MORE CONSPICIOUS CONSUMPTION

"New York – A giant gem will hit the auction block in New York this autumn with the sale of the 32-carat emerald-cut Annenberg diamond, which is expected to fetch as much at $5 million, Christie's said on Wednesday. The flawless ring-mounted diamond, owned by philanthropist Lee Annenberg, widow of publishing magnate Walter Annenberg, leads the auction house's magnificent jewels sale on October." (Yahoo News, 22 July) RD

THE DIGNITY OF LABOUR?

"Service with a smile is no longer just a catchy slogan, Japanese railway staff are now required to check their chirpiness every morning. Keihin Electric Railway has introduced a "Smile Scan" system at 14 of its railway stations, and staff are being asked to double check their grins at the door. They sit down in front of a computer with nothing more than a web cam, log in, and the system then judges just how well they make or fake a smile. The system also gives feedback such as "Your smile is getting better" or even just "Smile like you're happy!"
(Yahoo News, 23 July) RD

"OUR BETTERS" IN ACTION

"Three city majors, two state politicians and five rabbis were among 44 people arrested across New Jersey yesterday when federal agents cracked an alleged Soprano-style crime ring accused of bribery, money laundering and trafficking body parts and counterfeit handbags. In a sweep that shocked even residents hardened to the state's endemic corruption, officer from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) raided synagogues, government offices and a Jewish school early yesterday before bussing suspects to the FBI headquarters in Newark." (Time, 24 July) RD

2 FOR 1 CHURCH OFFER

"The Church of England has developed a two-in-one wedding and baptism service as it seeks to make peace with families "living in sin". The "batch and hatch" liturgy allow wedding couples to baptise their children after the ceremony. Parent can even get baptised themselves. The intention is to encourage cohabiting parents to marry, but critics said that the service appeared to sanction having children outside of marriage. One of the Church's own bishop described the move as "nutty". (Times, 23 July) RD

LAND OF THE FREE?

"This summer, on a remote stretch of desert in central Utah, the National Security Agency will begin work on a massive, 1 million-square-foot data warehouse. Costing more than $1.5 billion, the highly secret facility is designed to house upward of trillions of intercepted phone calls, e-mail messages, Internet searches and other communications intercepted by the agency as part of its expansive eavesdropping operations. The NSA is also completing work on another data warehouse, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome. The need for such extraordinary data storage capacity stems in part from the Bush administration's decision to open the NSA's surveillance floodgates following the 9/11 attacks. According to a recently released Inspectors General report, some of the NSA's operations -- such as spying on American citizens without warrants -- were so questionable, if not illegal, that they nearly caused the resignations of the most senior officials of both the FBI and the Justice Department. Last July, many of those surveillance techniques were codified into law as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FAA)" (Salon.com, 22 July). RD

When the killing stops?

An article in the Metro (28th July) a colonel Stuart Tootal said “I was extremely fortunate not to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)” “Suicide has accounted for more Falklands vets than the conflict did and it was a fairly conventional war”
Reminds me of a statistic I read about the Vietnam war where 58 thousand US soldiers died and over 122 thousand committed suicide after the war ended.

ALL RIGHT FOR SOME

35 chefs working out of a tent in a field, serving hot food for 700
celebrities

As celebrities and models sit down for lobster salad and beef with Cartier's wealthy customers, there is no mention of economic woes.
"Recession? What recession?" quips a 20-something model as she lights a cigarette after the meal. "In my world there is no recession."

An invite to Cartier's own marquee, where Mr Mosimann plies his trade, is the hottest ticket.
This year marks the jeweller and watchmaker's 25th year as main sponsor, and the company remains committed to the exclusive event. ( BBC NEWS 28th July)
"I don't want to spend money just to spend money," says Arnaud Bamberger, managing director of Cartier UK, wary of recessionary pressures. "But I do feel that when you have built up something over a number of years and it has legitimacy then I don't want to lose the momentum."

THREAT AND COUNTER-THREAT

Jafari said Israel was entirely within the reach of Iran.

Israel, widely believed to be the Middle East's only nuclear power, has repeatedly described Iran's nuclear program as a threat to its existence. Iran refuses to recognize Israel.
Jafari said Israel was entirely within the reach of Iran.
"Our missile capability puts all of the Zionist regime (Israel) within Iran's reach to attack," Jafari said. "The Zionist regime is too small to threaten Iran."(msnbc 25th July)

DOLE MONEY CHAOS

Kenneth Kottwitz, a laid-off cabinet maker in Phoenix, waited three months for his benefits to arrive. He exhausted his savings, lost his apartment and moved to a homeless shelter.
Luis Coronel, a janitor at a San Francisco hotel, got $6,000 in back benefits after winning an appeal. But in the six months he spent waiting, there were times when he and his pregnant wife could not afford to eat.
“I was terrified my wife and daughter would have to live on the street,” Mr. Coronel said.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said: “Obviously, some of our states were in a pickle. The system wasn’t prepared to deal with the enormity of the calls coming in.”
The program’s problems, though well known, were brushed aside when unemployment was low. “The unemployment insurance system before the recession was as vulnerable as New Orleans was before Katrina,” said Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, who is chairman of a House panel with authority over the program. ( msnbcnews 24th July)

FROM SPY TO TYCOON

"Alexander Lebedev is telling the story of how he met his girlfriend, Elena Perminova, who is 22 and heavily pregnant. We are sitting in the dining room of Lebedev's house in the ultra-exclusive enclave of Rublyovka, just west of Moscow, early this year. The house includes an underground pool with a cherub-laden fresco on the ceiling, Italian marble floors and a huge ovoid window onto a grand staircase that, Lebedev says, is typical of classical Italian architecture. Outside, there are four or five guards milling around in the driveway. Former President Boris Yeltsin once lived beyond the trees on the other side of a nearby tennis court, now covered in snow. A black BMW with tinted windows, its engine running, sits next to a wall that wraps around the compound. Lebedev, 49, dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt and black vest, is sporting his signature glasses with rectangular lenses. He has tousled grey hair and a mostly English accent that sounds carefully studied, because that's exactly what it is - in the 1980s, Lebedev spied for the KGB while posing as an economic attachÉ at the Soviet embassy in London." (Yahoo News, 17 July) RD

BAD NEWS FOR OTHERS

"The FTSE 100 registered its sixth consecutive gain on Monday, its longest rally of the year so far. But Smith & Nephew lagged behind the trend after its house broker voiced swine flu fears. The orthopaedic device maker fell 2.4 per cent to 440¾p after Cazenove said the pandemic could lead hospitals to cancel elective procedures." (Financial Times, 20 July) RD

GOOD NEWS FOR SOME

"Some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies are reaping billions of dollars in extra revenue amid global concern about the spread of swine flu. Analysts expect to see a boost in sales from GlaxoSmithKline, Roche and Sanofi-Aventis when the companies report first-half earnings lifted by government contracts for flu vaccines and antiviral medicines. The fresh sales – on top of strong results from Novartis of Switzerland and Baxter of the US, which both also produce vaccines – come as the latest tallies show that more than 740 people have died from the H1N1 virus, and millions have been affected around the world. ... A report last week from JPMorgan, the investment bank, estimated that governments had ordered nearly 600m doses of pandemic vaccine and adjuvant – a chemical that boosts its efficacy – worth $4.3bn (€3bn, £2.6bn) in sales, and there was potential for 342m more doses worth $2.6bn."
(Financial Times, 20 July) RD

A GRAVE BUSINESS

Willie Esper, a gravedigger who helped expose an alleged scheme to dig up
graves and resell plots at Burr Oak Cemetery in suburban Chicago, says another
worker warned him to keep his mouth shut or risk losing his job.

Loose bones kept turning up as he practiced digging holes with a backhoe in a supposedly unused section of Burr Oak Cemetery, a historic black graveyard near Chicago. Esper refused to keep his mouth shut about the grisly things he saw, leading to the arrest of four cemetery workers accused of digging up and dumping hundreds of bodies and reselling their plots.

(msnbc 21st July 09)

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Describing themselves as 'good squatters', the men said they had plastered the
ceilings, linked up the electricity and had running water in the three storey
eight bedroom house in which they live rent free

"Squatters have moved into a £3 million property on one of the richest streets in Britain, only a few doors down from royalty, financiers and an industrialist billionaire. The three men, from Romania and France, have been living at the run-down house on The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, north London, for the last two months. Not far away lies Lakshmi Mittal's £40 million gated home, Summer Palace, while members of the Saudi Arabian and Brunei royal families own large properties further along the road." (Daily Telegraph, 15 July) RD

A MAD, MAD WORLD

"A French court will examine whether the elderly heiress to the L'Oreal fortune, Europe's richest woman, was in her right mind when she lavished gifts worth close to $1.4 billion on a younger male friend. Prosecutor Philippe Courroye, who has been probing for over a year the gifts made by Liliane Bettencourt to photographer and socialite Francois-Marie Banier, told Reuters on Wednesday the case would come to trial in September. Banier, 62, a fixture in fashionable Paris circles for four decades, has received artwork, checks, cash, life insurance and other gifts from Bettencourt since 2002. Judicial sources estimate the total value of the gifts at about 1 billion euros. "What I have given to Francois-Marie Banier, though it's a lot, is not that much when you put it in perspective," Bettencourt told the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche in December, in her only interview on the matter. Bettencourt, 86, is the biggest shareholder in cosmetics giant L'Oreal, the company her father founded. Her fortune was estimated at $13.4 billion by Forbes this year, placing her in 21st position on the magazine's list of billionaires." (Yahoo News, 15 July) RD

A CARING SOCIETY?

"A bleak picture of a mental health service that tolerates bullying and houses children alongside adults in breach of guidelines is revealed in a damning report from a government monitoring body. The Mental Health Act Commission claims many more patient deaths will occur through inadequate staffing and lack of training. The 248-page study, the last by the commission before it is replaced by the new Care Quality Commission, highlights how patients put on suicide watch are often poorly observed, leading to tragedies half-concealed by "falsification" of nursing records." (Observer, 19 July) RD

A BOOM DURING THE SLUMP

"The greed and self-centredness of the bankers that helped to cause the credit crunch is costing taxpayers around the world billions of pounds - but has brought a counter-cyclical boom to one business off the Essex coast. The Causeway Retreat, on a private island in the Blackwater estuary, has had a flood of stressed and substance-abusing financiers. ...Bankers account for about 60% of clients at the retreat, which occupies all of 400-acre Osea Island. ... A week's stay in the luxurious manor house costs £10,000; more mundane cottage accommodation is £5,000 per week." (Observer, 12 July) RD

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

"What does a Danish shipping magnate give himself for a birthday? Well if you're Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller, who turned 96 on Monday, you get yourself an 82-foot sailing yacht, according to the daily Berlingske Tidende said. The $11 million boat is a Finnish-built Swan and is Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller's eighth yacht, the paper said. Like his earlier boats, it will be christened "Klem," which means "hug" in Danish and is formed by the first initials of the names of his daughters Kirsten and Leise and his late wife Emma Maersk, the newspaper said. Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller's billions comes from the A.P. Moller-Maersk's Group, which is the world's biggest container shipping company." (Yahoo News, 13 July) RD

GREEN SHOOTS OF RECOVERY?

"UK unemployment rose by a record 281,000 to 2.38 million in the three months to May, the Office for National Statistics has said. The jobless rate increased to 7.6%, the highest in more than 10 years. The number of people claiming unemployment benefit increased by 23,800 in June to 1.56 million, which was less than analysts had forecast. Unemployment among young people has been especially acute, as firms cut jobs to reduce costs in the downturn."
(BBC News, 15 July) RD

WARLORDS AND WASHINGTON

"The Bush administration repeatedly sought to block investigations into alleged killings of up to 2,000 Taliban prisoners by a US-backed Afghan warlord in 2001, The New York Times reported Friday. Top US officials discouraged separate probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department and the Pentagon into the mass killings because it was conducted by the forces of General Abdul Rashid Dostam, a warlord then on the Central Intelligence Agency's payroll, the Times said on its website. Dostam's militia had worked closely with US Special Forces during the US-led invasion and was part of the Northern Alliance, which helped the United States topple the Taliban." (Yahoo News, 10 July) RD