Category: today’s top story

“Belgium-based Yuzuko Horigome was transiting through Frankfurt Airport last week after performing in Japan … When she tried to walk through the green gate for travellers arriving in the EU with nothing to declare, customs officers stopped her and said she needed to pay 190,000 euros in duty on her 1741 Guarnerius violin.” (They’re now demanding an additional 100% fine.)

“A team of US scientists believe they will be able to test the synthetic tissue, which would be injected into damaged vocal cords, next year. They said animal tests had shown it was safe.”

“Diller worked steadily for decades, in nightclubs and on television. She built her stand-up act around the persona of the corner-cutting housewife (‘I bury a lot of my ironing in the backyard’) with bizarre looks, a wardrobe to match (by ‘Omar of Omaha’) and the faithful [husband] ‘Fang’.”

Here’s how. (New York TImes Book Review, you might want to take some notes.)

“[The] three members [of the punk rock collective] who were jailed in March following a guerrilla performance denouncing President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral have unwillingly emerged as vivid – and very different – characters.

“Preservationists and archaeologists are warning that fighting in Syria’s commercial capital, Aleppo – considered the world’s oldest continuously inhabited human settlement – threatens to damage irreparably the stunning architectural and cultural legacy left by 5,000 years of civilizations.”

“Exclusive interviews over the past several weeks with Chinese art dealers, auction house officials and others reveal a level of corruption significant even by Chinese standards, and more, the potential global dangers of an art market now at unprecedented heights – and growing.”

“Helen Gurley Brown, who as the author of Sex and the Single Girl shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but thoroughly enjoyed it – and who as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more – died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.”

When a compulsive hoarder died, buried by his stuff, the clean-up man didn’t realize at first the value of a pile of stuff from the dead man’s apartment. Then he started watching Antiques Roadshow – and the story got (very) big.

“Workers in the union that represents about 90 employees of the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor Museum in Lincoln Park completed voting last week to authorize their two-person bargaining team to call a strike if talks fail.”