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29 March 2024

Best of Web: Madame Cezanne was `stolen'

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By Staff & Agency

A Frenchman has claimed that a Cezanne masterpiece that belonged to his family was stolen by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and it now hangs on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

‘Madame Cezanne in the Conservatory’ – believed to be worth between $50 million and $70 million – was among the massive art collection of Ivan Morozov stolen by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, his grandson Pierre Konowaloff has claimed in a petition filed in the Manhattan federal court, reports New York Post.

According to the lawsuit, an American collector Stephen Clark purchased the painting along with a Van Gogh and several others through a Russian laundering operation in 1933.

After the death of Clark in 1960, the Van Gogh was gifted to the Yale University and the Cezanne to the Metropolitan museum. Konowaloff is also suing Yale for the Van Gogh.

He did not file a lawsuit sooner because until the death of his father in 2002, no one did a full accounting of his family’s stolen works, most of which are in Russian museums.

Meanwhile, both -- the museum and Yale -- claim proper ownership titles to the works and would defend themselves.
 

 

'Rat curry' served to students

Image for illustrative purpose only. (SUPPLIED)

Police are investigating the chef at a canteen of a leading university in Bangladesh after a student found a rat's head in a bowl of chicken curry, sparking protests.

The student made the gruesome discovery while eating lunch on Monday and fell sick immediately, the head of security at Rajshahi university in western Bangladesh, Chowdhury Muhammad Zakaria, told AFP.

"We've launched an investigation to find out why rodent meat was served to students," he said Wednesday, adding that the chef had been fired and handed over to police, and the canteen closed temporarily.

"We don't know if this was an accident or deliberate," he said, adding that the police were investigating.

The incident led to protests by students at the university, the country's second largest with over 25,000 students, who were already demonstrating about a recent hike in the price of meals at the canteen.

Rats are common in Bangladesh and are responsible for widespread damage to crops every year.

A recent report by Dhaka University's nutrition department found the quality of food served at dining halls in public universities across the country was of poor quality and often prepared in unhygienic conditions.

 

Cheetah delays Qantas flight in Australia

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Passengers on a Qantas flight were delayed  Wednesday when the pilot reported difficulties in getting one passenger on board -- a cheetah.

"We're sorry for the delay, but we're having some problems loading the cheetah," the pilot reportedly told passengers on board the domestic flight as it sat on the tarmac at Melbourne airport.

Qantas said the Adelaide-bound flight was delayed for 36 minutes after ground staff had problems loading the pallet carrying the big cat, which was bound for a South Australian zoo.

"It was nothing to do with the cheetah being upset," a spokeswoman for the airline told AFP. "It was purely just loading the pallet onto the aircraft."

The Australian airline, which has been been in the news lately after an engine blast on one its long-haul Airbus A380s grounded its superjumbo fleet for three weeks, said the animal was placed on the next flight to Adelaide.

Qantas said that it was regularly called upon to transport zoo attractions such as the cheetah.
"We move tens of thousands of animals each year," the spokeswoman said.

"We've recently moved some fairy penguins; we've moved a hippo, gorilla, crocodile, Tasmanian devils. We move livestock."

Asked whether the airline, known as the "flying kangaroo" had ever moved its bounding namesake, the spokeswoman replied: "We probably have."

 

Chopper rescues Frenchwoman trapped in tree

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A Frenchwoman had to be rescued by helicopter after she got stuck in a tree where she took refuge from a herd of wild pigs she ran into while strolling in a valley, police said Wednesday.

The 30-year-old was walking near the southwestern town of Bagneres-de-Luchon on Monday when she took fright after seeing the boars and climbed up a nearby tree.

When she later tried to climb down she fell two metres (six feet) and got stuck in branches from where she called rescue services with her GPS-equipped mobile phone and was able to give them her exact location, police said.

When rescue workers arrived they decided they would need a helicopter to extricate her safely form the tree and summoned one from a nearby base.

"She was shivering and suffering slightly from hypothermia" but had no broken bones or other injuries, said a rescue worker.

 

Now, pay for smokers to kick the habit

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Taxpayers will pay for nicotine patches and other anti-smoking drugs for addicts wanting to kick the habit under changes to the pharmaceutical benefits scheme.

The measure will dramatically cut the price of patches in Australia - from $160 a month to $5, reports Herald Sun.

Concession card holders will be able to buy nicotine patches under the PBS as part of a quit smoking program from February 1 next year.

The decision came after submissions to the Federal Government from the Cancer Council, Heart Foundation, Quit Victoria and the Public Health Association of Australia.

Responding to the use of taxpayer subsidies for smokers, Cancer Council CEO Ian Olver said that the cost of subsidies was far outweighed by savings to the health system.

"This is the usual problem of balancing a short-term expenditure for a long-term gain.

"The burden of disease that smoking causes costs us an enormous amount of money each year," he said.

Lost productivity in the workforce from smoking is also a problem.

 

Hills alive with UFOs

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An Australian man may have found evidence that aliens really do exist.

Adam Cainero believes he captured a photograph of an alien spacecraft hovering above an escarpment in the Southern Tablelands near Braidwood, reports The Daily Telegraph.


After an unsuccessful weekend fossicking for gold, Cainero and a friend were making the long trip home when he stopped to take a snap of the steep mountain they had driven down.

When he got home, Cainero realised he had found gold of another kind after all.

Earlier this year The Daily Telegraph revealed the suburbs around Gosford, on the Central Coast, were the state's biggest hot spot when it came to UFO sightings, with dozens of cases reported every year. Each month people turn up to meetings to share their UFO experiences.

The region was the scene of one of Australia's most baffling UFO cases - a series of sightings in 1995 and 1996 - reported by police and many other credible witnesses.

Residents saw shiny UFOs hovering above water.

 

Hic! UK drinks the most, India the least

Indians drink the least in the world, with just 27 per cent ever having a tipple - compared with the international average of 71 per cent, says a survey.

The survey found that Britons, from whom Indians imbibed their taste for a drink, are the booziest people - around 84 per cent are drinkers, way ahead of the lowest ranking, India, Daily Mail reports.

The survey found nearly one in 10 Britons admits to drinking every day - almost twice the number in France.

Around 41 per cent of Britons drink regularly, more than the nearest rivals in Australia, 27 per cent, and the international average of 17 per cent, the newspaper says.

Around one in three Britons exercises for less than an hour a week, and one in four smokes.

Britain is fourth in the obesity league, with obesity rates at 33 per cent, after the US which tops the table with 53 per cent, Mexico 44 per cent and Australia 34 per cent.


Are married men nicer and better behaved? 

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Men tend to behave better when they're married -- both because marriage likely helps improve their behaviour, and nicer men are more likely to be married in the first place, according to a US study.

S. Alexandra Burt and colleagues at Michigan State University also found that men with fewer nasty qualities were more likely to eventually end up married.

Among men who did marry, some showed signs that bad behaviour -- specifically traits associated with antisocial personality disorder such as criminal behaviour, lying, aggression and lack of remorse -- decreased after they tied the knot.

Burt said that married men "are just not as antisocial to begin with. And when they get married, they get even less antisocial."

In the study, presented in the December Archives of General Psychiatry, Burt and her colleagues followed 289 pairs of male twins for 12 years, from age 17 to age 29. More than half of the twins were identical.

Men who married during the study period, about 60 percent of them, showed less antisocial behaviour at ages 17 and 20, suggesting that men with more of these traits are less likely to get married in the first place.

By the age of 29, unmarried men had an average of 1.3 antisocial behaviours, compared with 0.8 among marrie men.

However, among identical twins in which one was married and one wasn't, the married twin had fewer antisocial behaviours after the union than the unmarried twin.

Given that identical twins, with similar genetics and childhood environments are likely to have the same antisocial tendencies, this indicates that marriage helped weed out those bad behaviours.

It's not clear why men's behaviour might improve after marriage, said Ryan King at the University of Albany, State University of New York, who was not involved in the study.

Married men may spend more time with their spouses than their friends, and bad behaviour such as delinquency and binge drinking tend to be group activities, he noted.

In addition, married men "have more to lose" if they're caught doing illegal activities, and may care what their spouses think.

"Not everyone is equally likely to enter the institution of marriage, but those that do enter into it get some benefit from it," King said.

The results help explain consistent findings from other studies that men who are married commit fewer crimes. One recent study, for example, showed marriage was associated with a 35 per cent reduction in crime.
   
Studies have also found that married people as a group tend to be healthier than singles, though recent research suggests the health advantage of marriage may be fading. But married people tend to live longer, be less depressed and suffer less from heart disease and stroke.

 

Man killed in freak gardening accident


A man was killed while lopping a palm tree in his garden.

The 50-year-old man allegedly died when the large foxtail palm came crashing down, striking him in the face, the Northern Territory News said.

The man's body lay unnoticed for several hours before he was found and the alarm was raised, the media reported.

The freak accident occured on Friday but it took police five days to release news of the death

"We're not quite sure when (the man) died," the Police Superintendentsaid.

Many of his neighbours yesterday were unaware of the freak tragedy that had unfolded just next door.

 

 
 

 

A Frenchman has claimed that a Cezanne masterpiece that belonged to his family was stolen by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and it now hangs on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

‘Madame Cezanne in the Conservatory’ – believed to be worth between $50 million and $70 million – was among the massive art collection of Ivan Morozov stolen by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, his grandson Pierre Konowaloff has claimed in a petition filed in the Manhattan federal court, reports New York Post.

According to the lawsuit, an American collector Stephen Clark purchased the painting along with a Van Gogh and several others through a Russian laundering operation in 1933.

After the death of Clark in 1960, the Van Gogh was gifted to the Yale University and the Cezanne to the Metropolitan museum. Konowaloff is also suing Yale for the Van Gogh.

He did not file a lawsuit sooner because until the death of his father in 2002, no one did a full accounting of his family’s stolen works, most of which are in Russian museums.

Meanwhile, both Met and Yale claim proper ownership titles to the works and would defend themselves.