Lovely news! Just lovely! Amy Winehouse shall be remembered and honored at this year's VH1 Divas ceremony! Some of the baddest bitches on the block will be paying their homage to the late great, singing her songs with their own divastic tudes. As for one of our personal favorites, we're THRILLED to know Florence Welch will be one of them, singing Back to Black. Gurl betta get it!!! Divas will be themed to some of the greatest music cities round the world: Memphis, Detroit, London, ...

An invitation to dinner at the French embassy in London is the dream of any true gourmet. Ambassador Jean Chauvel's chef is one of the world's great cooks. A tiny Tonkinese, Bui Van Han, 50, has presided over the Chauvel kitchen for 22 years, is a graduate of Paris' famed Cordon Bleu school, a master of haute cuisine. In the posts where he has cooked for the Chauvels—Paris, Bern, New York —the mere memory of his Pauppiette de Sole la Richelieu or Cotelettes de ...

You don't have to be a biologist or an anthropologist to see how closely the great apes--gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans--resemble us. Even a child can see that their bodies are pretty much the same as ours, apart from some exaggerated proportions and extra body hair. Apes have dexterous hands much like ours but unlike those of any other creature. And, most striking of all, their faces are uncannily expressive, showing a range of emotions that are eerily familiar. That's why ...

During one of the royal pageants that periodically choke the streets of London, a conservatively dressed American approached me. "You must be so proud," she trilled, and she became quite truculent when I told her I felt nothing but shame. "How can you hate your country?" she snapped. "What's the matter with you?" "I don't hate my country," I replied, "and there's nothing the matter with me. Like you, I am a republican." Foreigners rarely realize that British republicans ...

On Friday morning, walking through the Alberta area of Tuscaloosa, I saw a man sifting through the rubble of what used to be Affordable Mini Storage. He was going through the remains of his storage unit, searching for anything salvageable in the post-apocalyptic landscape of our home town. He picked up a toy from the debris, a still-sealed Ozzy Osbourne action figure and tossed it into his "save" pile. "At least he's in good shape, huh?" the ...

Even before its outcome is known, Libya's uprising could leave an indelible mark on the world economy: oil prices have rocketed since Tuesday and could rise even further amid the continuing turmoil that has prompted thousands of foreign oil workers to flee. Libya's oil output, typically 1.7 million barrels a day, has fallen by more than half since Tuesday, and its energy exports have ground to a complete halt. Worse news still for global oil markets is ...

Quintuplets were expected, quadruplets appeared. That was the story in London last week when government and colonial leaders signed the birth certificate of a new British Commonwealth nation. It was the Federation of Malaysia, which was to be composed of independent Malaya, self-governing Singapore, and the three British territories of Sarawak, Brunei and North Borneo. But at the last moment, the oil-sodden sultanate of Brunei pulled out of the agreement in a fit of pique over the final terms of ...

As the royal wedding approaches, I find myself thinking back to the other wedding 30 years ago that I helped cover as a young reporter in London and wondering from afar how the extravaganza on April 29 — and, beyond that ritual, the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton — will differ. During the summer of 1981, all of England seemed to have wedding fever, even my socialist pals. And as an intern working in ...

Back when he was establishing his career in investment banking, Roger Barnett made all the right moves: degrees from Harvard and Yale; jobs in London, Paris and New York City; and regular appearances in the society pages along with his wife Sloan. Today Barnett, 43, has a job at a direct-selling company in a nondescript office park about an hour inland from San Francisco. Like most people in direct sales, he has a touch of the evangelist about him. He ...

When people write on Chinese websites that they "love the future," it should be a sentiment the government can get behind. After all, the authorities in Beijing have pressed their subjects to embrace the country's bright economic prospects. But of late, "love the future" has taken on a new meaning. Online, people have begun to use the phrase, which is ai wei lai in Mandarin, as a code for the artist and political activist Ai Weiwei, whose name became too ...