BOHEMIAN (Monday, December 29, 2008)
(1)-DAN BROWN TAKE NOTE-- The mystery is set in the Louvre and the clues are hidden behind a 16th-century masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci. Remind you of anything? Lovers of Dan Brown novels will be salivating at the discovery of three previously unknown drawings on the back of one of Leonardo’s major works. A curator spotted the sketches on the back of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne when it was taken down in September for restoration. Sylvain Laveissière pointed out some grey marks that had previously been dismissed as stains. To him they resembled a horse’s head and a human skull. When the painting was photographed with an infra-red camera at the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, he was proved right. On the wood on which the work was mounted was an 18cm by 10cm (7in by 4in) equine head and a 16.5cm by 10cm skull, complete with orbital and nasal cavities, jaw and teeth. The camera detected a third drawing, a 15cm-high infant Jesus with a lamb, which was invisible to the naked eye. A spokeswoman for the Louvre said that the discovery was “amusing and moving”. It is also mysterious, since the drawings appear to have gone unnoticed for 500 years. “They were not meant to be kept,” said Bruno Mottin, of the Louvre’s art laboratory. “They had been largely wiped out, which explains why no one had spotted them until now.”

(2)-WHO IS GAO XIQING??—American know that China has financed much of their nation’s public and private debt. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain generally agreed on the peril of borrowing so heavily from this one foreign source. For instance, in their final debate, McCain warned about the “$10 trillion debt we’re giving to our kids, a half a trillion dollars we owe China,” and Obama said, “Nothing is more important than us no longer borrowing $700 billion or more from China and sending it to Saudi Arabia.” Their numbers on the debt differed, and both were way low. One year ago, when I wrote about China’s U.S. dollar holdings, the article was called “The $1.4 trillion Question.” When Barack Obama takes office, the figure will be well over $2 trillion. During the late stages of this year’s campaign, I had several chances to talk with the man who oversees many of China’s American holdings. He is Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, which manages “only” about $200 billion of the country’s foreign assets but makes most of the high-visibility investments, like buying stakes in Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, as opposed to just holding Treasury notes. Gao, whom I mentioned in my article, would fit no American’s preexisting idea of a Communist Chinese official. He speaks accented but fully colloquial and very high-speed English. He has a law degree from Duke, which he earned in the 1980s after working as a lawyer and professor in China, and he was an associate in Richard Nixon’s former Wall Street law firm.

(3)-THE NATURE OF THE BEAST-- The idea that when humans are at their worst they behave like wolves has been around a long time. Hobbes used the Latin tag homo homini lupus - man is a wolf to man - to illustrate his belief that unless they are restrained by government, people prey upon one another ruthlessly, while descriptions of rapacious or amoral behaviour as wolfish can be found throughout literature. The notion that evil is the expression of bestial instincts is deeply ingrained, and for the average philosopher as for the average person there is nothing more bestial than the wolf. More generally, a belief in the innate superiority of humans over other animals is part of the Western tradition. Christians tell us that only humans have souls, and though they speak in a different language secular thinkers mostly believe much the same. There are innumerable secular rationalists who, while congratulating themselves on their scepticism, never doubt that the universe is improved by the presence in it of humans like themselves.

(4)-COLONIAL NEW ORLEANS-- In 1682, the French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle set out from the Great Lakes and canoed down to the mouth of the Mississippi River, claiming its great watershed for Louis XIV. La Salle, a fur trader in Quebec more concerned with his own enrichment than with the crown's glory, returned to France and presented Louis with a false map showing the river's mouth close to Spain's silver mines in New Mexico, thereby winning the king's support to establish a colony. La Salle died before he could successfully set it up. But the French crown, competing with Britain and Spain for control of North America, sponsored a series of attempts to build a foothold in the marshy swamps of the Mississippi's delta. It wasn't until 1718 that a French settlement of any permanence was established in the region. In that year, La Nouvelle-Orléans was founded adjacent to a centuries- old portage site, where the area's Houma and Choctaw people dragged canoes between the river and a large inland bay, across whose shallow waters lay the nearby Gulf of Mexico. The centerpiece of a colonial venture by which France's ruler, the Duc d'Orleans, hoped to enrich his treasury through a newly chartered Company of the Indies, his namesake city was laid out on ambitious lines.

(5)-WHY MUSIC-- Biologists are addressing one of humanity’s strangest attributes, its all-singing, all-dancing culture… IF MUSIC be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it.” And if not? Well, what exactly is it for? The production and consumption of music is a big part of the economy. The first use to which commercial recording, in the form of Edison’s phonographs, was to bring music to the living rooms and picnic tables of those who could not afford to pay live musicians. Today, people are so surrounded by other people’s music that they take it for granted, but as little as 100 years ago singsongs at home, the choir in the church and fiddlers in the pub were all that most people heard. Other appetites, too, have been sated even to excess by modern business. Food far beyond the simple needs of stomachs, and sex (or at least images of it) far beyond the needs of reproduction, bombard the modern man and woman, and are eagerly consumed. But these excesses are built on obvious appetites. What appetite drives the proliferation of music to the point where the average American teenager spends 1½-2½ hours a day—an eighth of his waking life—listening to it?

(6)-JUSTIFYING STALIN-- At first, the purpose behind the midday raid at a human-rights group's office in St. Petersburg, Russia was murky. Police, some clad in masks and camouflage, cut the electricity to Memorial's offices and demanded to know if any drugs or guns were kept on the premises. Five hours later, after police had opened every computer and walked out with 11 hard drives, the reason for their visit became clear to Memorial Director Irina Flige. On the hard drives, a trove of scanned images and documents memorialized Josef Stalin's murderous reign of terror. Diagrams scrawled out by survivors detailed layouts of labor camps. There were photos of Russians executed by Stalin's secret police, wrenching accounts of survival from gulag inmates and maps showing the locations of mass graves. "They knew what they were taking," Flige said. "Today, the state tries to reconstruct history to make it appear like a long chain of victories. And they want these victories to be seen as justifying Stalin's repressions."

(7)-OBAMA'S CHIEF SPEECHWRITER-- The job requires him to work unnoticed, even in plain view, so Jon Favreau settles into a wooden chair at a busy Starbucks in the center of Penn Quarter. Deadline looms, and he needs to write at least half a page by the end of the day. As the espresso machines whir, Favreau opens his laptop, calls up a document titled "rough draft of inaugural" and goes to work on the most anticipated speech of Barack Obama's life. During the campaign, the buzz-cut 27-year-old at the corner table helped write and edit some of the most memorable speeches of any recent presidential candidate. When Obama moves to the White House next month, Favreau will join his staff as the youngest person ever to be selected as chief speechwriter. He helps shape almost every word Obama says, yet the two men have formed a concert so harmonized that Favreau's own voice disappears. "He looks like he's in college and everybody calls him Favs, so you're like, 'This guy can't be for real, right?'" said Ben Rhodes, another Obama speechwriter. "But it doesn't take long to realize that he's totally synced up with Obama. . . . He has access to everything and everybody. There's a lot weighing on his shoulders."

(8)-DESIGNER BABY TO BE BORN-- A woman from London will give birth next week to the first British baby screened to be free of an altered gene which causes breast cancer. Women in three generations of her husband's family have been diagnosed with the disease in their 20s. Without the embryo screening, any daughter born would have a 50-80% chance of experiencing breast cancer. But one expert warned the technique would not be suitable for all couples with this disease in their family. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves taking a cell from an embryo at the eight-cell stage of development, when it is around three-days old, and testing it. Using PGD to ensure a baby does not carry an altered gene which would guarantee a baby would inherit a disease such as cystic fibrosis, is well-established. But in 2006, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said doctors could test for so-called susceptibility genes, such as BRCA1. Carrying the BRCA1 mutation in this family's case would have given up to an 80% chance of developing breast cancer later in life.

(9)-GLADIATOR BATTLES IN ROME-- The Roman Coliseum will host several re-enactments next year of the gladiator battles made famous by the Roman Empire, a Rome City Council official says. Council head of archaeology Umberto Broccoli said to honor the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Emperor Vespasian, visitors to the historic site would be able to witness mock combats reminiscent of the infamous Coliseum battles, The Times of London said Friday. Event organizers have yet to determine if the historic events will take place in the famed arena or outside it on a stage. Broccoli said the orchestrated fights would involve authentic costumes and weapons in an attempt to educate visitors to the historic activity. City officials told The Times they chose to organize the gladiator events instead of pop concerts in order to protect the Coliseum from potentially damaging vibrations caused by loud music.
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