway

Petula Clark knew what she was singing about:

Authorities have closed the underground transport system in Palma, capital of the Spanish holiday island of Majorca, for an indefinite period five months after its inauguration because of repeated flooding, press reports said on Tuesday.

Regional transport minister Gabriel Vicens said the underground, which links the city centre and the local university with a single line of 7.2 kilometres, would remain closed until a solution was found to its "serious structural and design problems."

....Water has entered platforms and tracks, reaching a height of up to 2.5 metres.

The underground, which cost about EUR 130 million, was one of the most expensive infrastructure projects ever carried out on the Balearic Island.

It was to place Palma into the select group of Spanish cities having undergrounds, which include Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Bilbao.

A Leg Up

Should be an interesting conversation:

Shannon Whisnant, who found a severed leg in a barbecue smoker, wants to keep it in hopes of fame and money.

Whisnant plans to make his case personally today when John Wood, the Greenville, S.C., man who lost the leg in an airplane crash in 2004 and stored it in a barbecue smoker, comes to Maiden, N.C., to pick up his lost appendage.

....Whisnant thinks the leg is his property.

....The leg has brought both men some fame. Wood said he became a celebrity at a charity golf tournament that benefited amputees. Whisnant put a sign on the empty smoker charging for a look inside: adults $3, children $1.

He figures there could be more opportunities if he had the leg in hand. He knows there's interest; he's Googled the phrase "man finds leg in smoker" and gotten close to 2 million hits.

Wood said he was livid when he got the request from Whisnant.

"He's making a freak show out of it," Wood said. "He wants to go on 'The Tonight Show,' and he wants to sell it to The National Enquirer and call Ripley's Believe It Or Not."

After meeting with a lawyer, Whisnant decided his best move was to persuade Wood to share custody.

"It's a strange incident, and Halloween's just around the corner," he said. "The price will be going up if I get the leg."

And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses

It was the color of money:

Caramel: It's the shade Marc and Kristina Weiss used to stain a 12-foot section of cedar fence at their Redmond [Washington] town home.

And it's a stain that proved impossible to get out, even after members of the town-home association's board insisted on piña colada.

The Weisses restained with Nantucket white, but they refused to repaint their fence piña colada.

The color war raged for months and finally landed in the hands of an arbitrator.

The result? Vindication for the Weisses and more than $85,000 in legal fees on the association's tab.

....Arbitrator Jerome O. Cohen ruled caramel was in fact an approved hue, and that the Weisses were never required to use the piña colada color.

He also found the shade resulting from the caramel-Nantucket white combination — dulce de leche, maybe? — was so close to piña colada that the two shades were indistinguishable under "reasonable observation."

Cohen ordered the Sammamish Forest Manors Homeowners Association to reimburse the Weisses' legal fees, which came to more than $39,000.

Together with its own legal fees, the town-home association will spend more than $85,000 on the color war.

Attack of the Killer Amoebae

Things aren't always going swimmingly in Lake Havasu:

PHOENIX — It sounds like science fiction, but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain, where it feeds until you die.

Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are rare, six boys or young men have been killed this year. The spike concerns health officials, and they are predicting more cases.

....According to the CDC, the amoeba, Naegleria fowleri (nuh-GLEER-ee-uh FOWL-erh-eye), killed 23 people in the United States from 1995 to 2004.

....Although infections tend to be found in Southern states, the amoeba lives almost everywhere in lakes, hot springs, even dirty swimming pools, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment.

Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose — say, by doing a somersault in chest-deep water — the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve.

The amoeba destroys tissue as it heads to the brain, where it continues the damage, "basically feeding on the brain cells," Beach said.

Infected people tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers. In later stages, they will show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes, he said.

Once infected, most people have little chance of survival. Some drugs have stopped the amoeba in lab experiments, but people who have been infected rarely survive, Beach said.

Phoning It In

The novel:

Like many other young Japanese, Rin, 21, punches her mobile phone keys very quickly. Holding her phone with two hands, and moving her thumbs deftly and smoothly, she quickly generates sentences on the small screen.

But unlike others, her main reason for typing on her keitai (mobile phone) is not to send e-mails, text messages or check the Internet. Instead, she writes bestselling novels. Rin is one of the most popular authors in the fast-expanding genre of keitai shosetsu (mobile-phone novels).

....Original novels and other writings released and widely read on cell-phone Web sites have been one of this year's booming phenomena, with several titles as well as Rin's making the bestseller lists after being published in book form.

....Mobile-phone book editors attribute the novels' popularity to the fact that they fit the lifestyle of high-school girls and women in their 20s. This demographic not only habitually communicate by typed keitai messages, but also read on their small screens while on the train, at home or anywhere. As well, keitai-novel sites have become the nodes of a community by making it possible for users to have interactions together and access a huge number of titles. Writers, too, can have easy access to readers' responses and then draw on them to further develop their stories.

"An interesting aspect of keitai novels is that readers and writers often overlap. In many cases, readers who were inspired by stories on the sites have started writing by themselves," said Mayumi Sato, an editor at Goma Books, which published three of the five bestselling keitai books in the first half of this year.

Pregnant Pause

In Japan there's often no room at the inn:

There were at least 191 cases where a pregnant woman being transported by ambulance was turned away by five or more hospitals between 2004 and 2006, a survey showed Thursday, underscoring the growing hardships of ambulance crews forced to scramble by the dearth of obstetricians in the country.

The number of cases in which one or more hospitals refused to admit pregnant women, including the 191, was 2,780 in the three-year period.

In the survey, carried out by Kyodo News, the 47 prefectural governments were asked about the current situation for emergency care services for pregnant women, and 27 had responded as of Thursday.

Those figures are expected to swell in a government survey to be released shortly.

The Alan: 'Soak the Rich'

Fools and their money are soon parted, and that's allright with the Maestro:

The former head of the US Federal Reserve has denied that regulators failed to foresee the problems which caused the global credit crunch.

Alan Greenspan said they had not acted on concerns about complex and risky financial deals because only very wealthy people invested in them.

...."We did know what was going on and the reason we didn't stop them was that to a large extent these types of questionably egregious actions are taken by people who have their own money invested," he said.

"Hedge funds, who are presumably the largest culprit of all of this, are organisations in the US in which wealthy investors invest.

"I must admit that I do not have considerable concern about their net worth going from 40 million to five million, which in many cases is what's happened."

Brazil Nuts

The police shoot first and answer questions later:

A Spanish tourist and an Italian visitor to the Brazilian city of Fortaleza were wounded by gunshots fired by police, who apparently confused them with robbers trying to make a getaway.

....Spaniard Marcelino Ruiz, 38, suffered the most serious injury - a bullet wound in the spine that could render him paraplegic....

Ruiz had arrived in Fortaleza for a short vacation just minutes before the incident....

....The car in which the couples were riding ... a black Toyota Hilux pickup truck, was apparently mistaken by police for another of the same make and color that had just been used in a robbery.

Police said they ordered the driver of the vehicle to stop and, when that command was not obeyed, began shooting. The tourists, for their part, said they received no such warning before the bullets were fired.

The vehicle carrying the two couples had 18 bullet holes and two of its tires were punctured.

Inventory Control

Just in time?

A debt-ridden French shoplifter who sold stolen supermarket items on eBay is to face justice after police became suspicious about her low-priced loot, officials said Thursday.

The 33-year-old woman, who is estimated to have stolen more than 85,000 euros' (120,000 dollars') worth of goods from the Leclerc store in her hometown of Doubs, eastern France, since 2005, is due to appear in court December 7 following her arrest.

...."On her arrest at the beginning of July, she told us that one day, while she was waiting in line at the cashier's, she saw a child take out objects without setting off the alarms," one of the investigators, Philippe Pintapary, said.

He explained that the incident gave the woman -- who was deeply in consumer debt -- the idea for her scam.

Shop security failed to notice that the woman visited the store up to five times a day, ostensibly to buy small-ticket items, and walked out with a bag stuffed with pilfered products.

Gente Viejo en la Casa

Donald Rumsfeld had it right, it is Old Europe:

Europe is losing its youngsters and rapidly aging, according to a report by the Institute for Family Policies released this week in Spain.

The 2007 Report on the Evolution of the Family in Europe found that the number of young people aged below 14 had slumped 23 million across the continent, defined as the 27 EU states, between 1980 and 2005, falling from a 22.1 percent to a 16.2 percent share overall.

Lola Velarde, president of the European Network Institute for Family Policies, revealed that whereas in 1980 youngsters outnumbered adults by 36 million, the latter were now in the ascendancy.

"Europe is getting old," said Velarde, alluding to falling birth rates which she described as "worrying for the future" with the population of the United States projected to rise above that of the EU by 2060.

Worrying for the future of their welfare states, that is?

Sour Grapes?

French winemakers are befuddled (what else is new):

Strange weather we're having, said winemakers in Bordeaux this week. The 2007 grape harvest has started and never, not in the last 15 years, not in 20 years, not in 35 years, has anyone seen anything like it.

Wine expert Denis Dubourdieu, a professor at Bordeaux's main university and consultant to a number of chateaux, says it's the first time in his 35-year career he has seen vines flower so early in the year, and grapes ripen so late.

"We have never been in a situation like this," he said. "It could be good. We don't know. Could it be global warming, who knows? It could be Nicolas Sarkozy [the new French president]. There is no explanation. It could be simply the irregularities of an Atlantic climate."

The problems, mainly, relate to the weather.

But, not all the problems are weather related:

"The euro is killing us," [Californian wine merchant, Jeffrey] Davies said. "The payments for the 2006 wines (which are pre-sold as futures prior to bottling) are due this month, and I'm concerned some US clients may cancel their orders," he said, adding that currently selling anywhere outside of the eurozone was going to be an added problem for Bordeaux wines.

"There is still a fair amount of the 2005 vintage which has not been sold to the end user, but it might go in the OND period - October, November, December - which is when 60 percent of wine is sold in the US," he said. Otherwise, he fears, there could be a bottleneck with the 2006's, which would be compounded by the 2007's.

Asked how much he thought prices should go down for the 2007 vintage Davies said, the more the merrier. "Let's get this stuff out of here and get people drinking it, not collecting it."
"Bordeaux is producing some of the best wines in the world, but we need to get back to parity with the dollar in terms of pricing and make it more accessible," he said.

Roach Maternity Motel

Britain's NHS suffers another black eye:

Health bosses have been forced to close a hospital maternity unit - because of a cockroach infestation.

Patients were packed into a cramped temporary ward in the children's department with beds separated only by curtains after the creepy-crawlies were spotted.

The unit at Rochdale Royal Infirmary, Greater Manchester had to be shut down and the children's play room used for storage while fumigation took place.

It was expected that the unit - earmarked for closure in a shake-up announced by health secretary Alan Johnson - would be shut for almost a week after the shock discovery of the bugs, which can carry salmonella, several viruses or even polio.

.... Days earlier, the Infirmary was forced to stop admitting patients to the children's ward because of staff shortages.

Meanwhile, South of the Border

The Spanish Socialists are cutting taxes and enjoying it:

Spain's public debt will fall to around 34 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) next year from the 36.2 percent forecast for this year, Economy Minister Pedro Solbes has said.

The country's public debt stood at 46.2 percent of GDP when his Socialist government came to power in 2004 and will drop by 12 percentage points to sit at 34.2 percent of output by the end of its term in office next year, he told parliament on Tuesday.

The government, which is facing a general election next March, approved a 2008 budget that forecasts a budget surplus of 0.3 percent of GDP and calls for EUR 2.3 billion in tax cuts.

The government expects the Spanish economy, one of the most dynamic in the 13-nation eurozone, to expand by 3.3 percent next year after growth of 3.8 percent this year.

Faucon de Croissance

Just growing pains, says Sarko:

President Nicolas Sarkozy's government on Wednesday unveils its first budget since taking office, with state spending under scrutiny after the prime minister warned that France was bankrupt.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon caused a stir last week when he said the nation was "in a situation of bankruptcy" after decades of accumulated budget deficits and called for a change in mindset.

....Despite the dire state of public finances, Sarkozy dismissed suggestion that the nation was headed toward a belt-tightening austerity plan and said economic growth was key to filling state coffers again.

"I have committed myself to getting public finances under control in France and I will do it," Sarkozy said in New York on Tuesday where he attended a session of the UN General Assembly.

There will be no austerity plan," he added. "France's economic problem is very simple: we have discouraged hard work and we must encourage it (...) to gain growth."

Talk Not Cheap

For a Hollywood director:

Die Hard director John McTiernan has been sentenced to four months in prison after a judge refused his request to withdraw a guilty plea.

....McTiernan, 56, pleaded guilty last year to making false statements to FBI agents investigating disgraced celebrity detective Anthony Pellicano.

He tried to withdraw his plea, claiming insufficient legal representation.

The 56-year-old's lawyer has indicated that an appeal will be mounted.

....When he entered his guilty plea last year, the film director told a judge that he had denied knowing about Anthony Pellicano's alleged wiretapping activities during his FBI interview.

But he then admitted he had used the detective to wiretap Charles Roven, who he worked with on the film Rollerball.

Sleeping With the Enemies

And several others, including Napoleon:

Lady Jeanne Campbell , who has died aged 78, was a journalist who reported for the Evening Standard from New York for many years; she was also the former wife of Norman Mailer, the daughter of the reprobate 11th Duke of Argyll and the favourite granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook.

....Lady Jeanne was wild. So numerous were her love affairs that James C Humes (a speechwriter for many American presidents) claimed in his memoirs, Confessions of a White House Ghostwriter, that she was the only woman to have known "Biblically" Presidents Khrushchev, Kennedy and Castro — and all, he claimed, within the space of a year. Humes suggested that Kennedy went through his paces at her Georgetown house in October 1963; Khruschev at his dacha in April 1964; and Castro in Havana the following May.

[She] was the daughter of Ian Campbell, the handsome playboy who was heir to Niall, the bachelor 10th Duke of Argyll, his eccentric first cousin once removed. Her mother was Janet Aitken, daughter of the proprietor of the Daily Express.

Jeanne's parents had met at a casino in Le Touquet, when Janet was 17 and Ian 24. Janet later recalled that her husband had been "long on charm but short on judgment at the gaming tables". They married in December 1927, but the union got off to an unpropitious start when the groom — intending to instruct his bride in her marital duties — took her to watch a display of graphic lovemaking in a brothel. He was soon selling his bride's jewels to pay his gambling debts.

Jeanne was born on December 10 1928....

After the war Jeanne trained as an actress, even joining the Old Vic, before going down with pneumonia. In 1949 she went to live with Beaverbrook, and travelled with him to the Far East, Europe, Barbados and the United States.

While she remained close to her grandfather, particularly in his old age, he frequently berated her for her wilful and extravagant behaviour....She attributed this characteristic to his Presbyterian background; whenever he had acquired a mistress, he felt guilty about her, and thus began treating her badly.

When Beaverbrook died he left Jeanne the income from a $500,000 trust. Jeanne grew up rather "fresh", in the words of one of her passing admirers, Claus von Bulow. In 1953 it appeared that she might be about to marry William Ropner, a scion of the British shipbuilding clan, but instead she outraged her grandfather by succumbing to the charms of Sir Oswald Mosley, Bt, the former Blackshirt leader and a well-practised seducer.

By this time Jeanne was tall, vivacious, somewhat buxom and possessed of sparkling eyes. Mosley pursued her partly because he saw her as a conduit to Beaverbrook and hoped for favourable publicity for his Union Movement. The old man was not taken in, however, and the couple met clandestinely in a series of London flats. In the end Beaverbrook threatened to cut her off if she stayed with Mosley, and in 1956 he dispatched her to New York to write for the Evening Standard.

....Between 1959 and 1961 Jeanne had an intense affair with Henry Luce II, founder and owner of Time-Life Inc, and the husband of the redoubtable Clare Booth Luce. Jeanne had met him on holiday with Beaverbrook, at a time when she was working as a researcher at Time. He secured her a job at Life magazine, and came close to leaving his wife for her.

In the spring of 1961 Jeanne met Norman Mailer, and soon became pregnant by him.

....After a short, tempestuous marriage, which ended with Mailer's infidelity, she left him, and they were divorced in Mexico in 1963. He rewarded her by depicting her as the bitch in his novel An American Dream. He later described her as "a dear pudding of a lady" and "a remarkable girl, almost as interesting, complex and Machiavellian" as himself.

....It was said that Jeanne received a large advance on her memoirs but blew it on a villa in Greece without ever writing the book. Latterly she lived in a tiny walk-up flat in Greenwich Village, New York, and slept in her last surviving treasure — Napoleon's campaign bed.