Word: royals
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Ironically, some of the brands Li & Fung is snapping up are the very ones it helped doom: American labels that were slow to export manufacturing overseas. Last year it acquired the license to sell Royal Velvet, a home-textiles brand that went bust in '03. "We wanted a company that knew how to source overseas," says Rick Platt, managing director of Official Pillowtex LLC, which bought the bankrupt firm...
...hypnotic depth of these fables is partly due to the fact that they are the product of more than one brain. Indeed, Adventures belongs to an ancient Persian canon of oral literature known as the dastan, which includes popular stories generated, modified and passed down by village elders and royal poets alike. Dastan fables were subject to endless revision, shimmering and shifting depending on who was telling them and who was listening. When a few unnamed storytellers recited their dastan of Amir Hamza to an Indian publisher in 1883, the transcription yielded 46 volumes, each some 1,500 pages...
...hard to say why, apart from habit, there should be any nostalgia for royal forms among Australians, especially when we are so fond of our national antielitism. But people, including Australians, want figures to admire. "If we don't have the Queen, whom can we look up to?" was one of the most frequent complaints at referendum time. The thought that in a democracy you don't look up to your superiors, but sideways at your fellow citizens, wasn't much aired in monarchist circles. And Australia has always been short not only of convincing shared ceremonies of national identity...
...least, as a surprise. For a man who normally is the very embodiment of decorum, Juan Carlos' retort to the Venezuelan president - "Why don't you shut up?" - seemed shockingly uncharacteristic. But a statement from the Palace on Tuesday may have offered a bit of context on the royal mood: the king's eldest child, the infanta Elena, was separating "temporarily" from her aristocratic husband, Jaime de Marichalar. Could His Majesty - coolheaded impeder of military coups, tireless inaugurator of schools and hospitals, diplomatic booster of all things Spanish - be feeling a little family stress...
...unexpected: The gossip rags have been hinting for months that all was not well in the Bourbon-Marichalar household. Besides, Elena and Jaime have always made a strange pair. Married for 12 years and parents of two children, she has always been the loyal, stoic princess tirelessly fulfilling her royal duties, while he, an eccentrically dressed dandy, has become a regular presence at New York fashion shows. But whatever their differences, and although the Palace stressed that the separation was a "temporary cessation of their marriage" and had no legal implications, the separation is nonetheless an uncharacteristic admission of problems...