New novel, movies in the works

       So many projects, so much success.That's the theme of the life of novelist Nicholas Sparks, whose latest novel,The Last Song ,(Hachette Book Group) was released in US bookstores earlier this month. If the title sounds familiar, that's because Sparks wrote the screenplay first after Miley Cyrus specifically said she wanted him to pen a movie for her.She's been filming the movie by the same name in Georgia.
       That movie and at least one more, maybe two,based on Sparks' books will be released in 2010.The movie version of Dear John is scheduled for a February 2010 release, and The Lucky One could be on the big screen by next year, although filming hasn't started.
       His personal life is going well, too, with a private school he started near top capacity for and the high school track team he has coached winning championships. He's moving back into a new, larger home that he built on the site of his previous home outside New Bern on the Trent River, some 180km southeast of Raleigh.
       So, can he just humour the rest of us and give us a crumb about what's going wrong in his life?As it turns out, not really.
       "All of these things are not straight-line-tosuccess things," he said in a phone interview."You have all the downs that it takes to get there.There are frustrations and struggles with the track team, frustrations and struggles with the school, and frustrations and struggles with the house. We just keep trying and trying and do our best."
       Although The Last Song began as a screenplay,
       Author Nicholas Sparks attends the 'Nights In Rodanthe' world premiere at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York.

Portuguese Nobel laureate gives up blog

       Outspoken Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, has given up the blog which he launched a year ago at the age of 85 to concentrate on his new book.
       "It has always been convenient that goodbyes be brief.... Goodbye therefore.Until another day? I sincerely don't think so. I have started another book and want to dedicate all my time to it," he wrote in his final blog entry.
       The author of Blindness and The Cave , who lives in acliff-top house in Lanzarote on Spain's Canary Islands launched the blog on in September 2008 with a "love letter" to Lisbon.
       He updated it regularly with lengthy entries in both Spanish and Portuguese on topics ranging from poverty in Africa to opposition to health care reform in the United States that have been published as a book in Portugal.
       In Saramago's latest novel Cain , which will be published later this year, the author absolves the Biblical figure of the same name for the murder of his younger brother Abel and puts the blame instead on God.
       Saramago left Portugal in the early 1990s after the conservative government in power at the time refused to allow his controversial novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to compete for a European literary prize.

New tallest man has longing for love

       The world's new tallest man,measuring 246.5cm, said he was looking for love as he was presented by Guinness World Records in London last week.
       Sultan Kosen,26, blotted out the iconic Tower Bridge as he posed for photographs on the banks of the River Thames in his first ever trip outside his native Turkey.
       He takes over the title from China's Bao Xishun, who stands "just" 2.36 metres.
       The Turk also has the world's largest hands and largest feet, measuring 27.5cm and 36.5cm respectively.
       And his giant hands dwarfed those proffered by amazed wellwishers as he turned heads in London, while reporters strained to get their microphones within reach of his head.
       Kosen's record was unveiled to mark the launch of the Guinness World Records 2010 edition. The book, now in its 55th year, includes the world's biggest burger,made in the United States and weighing 84kg, and records for the dog with the longest ears and the world's biggest skateboard.
       Kosen was unable to complete his schooling because of his extreme height,but works occasionally as a farmer to support his family.
       He said he hoped his newfound celebrity status would enable him "to travel and see the world and have a car that accommodates my size".
       "My biggest dream though, is to get married and have children - I'm looking for love," he said.
       The extreme difficulty of squeezing into a regular-sized car is one of the main disadvantages of his height, but he says it comes in handy for replacing light bulbs and hanging curtains for his mother.
       Kosen has three brothers and a sister,who are all normal-sized, but his rate of growth surged from the age of 10 because of a tumour which caused too much growth hormone to be released from his pituitary gland.
       The tumour was successfully removed in surgery and he finally stopped growing last year. He uses walking sticks and tires quickly if he is standing.
       Another pretender to the tallest title,Ukrainian Leonid Stadnyk, who claims to be 10.5cm taller than Kosen, fails to qualify for the record because he refused to be measured by Guinness World Records officials.
       Guinness editor-in-chief Craig Glenday travelled to Turkey to personally validate Kosen's height under strict guidelines, measuring him three times in one day because bodies expand and shrink throughout the day.
       Glenday said:"Sultan's an imposing figure, but a gentle, quiet man who's totally relaxed and unfazed about his unique standing in the world."

"The Lost Symbol"

       The mind of Dan Brown may be a cluster of codes, but in person he appears no more mysterious than your average tennis partner. He is that smiling, sandy-haired man with the dimpled chin you know from the jacket flap of The Da Vinci Code , the sporty looking fellow in blazer and slacks.
       After six years of letting his work do the talking - a conversation that whispered and screamed across the globe he is back, at least briefly, to promote his new novel,The Lost Symbol , and to reflect on how The Da Vinci Code changed him from unknown thriller writer to a symbol in his own right.
       "I wouldn't trade it for the world," he says, seated on a recent morning in a sunlit conference room at the headquarters of Random House, Inc."It's 95 percent wonderful. My life is much more multifaceted. My experiences have gotten to be much more interesting, the people I get to meet, the discussions I get to have."
       The book is done and he beams like a father,"so pleased this day has arrived".His publisher has blessed The Lost Symbol , with a first printing of 5 million,oversized for virtually any writer except Brown, whose sales for The Da Vinci Code top 40 million.The Lost Symbol has been at or near the top of Amazon.com's best-seller list since the novel was announced in the spring.
       The long wait for his new book, he says, is mostly due to the story,"mindboggling stuff" that required time to master. In The Lost Symbol , protagonist Robert Langdon returns from his European adventures of The Da Vinci Code .He has been summoned to Washington,D.C., and is quickly caught up in a fateful race against a murderous villain to find a hidden code that supposedly unearths an ancient secret to limitless knowledge and power.
       Like The Da Vinci Code , the new book is thriller,puzzler, research paper and travelogue. Langdon hurries about from the Library of Congress to the National Archives to the Washington Monument, a capsule of the journeys Brown took in working on the novel,travelling first class all the way, like receiving personal tours of the Library of Congress and other buildings.
       "Those things wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for The Da Vinci Code ," he notes.Library spokesman Matt Raymond confirmed that Brown had visited in April last year and had looked over some Bibles in the library's collection. He also met for about 30 minutes with Librarian of Congress James Billington for a "private discussion".
       Fame's unwonderful 5 percent is the kind that other major celebrities face: a loss of privacy that Brown says makes it impossible to tour for his new book, a heightened self-awareness that briefly, just a couple of months, he says, made it hard for him to write The Lost Symbol .He was also delayed by the 2006 copyright infringement trial in which writers Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh claimed Brown's book "appropriated the architecture" of their own work. Brown and Random House prevailed.
       "That was certainly a setback, mainly because it was a distraction and all that the energy that goes into a trial is not going into your work," he says."The worst part of it was having someone question my integrity, publicly."
       He was attacked often for The Da Vinci Code ,especially for alleging that Jesus and Mary Magdalene conceived a child. Scholars scorned him, and religious officials were offended, but Brown stands by his theory, finding it "makes more sense than the story I was told in church".
       Brown's new book is centred on the Freemasons,the secretive, centuries-old fraternity that has included George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He has great respect for the Masons, especially for their policy of accepting people of all religious faiths. But he wouldn't be surprised if someone gets angry.
       "There will be a lot said, not all of it will be nice,"he says."And I'm just kind of used to it."
       He doesn't talk a lot to the press, but Brown's history is as known as most authors' thanks in part to a mini-biography he never wished to produce a 69-page court document submitted for the London trial.
       He was born in 1964 in Exeter, New Hampshire,and still lives near there. His father, Richard Brown,taught maths at Exeter Phillips Academy. His mother,Constance Brown, was a musician. The first treasure hunts he knew were the ones his father arranged at Christmas. Brown majored in English at Amherst College, but also liked music enough to debate after graduating whether he should write stories or songs.Choosing songs, he moved to Los Angeles and caught on with no one except for the woman who became his wife, Blythe Newlon, the director of artistic development for the National Academy of Songwriters.
       As a young man, he compiled a list of "187 Men to Avoid", which proved amusing enough for the Berkeley Publishing Group to release as a book, in 1995, under the pseudonym "Danielle Brown". But his real breakthrough came two years earlier, on a vacation in Tahiti, when he read Sidney Sheldon's The Doomsday Conspiracy ."It held my attention, kept me turning pages, and reminded me how much fun it could be to read,"Brown wrote in his court papers."The simplicity of the prose and the efficiency of the storyline was less cumbersome than the dense novels of my schooldays,and I began to suspect that maybe I could write a
       "thriller" of this type one day.
       He debuted in 1998 with The Digital Fortress , an intelligence thriller, and followed with Deception Point (a novel he found boring to write) and Angels & Demons , which introduced at least a few readers to Langdon, the Harvard professor embodied for many by Tom Hanks' portrayals in the film versions of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons .His sales were poor and by 2001 he was in the same rut as so many authors - handling his own publicity and even selling books out of his car,a process that would now require a convoy of trucks.
       Brown changed agents, changed publishers (from Simon & Schuster to Doubleday, a Random House imprint), changed his luck and changed the industry.The Da Vinci Code , published in March 2003 was an immediate hit that "just parked", Brown says, remaining on best-seller lists for more than three years. He recalls an early sign of success - an appearance at a superstore in Washington, not longer after the book came out."We drove up and the store was surrounded with people and I thought there must have been a bomb scare."
       Barnes & Noble Inc. fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley says she knew vaguely of Brown before The Da Vinci Code , but had never read him. Encouraged by a Barnes & Noble executive to try Brown's novel, she was immediately drawn to the "breathless pace, the intrigue - the science and art were fascinating".
       "But I have to say my biggest takeaway from it was that I wanted to know more about everything he wrote about," Hensley says."I Googled my fingers off! It made me wish I had Robert Langdon or Dan Brown as a professor in my college years!"
       Brown is far richer than he was a few years ago, but his working life remains steady, he says. He rises at 4am and writes until noon, seven days a week, even on Christmas. He is often too drained to read, so instead he will play tennis or go for a run on the beach. Mark Twain's religious critique Letters from the Earth is one of the few books he has read for pleasure lately.
       Brown will talk and talk about Twain, Masons,pyramids, spirituality ("a work in progress", he says)and e-books (he reads them, and the paper kind,too), but some subjects repe. Ask about his next book and he will smile, in a nice way, and change the subject. Ask about politics, and he will cringe.
       The Lost Symbol doesn't name names, but works in criticisms of waterboarding and religious intolerance,passages that suggest the author was not a fan of the George W. Bush administration."The people who have read the book have told me that the timing of the book seems preordained," he says."And they will cite, among other references, the president [Obama] and the change in attitudes toward religion."
       Asked if the book was completed after Obama's election, he answers, thoughtfully, yes. Asked for his opinion of Obama, he declines comment, for the very future of his book.
       "What I'm trying to what to do in this book is send a universal message, and the second I pick a side, it just undermines everything," he says, adding that he underwent a "transformation" on The Lost Symbol ."(It's) really two things. The idea that science is starting to show our true potential and that that potential is so much greater than most of us imagined.... Tangentially, I feel like we're entering a time where prejudice, prejudice of religion in particular, will start to evaporate."

A battle for the Earth's soul

       The flood referred to by the title of Margaret Atwood's new novel isn't the biblical deluge, sent by God to wipe out wickedness and sin, but a waterless one: An uncommon pandemic that cannot be contained by "biotools and bleach", and that sweeps "through the air as if on wings", burning "through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror and butchery". This flood has killed millions upon millions, and electrical, digital and industrial systems are failing, as their human keepers die.
       In The Year of the Flood we are transported to a world that is part Hieronymus Bosch, part A Clockwork Orange ."Total breakdown" is upon the land, and a private security firm has seized power,taking control where the local police forces have collapsed from lack of financing. The Corps people not only use brutal tactics like Internal Rendition to enforce their will, but they are also conducting sinister experiments, monkeying with human and animal genetics and creating strange new mutant species.
       A kind of companion piece to her lumpy 2003 novel,Oryx and Crake , this book takes us back to that postapocalyptic future and it does so with a lot more energy, inventiveness and narrative panache.
       Like Oryx and the author's 1986 novel,The Handmaid's Tale , this is another dystopian fantasy that's meant to be a sort of cautionary tale about the wrongs and excesses of our own world - be it anti-feminism, denial of global warming,or violence and materialism. But while those earlier books were hobbled by didactic asides and a preachy, moralistic tone, Atwood has loosened up in this volume and given her imagination free rein.
       One woman, Toby, has survived inside an upscale spa, where she subsists on supplies from a storeroom and the garden, where they used to grow vegetables for customers' organic salads. She eventually ventures out, journeying back to her parents' old neighbourhood to find a rifle she'd buried under some patio stones. Her father had used the rifle to commit suicide, after his wife died of a mysterious illness.
       Toby later learns that her mother was most likely a guinea pig for a drug company named HelthWyzer that was "seeding folks with illnesses" via souped-up supplement pills -"using them as free lab animals, then collecting on the treatments for those very same illnesses".
       After her parents' death, Toby is forced to take a series of demeaning jobs, culminating in her employment at a revolting fast-food chain called SecretBurgers, which is rumoured to run human corpses through its meat grinders.There, she becomes the sexual toy of a violent, piggish manager named Blanco - until she is unexpectedly rescued by a group of demonstrators known as God's Gardeners, a hippielike sect pledged to preserve all animal and plant life. Toby will rise through the ranks of the Gardeners and eventually become one of their elders.
       When she realises that she is one of the few survivors of the Waterless Flood,Toby wonders why she was chosen:"Why has she been saved alive? Out of the countless millions. Why not someone younger, someone with more optimism and fresher cells? She ought to trust that she's here for a reason - to bear witness,to transmit a message, to salvage at least something from the general wreck. She ought to trust, but she can't."
       Among the other people living with God's Gardeners is a girl named Ren,who has been brought there by her mother, Lucerne, a HelthWyzer executive's former wife, who has run away from home with a lover. Ren will later be taken back to the HelthWyzer compound, where she falls in love with Jimmy - the hero of Oryx and Crake , also known as Snowman - who will break her heart by taking up with her best friend.
       After her biofather is kidnapped, Ren winds up working as a trapeze dancer at a sex club named Scales and Tails one of her teachers actually recommends it as a good job with health benefits and a dental plan - and it is there, in an isolation room, that Ren will wait out the Waterless Flood.
       In recounting the stories of Ren and Toby, Atwood does a deft job of turning them into credible human beings - not simply cartoon heroines wandering through a special-effects-laden apocalyptic landscape in which killing droughts and hurricanes and new diseases have led many to predict "a massive die-off of the human race".
       Although some of the chapters start with annoying passages detailing the Gardeners' ecological credo, Atwood largely refrains from the sort of proselytising that tarnished her earlier ventures into science fiction. By focusing on her characters and their perilous journeys through a nightmare world, she has succeeded in writing a visceral book that showcases the talents she displayed with such verve in her 2000 novel,The Blind Assassin.

A chilling tale of the cold war

       From the sorry final years of Leonid Brezhnev's rule, which ended at his death in 1982, to the arrival of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985, the Soviet Union seemed to be led, as David Remnick has put it, by a series of "half-dead men in half-lit hospitals".
       After Brezhnev came Yuri Andropov,then Konstantin Chernenko: Grey eminences who each died barely a year after coming to power. A weary Ronald Reagan asked in private, after learning of Chernenko's death,"How I am supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?"
       At this same moment the Soviet Union had succession issues of a far darker sort on its mind, David E. Hoffman writes in The Dead Hand , his authoritative and chilling new history of the Cold War arms race.
       His book takes its title from a Soviet doomsday machine first conceived under Brezhnev. Because the Soviets feared "decapitation"- the killing of its leaders in one fast, huge US nuclear strike they developed an automatic retaliatory system to launch their missiles even if their command structure no longer existed. Thus the fate of the planet would rest on the shoulders of a few low-ranking officers sweating in a concrete bunker.Those officers were the twitching fingers of a dead hand.
       Hoffman is a contributing editor at The Washington Post and was The Post 's Moscow bureau chief from 1995 to 2001.In The Dead Hand he delivers a readable,many-tentacled account of the decadeslong military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. He touches the usual bases, from the dawn of mutual assured destruction through the Nixonera attempts at detente to Reagan's unshakable devotion to the Strategic Defence Initiative, aka Star Wars.
       What's particularly valuable about Hoffman's book, however, is the skill with which he narrows his focus (and his indefatigable reporting) down to a few essential areas. Thanks to interviews and new documents, he provides the fullest - and the most terrifying - account to date of the enormous and covert Soviet biological weapons programme,developed in defiance of international treaties at the same time that the Soviets appeared to be earnestly interested in reducing their weapons stockpile.
       This biological weapons programme - Hoffman refers to it as "a dark under-side of the arms race"- included the development of a super germ that mounted a grisly one-two attack on its victims: It would make them mildly ill and then, once they appeared to recover,hammer them with a death blow.
       Hoffman details how truly paranoid the Soviets were that the US would launch an unprovoked nuclear attack. He offers an inside account of how Gorbachev stood up to his own generals to slow and then reverse the arms race. And he is particularly good on the dangers, after the Soviet Union's collapse, of its stockpiles of nuclear and biological weapons,much of this material stored in unguarded warehouses.
       Almost as dangerous were (and are)the tens of thousands of newly unemployed Soviet defence workers, some willing to sell weapons or skills to the highest bidder. Hoffman recounts the story of one chemical warfare expert who ended up selling Snickers bars and blue jeans in a Moscow open-air market.
       The Dead Hand is deadly serious, but this story can verge on pitch-black comedy -"Dr Strangelove" as updated by the Coen brothers. Hoffman has an eye for bleak, jagged details. When he writes about how the Soviet disposed of nuclear waste - even nuclear reactors - by dumping it at sea, he notes that workers shot at any waste barrels that surfaced.
       He observes the curious Soviet idea that it could predict a nuclear attack by looking for a spike in prices for blood donations in Britain."The KGB failed to realise," Hoffman writes,"that British blood donors are unpaid."
       He quotes Nixon on losing his interest in biological weapons."We'll never use the damn germs, so what good is biological warfare as a deterrent?" Nixon said."If somebody uses germs on us,we'll nuke 'em."
       Hoffman gives detailed reconstructions of large Soviet blunders, like the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983. But he contrasts these with quirkier (if no less unnerving, at least for the Soviets) events, like the day in 1987 when a disaffected young West German named Mathias Rust managed to land a single-engine Cessna near Red Square in Moscow.
       If The Dead Hand has a pair of looming antagonists, they are Reagan and Gorbachev, and Hoffman offers sympathetic accounts of both men's actions and thinking. About Gorbachev he is especially admiring."A leader's courage is often defined by building something, by positive action," he writes,"but in this case,Gorbachev's great contribution was in deciding what not to do." Gorbachev declined to up the ante by building a Soviet Star Wars missile system; he did not intervene during the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
       One of this book's few villains, at least on the international stage, is George H.W. Bush's Defence Department under Dick Cheney. The department opposed aiding the Soviets, as their country fell apart, to properly secure weapons.
       The Dead Hand is a large book but also a jumpy one; it's as full of quick cuts and dateline switches as a Bourne Identity movie. Hoffman is so careful not to bore his readers that he sometimes underestimates them, verging closer to Tom Clancy than to John Lewis Gaddis.More synthesis and cerebration would have made this good book better.
       The Dead Hand has a title that sounds like an early-period Stephen King novel.Its imagery is even more terrifying than King's, especially towards the end. The stray parts of the Soviet empire became - and to some degree still are, Hoffman writes -"a Home Depot of enriched uranium and plutonium, with shoppers cruising up and down the aisles".

PUTTING THE FUN BACK IN ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

       It is not easy to interview Zcongklod Bangyikhan editor of a day , the famous local pop culture magazine,and writer of Dokmai Tai Loek (Underworld Flower).The book - his ninth - is being published for the third time since its release in March this year, a relatively big success by local standards.
       The uneasy part had nothing to do with the interviewee;Zcongklod turned out to be an extremely pleasant, eloquent and bright young man. To blame was my reluctance to judge whether he is a hardcore environmentalist who has become an up-and-coming editor/writer, or vice versa. Moreover, the content of the interview bounced between books and the environment.
       Thirty minutes into the interview, Zcongklod began looking like an alienated green sheep in the hyped and intellectual world of publishing. While editors of intellectual and hype magazines grow up listening to cool music,reading highbrow or underground books and eschewing mainstream films, the current editor of the famous magazine grew up involving himself in environmental or poverty reduction campaigns and got his first job researching and writing a national report on climate change policy.
       The doubt was cleared after Zcongklod - a graduate from Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Economics - offered a self-description.
       "I am through and through an environmental activist disguised as a media-savvy person,"said Zcongklod, a former employee of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the famous non-government environmental organisation.His field of expertise is environmental economics,appraising the value of seemingly immeasurable subjects such as clean air, forests, rivers and carbon emission.
       The road he took to reach the publishing world is an extraordinary one. People in the literary/publishing field usually come from a liberal arts background, while Zcongklod never dreamed of becoming a writer.
       Zcongklod, now 31, discovered his knack for writing during his university years while participating in environmental camps. To make dull and serious-sounding environmental issues more attractive to middle-class students, Zcongklod would write creative slogans and create hype campaigns.
       For instance, he spiced up serious rice cultivation problems by naming an event "Golden Grains and November Rain". The trip successfully drew attention and extensive media coverage. One of the attendants was Wongthanong Chainarongsingha, editor of a day Magazine at that time. Wongthanong subsequently invited him to join the magazine.
       Zcongklod has penned columns on the environment in respected local dailies such as Krungthep Thurakij since he worked at the WWF.
       After moving into the publishing field,a book Publication - the owner of the magazine he worked for - decided to publish his books, all of them anthologies of his columns. His eighth book,Tonmai Tai Loek (Trees Underworld), is going into its sixth print. Abhisit Vejjajiva leader of the opposition party at that time - wrote the forward for the book.
       His current book,Dokmai Tai Loek , has received rave reviews, and talk of his concise and crisp prose, and particularly his unique yet tender way of looking at the things around him. Readers cannot help thinking it is the writer's perceptive green lens that helps him see the world entirely differently than most people. For those who judge books by their covers, his minimalist-style designs are creative and admirable.
       Zcongklod prefers short sentences, suitable for young readers, and he extensively uses graphic design to attract attention. He writes mostly about modern lifestyles and inspiring stories on environmental conservation. Do not expect to read preachy tales about victims of pollution or the science of garbage recycling or carbon emission.This book is for everyone, including those who love life and its indulgences. He has a broad range of cultural reference points - Manchester City Football Club as champions in term of environmental conservation, bighearted Barcelona Football Club and the other side of Radiohead, the world's most environmentally friendly rock band. My favourite is the story of Spranq, the Dutch graphic design firm that created Sprang Eco Sens type.The font was inspired by the holes found in some types of cheese and can help reduce the levels of toxins in inks used in printing.
       The passionate environmentalist/writer said he often falls in love with pop culture artefacts, graphic design and creative advertising campaigns; he believes this marketing took can help promote social and environmental campaigns. His taste is quite different since other environmentalists and NGOs often pour scorn at consumerism,not to mention advertising.
       "I believe in public relation campaigns and commercial brand building," he says,"which goes against the grain of most Thais, who are instilled with values of do-gooders being humble and modest. I believe good deeds must be publicised because society is lacking in good examples and deprived of real heroes.
       Zcongklod has interesting opinions about local environmentalists and news on the environment."Most activists I know are decent people. But they are too reclusive and that affects their ability to draw people's attention to their campaigns." Also, environmental news is too often grim, serious and irrelevant, he adds.
       Thus his books are, in some ways, his crusade to save the planet from climate change, resources depletion and pollution. And they are not only useful and re-readable but entertaining. It is not often that reading about environmental issues is fun.

REGIONAL DELIGHTS

       Winding its way down from the foothills of Tibet to the emerald green rice paddies of the delta, the Mekong River encompasses some of the most diverse backdrops in Asia. Slake your thirst for adventure with some adrenaline-fuelled activities in the jungle before relaxing on a beautiful beach overlooking the South China Sea. Delve deeper to discern the mosaic of peoples that make up the population and learn about their incredible culture and lifestyle.Discover the depth of the Mekong's delights.
       PEOPLE AND CULTURE
       Towering mountains and flat plains - the contrasting landscapes of the Mekong region have attracted a divergent group of people over the centuries. Discover the diversity of the Mekong with a visit to some of the minority regions and experience their culture.
       Xishuangbanna, Yunnan
       The original Dai (Thai) kingdom, the land of "Twelve Thousand Rice Fields" is a little slice of Southeast Asia in China. Penetrate the jungle to discover a cultural microcosm that is unlike anywhere else in the Middle Kingdom.
       Mondulkiri Province, Cambodia Translating as "Meeting of the Hills", this place is a world apart from lowland Cambodia and a blissful escape from the heat of the plains. The landscape includes a seductive blend of pine forests, dense jungle and hidden waterfalls, and provides a home to the Phnong people, famous for their elephant rearing.
       Chiang Mai, Thailand
       Undisputed capital of northern Thailand,Chiang Mai is a cultural hub that acts as a gateway to surrounding mountain retreats.It is a city of classic Lanna temples where you can learn Thai cookery, Buddhist meditation and traditional Thai massage.
       Luang Nam Tha, Laos
       Laos is an ethnic melting pot with anywhere between 49 and 132 tribal groups, depending on who you listen to. Luang Nam Tha is home to nearly 40 of these groups and acts as a gateway to the award-winning,community-based ecotourism project of Nam Ha.
       Mekong Delta, Vietnam
       Where the Mekong's epic journey comes to an end, it splits into nine dragons that give us the Vietnamese name of Cuu Long.Explore the delta on two wheels or go with the flow on a traditional boat. Get up close and personal with local life courtesy of a traditional homestay.
       Beach Retreats
       The Mekong is not the only well known water in the region - both Vietnam and Cambodia boast lengthy and beautiful coas-tlines. Vietnam might have been late to the beach party in this region, but it was worth the wait. With more than 3,400km of coastline, there are infinite stretches of powdery sand, hidden coves, lovely lagoons and tropical islands. Cambodia's coast is less developed and offers opportunities for aspiring Robinson Crusoes.
       Mui Ne, Vietnam
       Set on a seductive swathe of sand, Mui Ne,with its swaying palms and towering dunes,is an absolute charmer. Be pummelled on the beach by a masseur or pummelled by the waves with some watersports. Mui Ne blends action and inertia to perfection.
       Sihanoukville, Cambodia
       King of the Cambodian beaches, the headland is ringed by squeaky white sands,and offshore lie countless tropical islands with barely a beach hut in sight. Try Otres Beach for romance, Sokha Beach for luxury or Koh Rong for an escape.
       Phu Quoc, Vietnam
       Simply the most beautiful island in Vietnam,Phu Quoc is liberally sprinkled with picture-perfect, white-sand beaches and cloaked in dense, impenetrable jungle. Long Beach is sophisticated, Ong Lan Beach romantic and Bai Sao simply irresistible.
       Kep, Cambodia
       The original beach resort in Cambodia,the French founded this coastal retreat in 1908 as Kep-sur-Mer. Devastated by war,it has resurrected itself in recent years with boutique resorts, succulent seafood and palm-fringed islands.
       China Beach, Vietnam
       Okay, so we are using artistic licence with the name, but call it My Khe to the north and Cua Dai to the south, it's all just one long, luscious stretch of sand. Try surfing off the shores of Danang or pamper yourself at the resorts near Hoi An.
       2008 Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd.All rights reserved. For more information
       visit www.lonelyplanet.com.
       This is an edited extract from Lonely Planet's Vietnam,Cambodia, Laos and the Greater Mekong , 2nd edition by Nick Ray, et al,ฉ Lonely Planet Publications,2009.
       VIETNAM, CAMBODIA,LAOS AND THE GREATER MEKONG:925 baht from all good bookshops.

Literary mania

       SIDNEY, BRITISH COLUMBIA - Here, in this coastal BC town, it's all about the books - thousands of them scattered throughout 12 stores.
       New books and rare books. Paperbacks and hardbacks. Children's books, classics and mysteries. Cookbooks, gardening books,even comic books.
       For two days, I was in literature bliss, not knowing where to start, losing track of time,and eventually being asked to leave one store because it was closing time - almost like a bartender cutting me off.
       Within seven blocks, I could find just about everything from the latest bestselling mystery by writer Michael Connelly to rare finds by 18th century writer Sir Walter Scott.
       These books quickly engage the senses and don't let go: Feel the raised letters of a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Smell the old paper from the pages of A History of Egyptian Mummies from 1834. Listen to the bookstore owners talk about their collections. Watch a new title unexpectedly catch someone's eye.
       Literary mania is a year-round preoccupation in this seaside town of 11,000 people,who live about 30 kilometres from British Columbia's capital Victoria. Wherever you are, there's a store on the next block. There's one next door. There's another a few doors down. And there's one around the corner.There's even one underground.
       Sidney is billed as Canada's only booktown, a place that emerged from the blueprint of Britain's Hay-On-Wye booktown on the English-Welsh border with 1,500 people and 30 bookstores.
       The books sit on tables, in bookshelves,and behind glass to preserve pages and bindings that survived a century long journey to this particular shelf.
       Some books get stacked along side bookcases already teeming with so many titles there is no room even for a thin paperback.
       The overflow reaches the top of shelves,putting some books slightly out of reach unless you find a stepladder.
       Some books still sit in boxes waiting to be unpacked and sorted. Sometimes store clerks are too slow for impatient customers,so it's not unusual to find a booklover begins wading through a new batch before it's on the shelves.
       Portions of the bookstores look more like a person's office, where books accumulate and await someone to come in and start reading.
       And somewhere behind every stack is someone eager to talk books.
       Start with Clive Tanner, who has a stake in five stores and started Sidney's booktown in 1994 after visiting Hay-On-Wye. He can be found roaming from Paperback Writer to Country Life Books to Time Enough for
       Books to Beacon Books.Tanner wants to know as much about readers where they are from, how they got here and when they are coming back as they do about his town.
       Or go visit Odean Long, who owns The Haunted Bookshop. One tableau underscores her love for British literature:a painting of Sir Walter Scott, famous for Ivanhoe and Rob Roy . Long refuses to stock books found on wire racks in local pharmacies. But she will have anything from a paperback of classic literature for a few bucks to a first edition of The House at Pooh Corner , which can fetch up to US$1,000 (about 35,000 baht).
       From there, walk few doors down into Galleon Books & Antiques where Rod Laurie and Brian MacLean own a shop with secondhand books shelved amid the decor of a genteel private study, surrounded by art,antiques and table centrepieces.
       Or sit down with Fred Gordon, a Scotsman who co-owns The Book Cellar, an underground bookstore with maps and more than 5,000 titles depicting the world's military history. Gordon opened the store with Tanner and sits ready to discuss his collection of Winston Churchill's works.
       If you're not browsing, buying or sitting along the coast getting lost in your latest discovery, chances are you're thinking about what's missing from your shelves.
       But it isn't always the book you're looking for. Rather, it's the one next to it or the one on the shelf below that catches your eye,allowing you to discover new titles in ways that searching the Internet would not.AP
       More INFO
       Sidney Booktown:www.sidneybooktown.ca/. Located in Sidney, British Columbia, in coastal western Canada, on Vancouver Island's Saanich Peninsula, about 30 kilometres from the provincial capital of Victoria.Getting there:Ferry service to Sidney includes BC Ferries from Vancouver, www.bcferries.bc.ca and the Coho Ferry from Victoria and Port Angeles, Wash, www.cohoferry.com. The nearest airport is in Victoria.

Rights group urges govt to stop harassing news website

       A global rights group has urged Malaysia to stop harassing a news website after it put up a video of Muslim protesters stepping on a cow's head during a protest against a planned Hindu temple.
       The Aug 28 protest raised ethnic tensions in Muslim-majority Malaysia,where about 8% of the country's 28 million people are ethnic Indians. Most of the ethnic Indians are Hindus for whom cows are sacred animals.
       Independent news website Malaysiakini was told to remove two videos,including one of the protest in Shah Alam, the capital of Selangor state. The site has refused to remove them.
       The clips are only accessible to Malaysiakini subscribers with one of them showing protesters stepping and spitting on a severed cow head in front of the Selangor government's headquarters,demanding that a Hindu temple not be built in their neighbourhood. The other video was of a subsequent news conference by Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, a Muslim, who appeared to defend the protesters.
       In a statement received late on Tuesday, New York-based Human Rights Watch said the government should not tell Malaysiakini to remove the videos.
       "The government wants to make the problem disappear by taking the videos off the internet," Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch,said in the statement.
       In a Sept 3 letter to Malaysiakini, the government's Comunication and Multimedia Commission warned that the videos were against the law because they "contained offensive contents with intent to annoy any person, especially the Indians".
       The offence is punishable by up to a year in prison or up to 50,000 ringgit (484,164 baht). Commission officials have also questioned Malaysiakini's editors and staff and asked for the tapes. Malaysiakini has refused to remove the videos,saying they merely record news events.
       "The government's investigation of Malaysiakini is nothing short of media harassment and it needs to stop ...Malaysians are entitled to know all sides of a story. It is not up to the government to approve what news is fit to air, print,or post," Ms Pearson said.
       Twelve of the protesters have been charged with illegal assembly, and six of them also with sedition, defined as promoting ill will and hostility between different races. It is punishable by up to three years in jail and a fine. Illegal assembly is punishable by one year in jail and a fine.
       All mainstream media in Malaysia are linked to the government, which is dominated by Muslim Malays. They account for 60% of the population. Ethnic Chinese and Indians are the biggest minorities.
       Malaysiakini and blogs are not subject to censorship but some have faced court action for articles and comments deemed to be offensive.

ASEAN EXPORT ORDERS A BOON TO PRINTERS

       The printing industry expects its exports to rise by up to 15 per cent this year mainly on advance orders from the Asean market.
       Kriengkrai Thiennukul, chairman of the Printing and Paper Packaging Industry Club of the Federation of Thai Industries, said yesterday that the main factor encouraging the industry for next year is orders from Asean, which accounts for 60 per cent of total printing exports. Overseas importers have placed orders for three to six months in advance.
       However, total printing sales this year were expected to be flat at US$1.45 billion or about Bt50 billion, he said.
       If markets abroad could improve next year, exports are estimated to reach Bt55 billion-Bt60 billion. The industry shifted its focus to Asean a few years ago as it saw stronger performance in this region than in the US and Europe.
       Printing exports in the first eight months of this year dropped by 9 per cent from the same period last year, but the export performances of other Southeast Asian countries were worse, declining 10-20 per cent.
       The Printing and Paper Packaging Industry Club formerly targeted the country to be the printing hub of Asia.
       Pornchai Rattanachaikanont, president of the Thai Printing Association, said manufacturers this year could export more kraft paper to Japan, and cardboard paper to India and Saudi Arabia.
       The industry has also gained a positive outlook for this quarter, as there are promising orders for Christmas and New Year from both local and overseas markets.
       Thailand is now hosting Pack Print International 2009 and the Thai Inter-national Plastic and Rubber Exhibition, which open today and continue to Saturday at the Bangkok International Trade and Exhibition Centre. Some 400 printing, packaging, plastic and rubber manufacturers from 20 countries are joining the exhibition.
       Messe Dusseldorf Asia, the organiser, expects the event to attract about 20,000 visitors over its four-day run.

A piece of the action

       And the crowd went wild as Steve "President for Life" Jobs of Apple Computer came out on the stage to emcee the now-annual September music sales pitch, with loads of new stuff; in the biggest news, the iPod Nano got a video camera and FM radio, and Steve showed off the new iTunes Ver 9 management software; he also showed off the iPhone OS 3.1, available for download, which actually recommends apps you might like, has better synching for music and video, and lets you save video from email attachments into your playlist, aka Camera Roll.
       Apple cut the prices of its old iPod models just hours ahead of announcing new iPod models; the price of the 32-gigabyte iPod Touch was cut $120 to $279, or 9,500 baht in real money; a 120-gig iPod Classic now costs $229, a $20 cut by the generous folks who run Apple. Palm introduced a smaller,cheaper smartphone than the successful Pre; the Pixi, as it's called, is aimed at younger users; it's slimmer, has a smaller screen, but features a Qwerty keyboard,8GB of memory and a two-megapixel camera.
       US President Barack Obama, in a controversial school-time speech to most US children, advised them to be careful about what they put on Facebook and other social networks;"Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life," he warned.
       First Solar of America signed a contract with the Chinese government to build the world's largest solar power plant in Inner Mongolia; assuming it is built, the Ordos City plant will push out 2,000 megawatts of electricity,around four times the size of the projects being built by the US Army in the Mojave Desert and by First Solar in California;the China project isn't near anything much; Ordos City is a coal-producing,eight-year-old, planned low-carbon development with about 1.5 million residents, roughly 800km west of Beijing.
       Networking firm Huawei of China,which has suffered a scandal or two in its Thailand work, was stung to the quick by mean stories in the Australian media that it might be tied to the Chinese espionage services; Guo Fulin, managing director of Huawei in Australia, was hurt by the insensitive stories that his company was under investigation by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation; Huawei is a public-owned company, he said, and it is unthinkable that any government agency would be using Huawei to conduct spying.
       The government of Cuba took a huge security gamble, and authorised post offices to provide Internet access to the public - just in case the Cuban government ever authorises the public to use the Internet at some point in the future; the only public access currently allowed is to an inside-Cuba intranet for email, provided by post offices at a cost of the equivalent of 55 baht an hour, in a country where the average wage is 680 baht a month.
       Japan fired an unmanned cargo craft into orbit; the 16.5-tonne unmanned H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) is on a mission to re-supply the space station;it will stay up there to continue ferrying stuff to the US shuttle fleet next year.
       Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologised for the way that people treated World War Two code-breaker and extraordinary computer geek Alan Turing for being gay; Turing was prosecuted for homosexual conduct in 1952,and a mere two years later, he committed suicide;"I am pleased to have the chance how deeply sorry I and we all are," said Mr Brown.
       Google , which plans to give away grazillions of books in order to get the (commercial) goods on its customers,offered to let all its opponents have a piece of the action;Amazon.com , which wants to sell grazillions of books to make tonnes of money directly, scoffed.Rupert Murdoch, the American media mogul, began collecting money at the tollgate to his news sites, in an interesting experiment to see if people will actually pay for news on the Net.
       IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corp and Google all responded to a plaintive "Help" from the Newspaper Association of America on how to get money from customers who don't want to pay for news; Randy Bennett, who is the senior president for vice in newspapers, said he's looking over 11 different proposals on how to squeeze money out of you;Google, to no one's surprise, offered to put all newspapers behind one vast,semi-expensive firewall, because that would be so convenient for everyone to just pay one company one time, and then Google would spread the money around; sure, that ought to work.
       South African technology firm Unlimited IT dispatched Winston, a pigeon,from its office in Pietermaritzburg, with some data for its main hub in Durban strapped to the bird's leg; it took Winston one hour and eight minutes to fly the data card; meanwhile, Unlimited IT tried to send the same data via the speedchallenged Internet connections provided by leading Internet Telkom , and that download was four percent finished by the time Winston arrived; so it's not only countries that start with "T" that have Internet problems.
       T-Mobile of Germany and Orange of France merged their yuppiephone operations in Britain, creating a new $13.5 billion company with 28.4 mobile phone customers; the Deutsche Telekom-France Telecom venture will be the biggest provider in the UK, with a 37 percent market share, larger than O2 of Telefonica.

Web users to help digitise faded books

       Google has acquired a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off that seeks to cut down on spam and fraud at websites while digitising books.
       ReCAPTCHA offers simple word puzzles that users must solve when registering at a website or completing an online purchase.
       Computers can't decipher the twisted letters and numbers, ensuring that real people and not automated programs are at the keyboard.
       Unlike other word puzzles, however,ReCAPTCHA's text comes from actual books, letting the system create a digitised version in the process.
       Google Inc is already behind a major project to digitise books and put them online, mostly by scanning pages and using optical character recognition, or OCR, to make the texts searchable.
       OCR doesn't always work on text that is older, faded or distorted. In such cases,often the only way to digitise the works is to manually type them in.
       ReCAPTCHA provides an alternative.Snippets that the computer doesn't recognize are split up into single words that can be used as human tests at sites all over the Internet.
       The ReCAPTCHA system reassembles the text of the book from those responses.
       Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Luis von Ahn, who developed the tool and launched the ReCAPTCHA company in 2008 said:"From the start,people assumed the project was connected to Google, so it only makes sense that ReCAPTCHA Inc ultimately would find a home within Google."

Freed shoe thrower Zaidi wants to live in Switzerland

       The Iraqi journalist who was jailed for throwing his shoes at George W. Bush said in an interview that he wants to move to Switzerland and rally Iraqis to take the ex-US president to court.
       "I really want to go to Switzerland because it is a neutral country and because it is a country that did not support the occupation of Iraq,"Muntazer al-Zaidi told TSR television in an interview broadcast on Monday.
       "Switzerland hosts many international organisations, including some that fight for children, and Switzerland is a country that has a great democratic tradition. It is an example for the world," he said in an interview taped on Thursday from an undisclosed location.
       Zaidi, who says he was tortured while in prison, was freed last week after being jailed for nine months for hurling the shoes at Mr Bush last December during
       a Baghdad press conference one month before he stood down as US president.
       His employer, Al-Baghdadia TV station in Baghdad, and a family member have said that Zaidi had left Iraq for Syria and would travel on to Greece for medical treatment.
       Zaidi told TSR that he wants to launch a "vast operation" to rally Iraqi families in order to lodge a legal complaint against Mr Bush.
       Mr Bush and his collaborators should face trial in an international tribunal for "war crimes committed during the occupation of Iraq", he said.
       Zaidi told the Swiss broadcaster that he was beaten with metal bars, tortured with electric cables and endured simulated drowning during his detention.
       An attorney in Geneva said in February that he had lodged a political asylum application on Zaidi's behalf. But one of Zaidi's brothers denied this.

63-year-old FEER ceases publication

       The Hong Kong-based monthly magazine Far Eastern Economic Review will cease publication in December due to falling readership and advertising revenue, the publisher confirmed yesterday.
       The 63-year-old magazine has continued to lose readers and advertisers despite several attempts at invigorating the brand, publisher Dow Jones Consumer Media Group said.
       But faced with continuing readership declines at the Review , the company said it has chosen to concentrate its efforts on its core print and online publications, in an effort to boost the company's growth in Asia.
       Todd Larsen, chief operating officer at Dow Jones Consumer Media Group,said the company had been proud to be associated with the magazine and its invaluable contributions to the understanding of the Asia region.
       "The decision to cease publication of the Review is a difficult one made after a careful study of the magazine's prospects in a challenging business climate,"he said.
       "The magazine has a rich history of pioneering journalism and helped to set the standard for the press in Asia in the post-World War II era, when local publications often lacked the freedom to report honestly."
       Dow Jones has already expanded its Asian content in the Wall Street Journal and in its online editions with a redesigned WSJ.com website.
       It has also launched a mobile application that delivers news content via BlackBerry and iPhones.
       The company said these investments in Asia had translated into an increased print circulation of 6.3% year-over-year for the January-to-June period, with particularly significant growth in Hong Kong,India, Malaysia and Taiwan.
       Founded by Eric Halpern, an immigrant from Vienna, in Hong Kong in 1946, the Review published freelance analysis and opinion for some 30 years before becoming a weekly news magazine that charted Asia's turbulent economic and political rise. It was the subject of lawsuits from Singapore's leaders and banned from the island nation.
       Dwindling readership and advertising following the Asian financial crisis and dot.com meltdown forced a return to its roots in 2004. Nearly all the magazine's 80-plus staff were cut and it reverted to publishing mostly academic-style opinion and analysis in a monthly journal format.
       The Review as a monthly publication had a little over 12,000 subscribers across Asia, Europe and the United States.
       Its current editor, Hugo Restall, will remain on the Wall Street Journal 's editorial board.
       The company said current subscribers would be offered a one-year subscription to the Asian online edition of the Wall Street Journal.

D'Estaing pens "Princess Di" tale

       Eighty-three-year-old former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing has brightened his long retirement by writing a steamy romantic novel about a French leader's affair with a British princess.
       The Princess and the President recounts the secret and passionate love of two characters clearly modelled closely on both Mr Giscard himself and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, according to yesterday's edition of the daily Le Figaro .Recast as President Jacques-Henri Lambertye and Princess Patricia of Cardiff, the pair meet at the closing dinner of a G7 summit after the young British royal has been left miserable by her princely husband's adultery.
       "I kissed her hand and she gave me a questioning look, her slate grey eyes widening as she tilted her head gently forward," the presidential first-person narrator recounts, according to an excerpt published in Le Figaro .The newspaper said Mr d'Estaing's book rises above the level of a wellwritten romantic novel because of the wealth of details he is able to supply about the French and British characters and the palaces in which they meet.
       As befits a member of the prestigious Academie Francaise, the president also alludes to the literary classics, such as Alexandre Dumas' tales of the love between French Princess Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham.
       But the book will most likely cause a stir as the latest to cash in on the posthumous Diana publishing industry,particularly as it includes a playful hint that there might be an element of truth in the story.
       According to Le Figaro , the book opens with the phrase "Promise kept" and ends with:"'You asked me for permission for you to write your story,' she told me.'I give you it, but you must make me a promise ...'."
       While marketed as a novel, there is little doubt that the characters are closely modelled on real-life figures from recent history.
       Princess Patricia shares Diana's passion for charity work with children with Aids and campaigns as she did against anti-personnel mines.
       "A fortnight before my marriage, my future husband told me that he had a mistress and was determined to continue his relationship with her," Princess Patricia tells her French lover, according to the leaked extract.
       President Lambertye also appears to be a close fit with Mr d'Estaing, except for one key detail, one that suggests that the author is keen to reimagine history in a more flattering light.
       While the fictional President Lam-bertye wins a second term with a comfortable 56%, the real Mr d'Estaing was turfed out of office in 1981 after being accused of corruptly receiving diamonds from Emperor Bokassa of Central Africa.
       Mr d'Estaing lost the vote in May 1981, costing him the chance of representing France two months later when Diana Spencer married Prince Charles,and thus the pair were never simultaneously The Princess and the President .Nevertheless, some commentators said that Mr d'Estaing had left himself open to ridicule by penning a book even hinting at an affair - he was 55 years old in 1981, Diana was 19. Some warned he risked tainting his legacy.
       "How does he want posterity to remember him?" demanded the magazine Marianne on its website."As the guy who legalised abortion? Who gave 18-year-olds the vote? Who brought female ministers into government?
       "By talking about Diana, Giscard is remaking himself the great inventor of the celebrity presidency. A low-brow gossip president who needs the skills of a psychoanalyst to understand history,"it stormed.
       Diana died in a road accident with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed in Paris in August 1997.The Princess and the President will be released in Paris in French on Oct 1 by publishers Fallois-Xo.

Famed "Shin-chan" cartoonist dies in fall

       Tributes poured in yesterday for Japanese cartoonist Yoshito Usui after confirmation the bruised body of a man found on a mountain was that of the creator of the popular Crayon Shin-chan series.
       Usui, 51, who was popular worldwide among manga enthusiasts, disappeared on Sept 11 after he went hiking on his own on a mountain range straddling Gunma and Nagano prefectures, north of Tokyo.
       A body was found on Saturday by a fellow hiker and his family late Sunday confirmed it was Usui,a recluse who was married with two daughters.
       The indications are he fell and there was no suggestion of suicide, police
       and reports said.
       His death dampened celebration yesterday on the Respect for the Aged holiday in Kas-
       kabe, a suburban city
       outside Tokyo which has become wellknown nationally as the place where the ca-
       toonist lived and set
       the Crayon Shin-chan story.
       "I'm deeply depressed to hear the
       unfortunate news. I pray his soul rests in peace with citizens here," Kasukabe mayor Ryozo Ishikawa said by telephone.
       "I saw many sorrowful citizens today as 'Shin-chan' is definitely a Kasukabe kid. We hope 'Shin-chan', a byword for cheerfulness, will keep staying here with his family," he said.
       Usui made his debut as a manga author in 1987 and sprang to prominence in the 1990s with Crayon Shin-chan ,which features the daily life of Shinnosuke, a mischievous five-year-old boy.
       The series ran regularly in a magazine and later was made into a book and animation version.
       "We had been praying for Mr Usui's safety with his family but now feel the utmost regret over how things have turned out. We are in a big shock,"Futabasha, the publishing house of Crayon Shin-chan , said in a statement.His books have been translated in 14 countries and the animated version has been aired in 30 countries.

Newspapers "not yet out of woods"

       Despite some tentative optimism from Washington, Wall Street and Madison Avenue, people who monitor the newspaper business for a living say it has not yet hit bottom. But in what passes for good news these days, the free-fall in newspaper advertising may be slowing, and specialists predict it will ease through 2009 and into 2010.
       With 10 days left in the third quarter,analysts, publishers and ad buyers say ad revenue will be down about 25%industrywide from the third quarter last year, possibly a little less.
       They predict that the decline will be smaller in the fourth quarter. Several of them say the usual back-to-school uptick in newspaper advertising seems to have been a little better than in most years, if only because July and August were so weak.
       Ordinarily, such numbers would be seen as catastrophic, but these times are not ordinary.
       The drop in combined print and digital ad revenue in 2008,16.6%, according to the Newspaper Association of America,was the worst since the Depression. But it looks rosy next to 2009, when revenue fell 28.3% in the first quarter and 29% in the second.
       In the last few days, signs of life have been seen from struggling retailers, and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, and others have speculated that the recession has ended. Media executives, including Rupert Murdoch,have talked about advertising starting to rebound. Last week, shares in several newspaper companies, including Gannett, McClatchy and the New York Times Co, jumped 10% or more, to their highest prices this year.
       Alexia Quadrani, an analyst at J.P.Morgan, said newspaper stocks had benefited from a trickle-down effect as investors, hearing positive news about advertising, asked,"What stocks are still looking relatively inexpensive among media stocks?"
       She said ad revenue would show a percentage decline in the mid-20s for the third quarter, about 20 in the fourth quarter and, next year,"more modestly negative, but still negative."
       Several publishing executives said those numbers seemed about right. The executives, who insisted on anonymity because they are prohibited from discussing financial information until it is made public, also said they saw no particular justification for the recent spike in stock prices.
       If the rate of decline in advertising slows, it will largely be because 2008 grew steadily worse as the year wore on and the recession deepened, making year-to-year comparisons less stark. The figures for the fourth quarter of 2009 will be compared with the final quarter of 2008, when the financial markets were in crisis and newspaper advertising fell almost 20 percent, at that time the worst performance in generations.
       Roberta Garfinkle, director of print strategy at TargetCast TCM, was sceptical about any improvement in the third quarter, but said signs of recovery could appear in the fourth quarter.
       "Newspapers will be the last media to get any ad comeback," Garfinkle said."But we're seeing more people wanting to have the conversation about doing some print advertising, where earlier we weren't even having the conversation."

Bestseller sees plots and profit in crisis

       A disaster worse than the financial crisis will engulf the world,predicts China's latest financial bestseller,and its author is preparing to profit from the turmoil. But that profit will not be in US dollars.
       In Currency Wars 2 , Song Hongbing claims a shadowy global elite will introduce a single world currency around 2024, tossing the dollar into the dustbin,condemned by loose-spending Washington policies and the waning dominance of the West.
       Song's book, a sequel to his 2007 bestseller, claims this murky establishment of bankers and politicians stood by as markets crashed last year, hoping the trauma would hasten the world's acceptance of a single currency and world government.
       "This crisis was bound to occur, but there were people who understood that beforehand and set in place the arrangements," Song told Reuters in an interview in his office.
       "This crisis was just warming up public opinion for a single global currency ...Another, even bigger crisis will be needed to launch the world currency into reality,"he added.
       Currency Wars 2 will not convince many economists. But its popularity is a telling sign of China's contradictory times.
       It echoes the mix of disdain, suspicion and awe of the United States that is reflected in Chinese media and official comment.
       Song's intricate diagrams and claims of generations of purported conspirators guiding the world's course read like the plot of a thriller novel, and footnotes in his book suggest familiarity with farright US conspiracy theories.
       When Chinese President Hu Jintao speaks at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh this week, he is sure to deliver a sobre mix of proposals and admonitions that avoids such heady claims.
       Yet China often says the United States has long backed plots seeking to subjugate it, even while Beijing is the world's biggest holder of US treasury debt, which makes up a big chunk of its foreign exchange holdings.
       "The popularity of Currency Wars reflects a widespread feeling that China's power isn't properly reflected in the way the global financial system works," said Wang Yong, a professor of international political economy at Peking University.
       "A conspiracy theory is always an easy way to explain that imbalance ... It helps make sense of complicated issues."
       A US decision to put high duties on Chinese-made tyres could stoke the Chinese public anger with Washington that helped make Song's two books bestsellers, he said.
       Yet in the looming turmoil, China should be pragmatic and focus on seizing economic opportunities."There are always opportunities to make money, even during a crisis or depression."
       Song is no stranger to the United States. Now 41, he studied education at American University in Washington, D.C.,before a business career and work as a financial pundit.
       He likened the financial crisis to Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, which he claimed President Roosevelt was warned about but chose not to stop.
       Likewise, Song argued, the world's central bankers stood by despite mounting signs of a looming financial crash.
       "It was a crisis they perhaps awaited,with the goal of establishing consensus for a unified global currency."
       Seeing that the US dollar "is doomed,Federal Reserve bankers are backing plan for a currency based on gold reserves and greenhouse gas emissions credits,which may eventually leave China holding mountains of worthless dollars."
       The role of Jewish financiers from the Rothschilds onwards is a thread throughout his two books. He said he was not hostile to Jews."They aren't singled out. They are one group competing along with Protestant and Catholic financiers."
       Before the currency and a world government to control it can be born, the United States will suffer a decline echoing the hyperinflation and chaos that Germany endured before the emergence of Nazism.
       He said smart investors could profit from the crisis by buying gold and platinum."Beijing should resist backing the plans until it has grown strong enough to match the West and win a big say in the new order.
       "This will be a massive reshuffling of global wealth," he said."If that's the way things are headed and you can't stop it, then why not try to get rich from it?"

AMARIN'S MAGAZINES SEEK WEBSITE BOOST

       Amarin Printing and Publishing will focus more on connecting its magazines with their readers next year, to increase advertising revenue and reader numbers.
       The plan is the company's main business strategy to boost sustainable growth amid the changing of lifestyles towards the huge popularity of social networking. Rarin Utakapan Panjarungrot, managing director of the Publishing Business Division, last week said one way to create greater connectivity was to improve the magazines' websites to give them more content than in the past and provide interactive online columns, such as questions and answers on beauty topics.
       Some content unable to be published in the magazines will be posted on the websites. This, as well as interactive articles, will differentiate the websites' content from that of the magazines. It is hoped this will attract more readers and website visitors.
       This model is quite new for the Thai magazine market but recognised abroad, Rarin siad.
       Amarin began to create online social networks with two magazines-Baan Lae Suan and Room-last year. The next is Praew, Amarin's flagship magazine for women, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary.
       "After we fixed more attention on online media, Baan Lae Suan's website visitors, for example, increased 50 per cent to 130,000 a month, while circulation rose 10 per cent. This was beyond our expectations in this tough year. We expect to experience the same response from Praew and other magazines," Rarin said.
       At present, advertising revenue from the websites accounts for only 2 per cent of the company's ad revenue. It expects this to increase to 5 per cent next year and 10 per cent within three years, she said.
       Advertising contributes 30 per cent of the total revenue of the Publishing Business Division. The rest comes from magazine sales, book publishing and event organising, at contribution rates of 30 per cent, 30 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively.
       Rarin believes the company's revenue growth this year may fall to a single-digit rate. Last year, it recorded revenue of Bt1.87 billion. The performance is expected to improve next year, due to the economic recovery and the company's new business strategy.
       As well as increasing advertising revenue through online media, she said Amarin would also focus more on its event-organising business next year by expanding to serve outside clients. It now organises only its own events, such as a Baan Lae Suan fair. It will recruit more event-business unit.
       "We have enough experience in this field and are confident we can do this. Organising events is a business that generates greater gross-profit margins than publishing, because we don't have fixed costs. This could publishing business, which relies mostly on ad revenue," she said.

Hardline rebels ban "un-Islamic books"

       Somalia's hardline alShabaab insurgents have warned schools not to use textbooks provided by UN agencies and other donors they accuse of being un-Islamic.
       The rebel group, which Washington says is al-Qaeda's proxy in Somalia, hit the African Union's main base in Mogadishu with twin suicide car bombs on Thursday, killing 17 peacekeepers in a country of growing concern to Western security analysts.
       And in a sign of the insurgents' growing influence in the chaotic city, the rebels issued orders to schools on Saturday.
       "Some UN agencies like Unesco are supplying Somali schools with text books to try to teach our children un-Islamic subjects," al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage told Koranic students gathered at Mogadishu's Nasrudin mosque.
       "I call upon all Somali parents not to send their youngsters to schools with curriculum supported by the UN agencies."

A Midwest chronicle

       Lorrie Moore had just begun working on what would become her new novel,A Gate at the Stairs , when she told one interviewer that she was writing a book "about hate".
       Later she recalled telling someone else that it was a novel about chores.
       In May, speaking to a roomful of booksellers at BookExpo America, the publishing industry's annual convention, she said she had written a book - her first in 11 years - about a 20-yearold woman because she viewed 20 as "the universal age of passion".
       And in a recent interview at a brasserie here,two blocks from her home in a neighbourhood of colourful Victorian and prairie-style houses,Moore described the book as a meditation on "what it meant to be in this town in the Midwest in this particular time in contemporary America".
       As it turns out, Moore's slippery characterisations of A Gate at the Stairs , published by Alfred A. Knopf, are quite apt.
       The novel takes place in the aftermath of September 11,2001, with the threat of terrorism and war hovering over a liberal university town described as "the Athens of the Midwest".
       It also features a prickly couple, Sarah Brink and Edward Thornwood, whose marital relations sometimes veer toward something that looks like hate. Tassie Keltjin, the 20-year-old college student who narrates the novel, falls in love, for the first time, with a mysterious foreign student.Passion ensues.
       And about those chores: During one of the book's most startling revelations, the housecleaner can be heard "at the back door, with his stabbing,fidgeting key in the lock and his clanking pails and mops".
       Moore's fans - ardent, even cultish - have been waiting ever since Birds of America , her last book, a story collection, was published in 1998.That book, widely praised, broke onto The New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list for five weeks.
       It also subjected Moore, who at 52 still seems girlish with her shoulder-length brown hair and voice that swoops from low to high registers, to the intruding curiosity of those who wanted to know more about her personal life after reading People Like That Are the Only People Here , a short story about a baby with cancer that Moore acknowledged was somewhat autobiographical.
       "The problem of course is you don't want everyone talking about your kid," Moore said,recalling the rounds of publicity."And that was really hard to avoid."
       This time around she is remaining circumspect about any autobiographical antecedents to AGate at the Stairs , her seventh book.In one of the novel's central plotlines, Tassie takes a job as a baby sitter working for Sarah, the owner of a local restaurant, and Edward, a cancer researcher, as they adopt a part African-American baby girl. As the girl's devoted care-giver, Tassie is exposed to both explicit and implicit racism.Moore's own teenage son is adopted and part African-American, but she would say only that some of the incidents in the novel may have happened to other children and parents she knew.
       Instead she invoked Madame Butterfly and Jane Eyre , works that feature themes of abandonment and orphanhood."I'm interested in adoption because those kids become Jane Eyre,"said Moore, alternately sipping from a cup of coffee and a small glass of pale Belgian beer."Not to push the Jane Eyre thing too much, but of course there is that racial aspect to it," she said, alluding to the Creole heritage of the Mrs Rochester character."And there's a racial component to Madame Butterfly , so these were the Ur-texts hovering over my desk while I just barrelled ahead and wrote a Midwestern story."
       As one of the most nuanced writers working today, Moore is as likely to write about sweeping themes as she is to deliver sharp-witted and trenchant observations about life's small moments. Her career has been building since she sold her first story collection,Self-Help , at 26,gaining instant literary credibility.
       "Moore may be, exactly, the most irresistible contemporary American writer," the novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote in The New York Times Book Review on Sunday ."Brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm; seemingly effortlessly lyrical; Lily-Tomlin-funny. Most of all, Moore is capable of enlisting not just our sympathies but our sorrows."
       And in her review in The Times , Michiko Kakutani wrote that "in this haunting novel, Ms Moore gives us stark, melancholy glimpses into her characters' hearts."
       In A Gate at the Stairs those sorrows and melancholy glimpses come in some brutally heartrending scenes."There are times when you feel like stepping into a dark dream, and you really want to travel to some very unhappy place,"Moore said,"in order, in some ways, to close the book and step away from it".
       Moore, who had recently had cataracts diagnosed and sometimes used prescription sunglasses to see inside, said that part of the reason it took her so long to finish the novel was that she could not bring herself to write those devastating passages.
       "There were certain scenes that felt so heartbreaking to me that I didn't know how I was going to write them," she said."I cried all the way through the writing of it."
       Then there were the more practical constraints on her time. Since 1984 Moore has taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,and eight years ago she divorced her husband (no, she doesn't want to talk about it) and is now raising her son as a single mother.
       Moore sees such challenges falling disproportionately on women."You look out into the world and you say,'Who are the working meaning you also have a job, not just writing novels - single mums who are writing novels that you want to read?"' she said.
       Jayne Anne Phillips, a fellow writer and fan,said balancing a job and child-rearing with writing had shaped Moore's work."The double edge of it is that I think any form of real spiritual surrender does inform one's work," Phillips said."But the problem is that oftentimes one doesn't have time to write the work."
       In A Gate at the Stairs Sarah struggles to juggle her fervent desire to be a mother with her allconsuming job as a restaurant owner. Writing about food allowed Moore to play with the terminology that was infiltrating menus around town. At one point Tassie reads a menu from Sarah's restaurant:
       "There were ramps and fiddleheads, vinaigrettes and roux - summer had not yet taken these away."
       And then, in a moment of pure Lorrie Mooreness, Tassie observes,"Though only now did I realise that roux was not spelled rue, as surely it should be and would be soon."
       Although she has spent a quarter-century in the Midwest, Moore, who commuted between New York and Madison for several years, maintains some of the arch distance of the outsider. Strolling by an Indian restaurant near the state capitol,she sniffed the air and noted:"You walk around and you get a whiff of garlic and you feel like you are in a real city."
       But living far from the literary nerve centre of New York, she said, has allowed some liberties.
       "If you live in Madison, Wisconsin, and teach creative writing, you've already made some decisions about what you're going to do as an artist, and you're quite free to do as you please,"she said.
       "Some people get their books on the bestseller list and then they count the number of weeks, and I just never want to live that way. I already have been luckier than I ever dreamed that I could ever be."

A truer Kennedy compass

       In a memoir being published this month,Sen Edward M. Kennedy called his behaviour after the 1969 car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne "inexcusable"and said the events may have shortened the life of his ailing father, Joseph P. Kennedy.
       In that book,True Compass , Kennedy said he was dazed, afraid and panicked in the minutes and hours after he drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island with Kopechne as his passenger.
       The senator, who left the scene and did not report the accident to the police until after her body was found the next day, admitted in the memoir that he had "made terrible decisions"at Chappaquiddick. He also said that he had hardly known Kopechne, a young woman who had been an aide to his late brother Robert,and that he had had no romantic relationship with her.
       The account by Kennedy, who died on August 25 at 77 years of age, adds little to what is known about the accident and its aftermath but recounts how they weighed on him and his family. The book does not shy from the accident, or from some other less savory aspects of the senator's life, including a notorious 1991 drinking episode in Palm Beach, Florida,or the years of heavy drinking and womenchasing that followed his 1982 divorce from his wife, Joan.
       But it also offers rich detail on his relationships with his father, siblings and children that round out a portrait of a man who lived the most public of lives and yet remained something of a mystery. Among other things,it says that in 1984 he decided against seeking the presidency after hearing the emotional objections of his children, who, it says, feared for his life.
       In the 532-page memoir, Kennedy also said he had always accepted the finding of a presidential commission that a sole gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was responsible for former president John F. Kennedy's assassination.Robert F. Kennedy grieved so deeply over the killing of the president that family members feared for his emotional health, Kennedy wrote,saying that it "veered close to being a tragedy within a tragedy".
       Kennedy's book provides new details about life in the US's famous political family and covers the remarkable career that was celebrated in memorials last week before his burial near John and Robert Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery. It provides his personal account of being stricken by the brain cancer that took his life and his decision to battle the disease as aggressively as he could. And it deals openly and regretfully with "selfdestructive drinking", especially after Robert's death.
       Kennedy said that his father had encouraged intensive competition among his children,especially his sons, which fed his recurrent feelings of inadequacy after the death of his three brothers, all of them older.
       "Competition, of course, is the route to achievement in America," Kennedy wrote."As I think back to my three brothers, and about what they had accomplished before I was even out of my childhood, it sometimes has occurred to me that my entire life has been a constant state of catching up."
       The book, published by Twelve, a division of the Hachette book group, was originally scheduled to be published in 2010 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the election of former president Kennedy but was moved up because of the senator's illness. Much of the book, written with a collaborator, Ron Powers,was based on notes taken by Kennedy over 50 years as well as hours of recordings for an oral history project at the University of Virginia.
       The memoir also suggested that former president Kennedy had grown uneasy about Vietnam and was increasingly convinced that the conflict could not be resolved militarily. It said the president's "antenna" was up, and surmised that he was "on his way to finding that way out", though "he just never got the chance". Kennedy wrote of a secret meeting in the spring of 1967 between former president Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Kennedy, whose increasingly outspoken criticism of the war in Southeast Asia was becoming a political threat to Johnson. According to the book, Robert Kennedy proposed that Johnson give him authority to personally negotiate a peace treaty in Vietnam. This implicitly would have kept Robert from running for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, a prospect that worried Johnson.
       "If the president had accepted his offer,"the book said,"Bobby certainly would have been too immersed in the peace process to become involved in a presidential primary."
       But Johnson could not take the offer at face value, concerned that Kennedy had ulterior motives, the senator wrote.
       In raw and often intimate terms, Kennedy wrote of the despair he experienced after Robert's assassination in 1968. It was at first impossible for him to return to the Senate.And even when he managed to, he could not focus on his work. He spent days on the ocean,taking long sails from the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
       He described drinking to excess during that period and driving Joan Kennedy "deeper into her anguish". He drove himself and his staff hard."I tried to stay ahead of the darkness."
       The shooting of his brothers traumatised him in ways both existential and mundane,Kennedy noted. He would flinch at loud, sudden noises like the explosion of firecrackers, or hit the deck whenever a car backfired.
       Kennedy also revealed that he had written a letter to the Los Angeles district attorney asking that he not seek the death penalty for Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan.(The judge, Herbert V. Walker, disregarded the letter,Kennedy said, though Sirhan's life would be spared by the California Supreme Court.)
       The book opens with an account of Kennedy's falling ill and then, in May of last year, receiving a diagnosis of a lethal brain tumour. Doctors said he had just a few months to live, Kennedy wrote, but he refused to believe the grim prognosis, because he had been raised not to give up. His son Teddy Jr had survived a supposedly fatal cancer in his leg, and his daughter, Kara, had beaten lung cancer, against long odds.
       "And I believe that approaching adversity with a positive attitude at least gives you a chance for success," he said."Approaching it with a defeatist attitude predestines the outcome: Defeat. And a defeatist's attitude is just not in my DNA."
       Kennedy expressed regret over the 1991 episode in Palm Beach, when he went drinking with his son Patrick and his nephew, William K. Smith, who would be charged with rape that allegedly occurred that night.(Smith was later acquitted.)
       Those events hobbled him later that year when Clarence Thomas was nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court. Kennedy strongly opposed the nomination, but, he wrote, he could not speak out as forcefully as he would have liked.
       "I also understood another hard truth: with all the background noise about Palm Beach and my bachelor lifestyle, I would have been the wrong person" to raise questions about Thomas' alleged sexual harassment of Anita F. Hill.
       But even as Kennedy offered apologies for the darker moments of his life, he raged against the portrait of him in some tabloids, magazines and books. He described some of those accounts as "totally false, bizarre and evil theories".
       Of his indulgences, Kennedy wrote:"I have enjoyed the company of women. I have enjoyed a stiff drink or two or three, and I've relished the smooth taste of a good wine. At times, I've enjoyed these pleasures too much. I've heard the tales about my exploits as a hell-raiser some accurate, some with a wisp of truth to them and some so outrageous that I can't imagine how anyone could really believe them."
       Kennedy wrote about his views of various presidents, sometimes affectionately, sometimes harshly. Some of his most critical words are directed against Jimmy Carter.
       He said that while they had found common cause on a few issues, their relationship had broken down over health care. He accused Carter of timidity that doomed any chance of meaningful health insurance reform and said the president had been virtually impossible to talk to."Clearly President Carter was a difficult man to convince - of anything," Kennedy wrote."One reason for this was that he did not really listen."
       While Kennedy had little patience for the president's piety and punctiliousness, he found the disengagement of Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, at times oddly charming, though at other times frustrating. The senator said it had been difficult to get Reagan to focus on policy matters. He described a meeting with him that he and other senators had sought to press for shoe and textile import limits.
       The senators were told that they would have just 30 minutes with the president. Reagan began the meeting, the book said, commenting on Kennedy's shoes - asking if they were Bostonians - and then talking for 20 minutes about shoes and his experience selling shoes for his father."Several of us began conspicuously to glance at our watches." But to no avail."And it was over! No one got a word in about shoe or textile quota legislation."
       Kennedy also complained that White House meetings had been barely tolerable, in part because no liquor was ever served during Carter's term."He wanted no luxuries nor any sign of worldly living," Kennedy wrote.
       Kennedy said he had been disappointed by former president Bill Clinton's inability to enact comprehensive health care legislation, but he did not blame Clinton or his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who helped write the administration's proposal.
       He also said he called Clinton immediately after the president appeared on television to confess his affair with Monica Lewinsky,reassuring him that he would stand by him during that difficult period.
       In the midst of recounting that anecdote,Kennedy took a break to offer his views on the scrutinising of the private lives of public officials,something with which he clearly was quite familiar. Kennedy said he had no quarrel with such inquiries.
       "But do I think it tells the whole story of character? No I truly do not," he wrote. Men and women, he said, are more complicated than that."Some people make mistakes and try to learn from them and do better. Our sins don't define the whole picture of who we are."