President Mubarak.
Neither the end of the work week nor a government-sanctioned curfew extinguished the Egyptian protests, which are now approaching their eighth day. And demonstrations will certainly continue into tomorrow, when there will be a “march of millions.”
Over the weekend, Nobel Peace Prize winner and pro-democracy advocate Mohamed ElBaradei emerged as a possible sucessor to President Honsi Mubarak, whose unpopular 30-year tenure is at the root of the rioting. According to The Wall Street Journal, “ElBaradei’s endorsement by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest and best-organized opposition force, amounted to a historic display of unity between the country’s secular and Islamist opposition forces.” At a demonstration over the weekend, ElBaradei told protestors, “We have restored our rights, restored our freedom, and what we have begun cannot be reversed.”
To be sure, President Mubarak, who notably appeared on television with several high-ranking military officers, is still in power. As The Washington Post explains, that Mubarak has remained on good terms with the army is crucial to his continued reign. “The army is believed to have the power to topple Mubarak if it chooses, but so far it has not done so, which may mean its gestures of solidarity with the protesters are meant only to placate the movement as the president engineers a succession plan,” the Post reports.
Meanwhile, the State Department is encouraging Americans to leave Egypt, and chartered flights have been set aside for the purpose of expediting the exit. U.S. citizens should “consider leaving as soon as they can safely do so,” according to a communiqué from the American Embassy in Cairo.(Vanity Fair)
segunda-feira, 31 de janeiro de 2011
terça-feira, 25 de janeiro de 2011
BIOPLASTIA
Muitas pessoas pensam em fazer um pequeno retoque, com resultado rápido, para que já no dia seguinte, possam retornar às atividades normais, sem deixar sinais visíveis de uma possível plástica, Para essas pessoas há a Bioplastia, uma plástica sem cortes que consiste no preenchimento, em níveis mais fundos de determinadas áreas da face ou do corpo. O método corrige pequenas falhas e rejuvenesce, melhorando o contorno da região onde é realizado.
Alguns profissionais dizem que ela é o “Botox da próxima década”.
COMO SE FAZ:
O procedimento é rápido e indolor. A técnica é ambulatorial, o que significa que não é necessária internação. Todo o tratamento é realizado sob anestesia local, sem necessidade de sedação. Não há cortes e nenhuma restrição ou contra-indicação, a exposição ao sol deve ser evitada por um período de 2 a 3 dias.
O material utilizado neste procedimento é o PMMA, ou metacrilato, uma substância utilizada em medicina desde 1950, trata-se de um gel não-protéico que, inclusive, melhora a produção de colágeno, retardando o envelhecimento da pele
Logo após passar pelo procedimento, o paciente já pode sair, sem precisar de internação. Os minúsculos furinhos são cobertos por um esparadrapo antialérgico, que é retirado em dois dias.
Para amenizar a dor e o inchaço são realizadas compressas frias, além do uso de analgésicos leves e antiinflamatórios por alguns dias.
ONDE É POSSÍVEL MEXER:
FACE - nariz, maçã do rosto, contorno da mandíbula e queixo.
CORPO - pequenas correções em glúteos, mãos, panturrilhas e face interna das coxas.
quarta-feira, 19 de janeiro de 2011
Memoirs of Mrs. Pierre Schlumberger
From the moment the ambitious Portuguese beauty married an aristocratic French oil-industry tycoon, almost everything São Schlumberger did caused a stir, from her championing of artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Wilson to her open affairs (one with a much younger Egyptian), to the wildly extravagant, utterly fearless style of her homes and parties. Three years after her death, the author draws on a lengthy friendship to explore Schlumberger’s bewitching power, her fatal weakness, and the family dramas surrounding her gallant finale.
I bit of the apple. I did not nibble,” São Schlumberger, the wildly extravagant Paris hostess and patron of the arts, told me shortly before her death, at 77, in 2007. As the wife of Pierre Schlumberger, the oil-industry billionaire from one of France’s most distinguished families, the bewitching, Portuguese-born beauty had for nearly 40 years lived a fairy-tale life peopled with names such as Warhol, Twombly, Rothschild, Thurn und Taxis, Kennedy, and Chirac. In her later years, it became a life of high drama, tragedy, and controversy, most of it of her own making. “São wanted to astonish,” says her best friend, the American philanthropist Deeda Blair. “I don’t think it ever entered her thinking to be concerned about how other people perceived her. She was never afraid of being wrong.”
When São married Pierre Schlumberger, in 1961, he was 47 and she was already 32—a well-educated, highly ambitious woman getting off to a late start. Both had been previously married: she for under a year to a Portuguese boulevardier, he for two decades to a French aristocrat who had borne him five children before dying of a stroke in 1959. For the first few years of their marriage they lived in Houston, where Schlumberger Limited, the world’s largest oil-field-services company, had been based since World War II. In 1965, however, Pierre was ousted as president and C.E.O. in a family coup, and the couple moved to New York and later to Paris. It was in the City of Light, in an 18th-century hôtel particulier decorated by Valerian Rybar in a provocative mix of classic and modern styles, that São began to blossom—and people began to talk about her. How could she have signed Louis Seize chairs upholstered in chartreuse patent leather? And what about that discotheque in the basement? By then she and Pierre had two children, Paul-Albert, born in 1962, and Victoire, born in 1968, but motherhood—she once admitted to me—was not her forte.
One of those special creatures who could be both serious and frivolous, São made the contradiction work. On the one hand, she saw herself as a high-minded benefactor of the art of her time, a kind of latter-day Marie-Laure de Noailles, and was daring, farsighted, and generous in her pursuit of that vision. Soon after marrying Pierre, she began to expand his collection of Seurats, Monets, and Matisses by adding contemporary works by Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Roy Lichtenstein. She stuck her neck out by backing Robert Wilson’s early avant-garde operas, and she was one of the first to commission Andy Warhol to silkscreen her portrait. Both artists became staunch friends. She sat on the board of the Pompidou Center, in Paris, and was a long-standing member of the International Council of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she impressed such art-world heavyweights as Lily Auchincloss and Ronald Lauder with her intellectual acuity and discerning eye. She rarely went to an exhibition of a young artist’s work without buying something, so that, she explained, they could say they were in the Schlumberger collection. And she never tired of entertaining artists, starting with her next-door neighbor in the Rue Férou, Man Ray, and including Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, Marina Karella, Francesco Clemente, James Brown, and Ross Bleckner.
On the other hand, São, a sucker for glamour, was determined to be a jet-set star like Marella Agnelli or Gloria Guinness: a regular at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in Saint-Moritz at Christmas, the Cipriani in Venice in September, the Carlyle in New York for the spring and fall social seasons. At least three A-list publicists were enlisted to smooth her way: Serge Obolensky, Earl Blackwell, and Ghislaine de Polignac. In 1968 she gave her famous “La Dolce Vita” ball for 1,500 guests—everyone from Audrey Hepburn and Gina Lollobrigida to the would-be kings of Portugal and Italy showed up—at the 100-acre estate Pierre had bought for her near the posh Portuguese resort of Estoril. When the main house burned down after the anti-Fascist revolution of 1974, she had Pierre buy Le Clos Fiorentina, in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, one of the most beautiful old villas on the French Riviera, and hired Lord Mountbatten’s son-in-law, David Hicks, to renovate it. In Paris, she became a front-row fixture at the semi-annual haute couture shows and a major customer of Givenchy, Saint Laurent, Chanel, and Lacroix, taking her place in the International Best-Dressed List’s Hall of Fame. She also loved jewelry, the bigger the better, and thought nothing of turning up at Studio 54 after a black-tie party wearing an evening dress and major diamonds or rubies from Van Cleef & Arpels.
In the mid-70s, she embarked on a very public five-year affair with a charming Egyptian dandy who called himself Prince Naguib Abdallah. Though people talked, Pierre, who had suffered serious strokes in 1969 and 1975, went along with it. After that affair ended, she took up with Patrice Calmettes, a handsome French photographer and nightclub promoter in his late 20s. São was then in her 50s, so people talked more. After Pierre died, in 1986, São and her children and stepchildren spent years fighting over his estate, causing yet another scandal.
But nothing shocked Paris—a city where taste is everything—more than her over-the-top new apartment, on Avenue Charles Floquet in the Seventh Arrondissement. Conceived as a neo-Baroque fantasyland by the London decorator Gabhan O’Keeffe, it set São’s contemporary art and 18th-century furniture in a series of rooms that combined France with Portugal, Scotland with Persia, and Egypt with Hollywood. The pièce de résistance was the Andalusian-style terrace, with the Eiffel Tower rising directly above it. Dinner-party debates over whether O’Keeffe’s creation was “innovative” or “abominable” got so out of hand that at one soirée a pair of socialites had to be pulled apart before they came to blows. “It’s simply hideous,” said one visitor, “but totally fabulous!”
São fainted during the unveiling dinner in 1992, the first hint for most of her guests that she was ill. (She had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1982 and was already taking medication to keep her hands from shaking.) But neither ill health nor family feuds could slow her down. Right up to the new millennium, the pheasant and venison continued to be served, the Dom Pérignon and Château Margaux continued to be poured, and the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Susan Sontag, Betsy Bloomingdale, Gianni Versace, and the Duke and Duchess of Bedford continued to be stunned by her 65-foot-long grand salon, with its gold-leaf ceiling, purple-and-orange curtains held back by giant Murano-glass tassels, an enormous Lalanne sculpture of a fish with a bar in its belly, and mango-yellow walls hung with soaring canvases by Troy Brauntuch, Alexander Liberman, Rothko, Wilson, and Warhol. (“Amazing ... amazing ... amazing” was all that Valentino could say the first time he saw this room.)
“There was a sort of legend around São,” says Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, a nephew of the late French president and one of Paris’s leading contemporary-art dealers. “Because she became part of this old traditional family, but she did not play that game. She had a strong character, but at the same time she loved to dream, to fill her life with fantasy.”
“Most rich people are stiff and square. São—absolutely not!” says Pierre Bergé, the longtime partner of Yves Saint Laurent. “She was like a gypsy, in a way. She had more than taste. She had audacity.”
“Who had the most interesting parties in Paris? Who had the most interesting artists in Paris?” asks Robert Wilson. “It was a salon. Who else in Paris but São had all of us? Who?”
“Of all those ladies, she got it,” adds the New York photographer Christopher Makos, who was also helped by Schlumberger early in his career. “She was incredibly cool.”
“I always thought she was a bit of a fool,” says Florence Van der Kemp, the widow of the director of Versailles, expressing a view perhaps more representative of conservative high society. “But I liked her.”
fonte/Vanity Fair
segunda-feira, 10 de janeiro de 2011
Hillary Clinton: Double the charm.
Love Hillary!
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apparently thought that outgoing Mossad director Meir Dagan went too far on Thursday when he said that Iran would not obtain nuclear weapons before 2015. Fearing that the sanctions against Iran would start to come apart, Clinton chose to moderate Dagan's claims during meetings with Arab leaders in the Persian Gulf.
Clinton told reporters accompanying her on a three-nation tour of the Persian Gulf that Iran "remains a serious concern" no matter when it might be able to produce a nuclear weapon. And she urged countries in the region that do business with Iran "to do everything within reason" to help ensure the sanctions are enforced.
"We have had a consistent message to our friends in the Gulf that there is no part of the world that has more at stake in trying to deter Iran from becoming the creator and possessor of nuclear weapons than you," she said.
"I don't know that it gives much comfort to someone who is in the Gulf or in a country that Iran has vowed to destroy that it's a one-year or three-year timeframe. So, I think we should keep the focus where it belongs," she said, referring to the sanctions and efforts by world powers to persuade Iran to halt uranium enrichment.
Her comments were the first from a senior US official in response to reports on Friday that newly retired spy chief Meir Dagan thinks Iran won't be able to build a nuclear bomb before 2015, further pushing back Israeli intelligence estimates of when Teheran might become a nuclear power.
"We don't want anyone to be misled by anyone's intelligence analysis," Clinton said. "This remains a serious concern. We expect all our partners ... to stay as focused as they can and do everything within reason that will help to implement these sanctions."
On a television program in the Emirates, Clinton also talked up the sanctions.
"The most recent analysis is that the sanctions have been working. They have made it much more difficult for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions," Mrs. Clinton said during an appearance on the Emirati talk show, "Sweet Talk."
"Their program, from our best estimate, has been slowed down," she said. "So we have time. But not a lot of time."
...
U.S. officials, in private, have been saying in recent months that they believed Iran was experiencing significant difficulties in acquiring the raw materials to upgrade the centrifuge machines it has used to enrich uranium. They particularly cited shortages of such materials as carbon-fiber and maraging steel, which are critical to building the rotor tubes used in centrifuges and the stabilizing systems that keep the machines from breaking part.
Still, many U.S. officials have been reluctant to speak publicly about these successes, due to fears such assessments could dampen international resolve to continue through with tighter economic sanctions on Iran.
It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, tries to take credit for Stuxnet once the US Presidential elections start in earnest.
Labels: Hillary Clinton, Iran sanctions regime, Meir Dagan
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