testing from boss side

Tourist Muskan Mahuwakar pictured the Taj Mahal as a dazzling vision of symmetry and beauty but upon reaching the monument, she -- like thousands of other visitors -- was disappointed to find it covered in scaffolding, its once white marble now yellowing due to pollution.

Building restoration at India's most popular tourist attraction is now into its fourth year, with work yet to even begin on its imposing dome.

"It's disappointing not to get a perfect frame of this immaculate structure," Mahuwakar, a history student, told AFP on her first visit to the Taj, as nearby cleaners armed with colourful plastic buckets and large mops desperately tried to scrub some lustre back into the stained stone.Other restoration teams scale the facade, blocking views to the ornate Islamic carvings engraved on its walls. The interruption to the serenity of visiting one of the seven modern wonders of the world.

"The repair has been going on for so long. Of course, old monuments need to be conserved, but we must find solutions that are quick and effective," Mahuwakar said, casting a dejected look at the scaffolding around.

Pollution and old age are taking their toll on the 17th century mausoleum, nestled on the south bank of the Yamuna river in Agra, but critics warn that even the options authorities are using to try to fix, may be exacerbating the problem.

Mudpacks have been applied in stages to draw out stains but critics say the process is as damaging as bleaching the fine stone.

Authorities reject this, but admit they are concerned about how to proceed with handling the fragile central dome.

There are fears this inevitable work risks damaging the unmistakable feature of the Taj and will put off tourists.

- 'Taj Mahal is Dying' -

Experts warn that iron scaffolding risks leaving irrevocable scars on the fine marble. But bamboo frames are inadequate for such heights, leaving few options for those charged with executing the daunting task.

"We have to clean the dome, but the challenge is how to erect the scaffolding," Bhuvan Vikrama, the government archeologist overseeing restoration efforts, told AFP.

"The structure is almost 400 years old, so we can't put any extra load on it. In righting the wrong, we should not wrong the right."

It remains unclear when work will begin or for how long the central dome will be encased in scaffolding.

Fodor's Travel, a publisher of tourism guidebooks, has advised readers to avoid the Taj until at least 2019 lest visitors be disappointed.

The number of local tourists is also being capped to 40,000 a day in a bid to reduce wear and tear on the monument to love, which was built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth in 1631.Currently daily visitor numbers average 10,000-15,000 but can be much higher at weekends, going up to around 70,000. According to government figures, nearly 6.5 million people -- mainly from India -- visited the historic complex in 2016.

Anyone wanting to see the main crypt, which houses marble graves inlaid with semi-precious stones, will also have to pay for a pricier ticket.

But critics warn that restoration is only half the solution, pointing to the industrial factories across the river that near continuously belch out noxious fumes, leaving the air thick with smog.

This toxic haze from this and from dung and garbage burning in and around Agra is responsible for discolouring the Taj, experts say.

Efforts to curb these pollutants, including banning motor vehicles within 500 metres of the building, have failed to clear up the air.

M C Mehta, a lawyer, said his battles in court to shift polluting industries -- including a huge crematorium -- had fallen on deaf ears.

"No one wants to take hard decisions," Mehta told AFP.

"The Taj used to be surrounded by lush greenery, but now there is nothing. Taj is in the last stage of cancer. It is dying, it is gasping for breath."

If it were a conspiracy thriller it would be dismissed as far-fetched, but Tim Wardle's astonishing story of triplets separated at birth and reunited by pure chance is all too real.

His debut feature documentary "Three Identical Strangers," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, introduces Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, who had no idea they were triplets until the age of 19.

But don't expect "The Parent Trap," for this altogether darker film shows how the trio's joyous reunion set in motion a chain of events that unearthed a conspiracy that went far beyond their own lives.

The amazing saga began in 1980 when Shafran enrolled at Sullivan County Community College, a two-hour drive north of New York, and was told he had a double called Eddy Galland, who had just quit.

Shafran tracked down Galland and, sure enough, they were stunned to find they looked exactly alike, and had the same birthday, interests, voices, mannerisms and even hands.

The chance reunion of twins separated at birth was enough to make the front pages of the local tabloids but the coverage unearthed a far more intriguing story.

Kellman was reading about the newly-acquainted brothers and realized he, too, looked exactly like them, shared their birthday and was also adopted.

The men hit it off immediately, moving in together, transferring to the same degree course in international marketing.

The public lapped up their inspiring story and they became celebrities in the Manhattan club scene, even making cameo appearances in Madonna's first major movie, "Desperately Seeking Susan."

- 'Complete surrealism' -

"The initial meeting was just complete surrealism. These things that were happening were just so unreal that they were almost dreamlike," Shafran told AFP.

"But then once we got together there was a joy that I had never experienced in my life and it lasted a really long time."

They opened a restaurant -- Triplets -- selling Eastern European fare and had a ball in the early days, but eventually tempers began to fray as arguments flared over work responsibilities.

Wardle uses a mix of reenactments and interviews with Shafran and Kellman, now 56, to deliver the first bombshell -- a disillusioned Shafran quitting the business.

Then the story takes a tragic turn as it is revealed that Galland had become increasingly depressed and unstable, eventually taking his own life at the age of 33.

The mystery around their infancy -- why they knew nothing about each other despite growing up within a 100-mile radius -- took another twist as journalist and writer Lawrence Wright made a stunning discovery.

The triplets, it turned out, were among a number of identical siblings split up as part of a dark "nature versus nurture" social experiment which began in 1960 and was led by psychoanalyst Peter Neubauer, head of The Child Development Center.

Neubauer's center merged in 1963 into the Jewish Board of Guardians, which would later merge with what would become the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services in Manhattan.

Visits by researchers throughout their childhoods were explained away as a "child development study," when in reality Neubauer was scrutinizing the brothers' personalities and relationships with their very diverse adoptive families.

"We really didn't understand just how egregiously these people behaved," said Kellman, who told AFP all six adoptive parents were angered that they too had been kept in the dark.

"As we got older, got married, became parents ourselves, we realized how impactful it was."

- 'Victims, not participants' -

Wardle, who came across the story while scouting for new documentary ideas and has spent five years on the film, describes the story as "one of most extraordinary" he'd ever heard.

"Right from the off they are very characterful, warm people but there was also a degree of mistrust, which I completely understand," he told AFP.

"When you hear the full depth of their story and what has happened to them it's quite understandable that they'd be a bit wary of people."

The Jewish Board finally agreed to give the surviving brothers access to 100,000 pages of heavily-redacted notes on their evaluations after filming was completed.

But these were far from a formal research paper and included no explanation as to what Neubauer was doing and why, or what his researchers had learned.

Kellman went on running the restaurant for another five years but with Shafran out of the picture and Eddy no longer alive, the venture lost its luster.

He went on to work as an insurance consultant while Shafran became an attorney.

No one has ever apologized to Shafran or Kellman, and the Jewish Board declined to take part in the documentary.

"The Jewish Board does not endorse the Neubauer Study," a spokeswoman told AFP.

She said the organization was "committed to providing identified Neubauer study participants access to their records in a timely and transparent manner."

It is not the kind of language that sits easily with the brothers, however.

"They refer to us as participants," says Kellman. "We weren't participants, we were victims."

British satirist Armando Iannucci's return to Sundance comes exactly nine years after his first lacerating big screen political comedy "In the Loop" debuted at the US film festival.

"Things have changed since then. I remember that day was Obama's inauguration and having done that movie I then went on and did five years of 'Veep,'" he reminisced at the US premiere of his new movie "The Death of Stalin" on Saturday.

"After that I decided I wanted to get away from American politics. Why not do a film about a delusional narcissist who terrifies his own country? And in this one he dies."

Sundance audiences tend to skew liberal and the crowd howled with laughter at the Donald Trump jibe on a day when women across the country were protesting against the 45th US president.

Iannucci -- who created multiple Emmy-winning US political comedy "Veep" after two decades making acclaimed British comedy -- is used to making people laugh.

His latest creation -- which chronicles the Soviet power struggles following murderous dictator Joseph Stalin's demise in 1953 -- might not sound much like comedy fodder.

In fact, it has been hailed by critics as one of the funniest political satires in years, with particular praise going to an all-star cast including Steve Buscemi, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend, Michael Palin and Jeffrey Tambor.

Due for US release in March, the movie is sure to resonate with American audiences exasperated an increasingly tribal political culture, but Iannucci points out that it was filmed before "The Event," as he labels Trump's election.

- Rise of populism -

"At the time I was thinking about doing something about a fictional, contemporary dictator because there had been in the last three or four years lots of nationalist movements," the 54-year-old Scot told AFP.

"There was populism, Berlusconi, Putin... and I thought there's something slightly reminiscent of the 1930s going on here."

Iannucci was sent the French graphic novel on which the film ended up being based and decided immediately against an original story.

"Why do the fiction? Here it is and it's all true. It's funny but it's true," he said.

Iannucci is frequently asked whether he would turn his laser sharp focus on the commander-in-chief, whose various scandals, both serious and amusing, come so frequently they never have long to gestate in the daily news cycle.

"I feel with Trump any attempt to fictionalize what he's doing will never succeed because what he's doing is its own fiction. He is his own satire," the filmmaker told AFP.

Iannucci, whose government shutdown episode in the second season of "Veep" five years ago now looks uncannily topical, said he was glad to no longer be involved with the show.

"I kind of feel I've done it. I've moved on and actually the comedians who are more impactful are the journalistic comedians like John Oliver and Jon Stewart," he said.

"The Death of Stalin" follows the real-life infighting and violence among the dictator's Central Committee -- including Deputy Secretary General Georgy Malenkov (Tambor), eventual leader Nikita Khrushchev (Buscemi) and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (Palin) -- after he collapses with a brain hemorrhage.

- No Russian accents -

Georgy Zhukov, the bombastic, no-nonsense head of the Soviet Army, is played by British actor Jason Isaacs -- perhaps best known internationally as Lucius Malfoy in the "Harry Potter" films.

"He had a reasonable sized ego, as befits a man who, in his mind, single-handedly won the Second World War," Isaacs told AFP.

"You don't need to dig very deep to find he's the only man who, reputedly, could speak the truth to Stalin, that Stalin was wary, if not scared, of."

Isaacs sought out old photographs, all of which showed Zhukov wearing "about 7,000 medals."

Deciding the war hero must have been a hugely proud, headstrong man, Isaacs telephoned Iannucci and asked if he could play the character with the accent of people from the northern English county of Yorkshire, "because they're the bluntest people I know."

Having already decided none of his actors were going to put on hokey Russian accents -- many of the leading Soviet figures including Stalin himself were Georgian, Moldovan or Ukrainian, after all -- Iannucci agreed.

Stalin's daughter Svetlana, who died in the US in 2011, is played by Andrea Riseborough ("Battle of the Sexes," "Nocturnal Animals"), who told AFP a lot of the dialogue was improvised.

"I enjoy research so I had lots of ridiculous stupid facts that I can't now lose from my brain that I'd chuck in, that I used while we were improvising," she said.

"It's so wonderful when you can improvise political satire. I can't think of anything better than politics and comedy together, with a bit of tragedy speckled in."

Sony s family film “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” continued to stomp the competition at the North American box office, taking the top spot for the third straight week, according to industry estimates Sunday.

“Jumanji,” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson along with funnymen Jack Black and Kevin Hart, netted just over $20 million for the three-day weekend, bringing its total to $317 million in its fifth week out, industry tracker Exhibitor Relations reported.

The film follows four teens who find themselves transported inside the video game world of Jumanji.

Debuting in second place was “12 Strong” from Warner Bros., starring Chris Hemsworth, about US Special Forces deployed to Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks. It had a take of $16.5 million.

Gritty heist thriller “Den of Thieves” from STX Films was third on the list in its debut weekend, with $15.3 million. The movie, starring Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Gerard Butler, follows the intersecting lives of the major crimes unit of the Los Angeles Sheriff s Department and an elite band of robbers.

Fox s “The Post” dropped to fourth place from second, after pulling in $12.2 million over the weekend for a total take of $45.2 million in four weeks.

The political thriller recounts the nail-biting behind-the-scenes story of the 1971 publication by the Washington Post of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the lies behind US involvement in the Vietnam War.

“The Greatest Showman,” a Fox film about larger-than-life circus impresario P.T. Barnum, netted $11 million to take the fifth spot. It has taken in $113.5 million in five weeks.

President of Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities, Shaikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa, today received Japan’s outgoing Ambassador to Bahrain, Kiyoshi Asako, and lauded the ambassador’s role in boosting the bilateral cultural exchange. 

The BACA President expressed optimism that the Bahraini-Japanese cultural cooperation would pave the way for the construction of the permanent headquarters of the Arab Regional Center for World Heritage in Sar, Bahrain, which was designed by the Japanese architect Tdao Ando.

The Japanese Ambassador praised the bilateral relations, noting the BACA role in building bridges of communication with his country. 

He expressed appreciation of Bahrain cultural movement that highlights Bahrain as a regional and international cultural destination, wishing a bright future for the BACA programmes and projects. 

French feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir's "mad passion" for a lover 18 years her junior has been revealed in a letter published for the first time Sunday.

It also shows that she was never sexually satisfied by her partner, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

The writer, who condemned marriage as an "obscene" institution which enslaved women in her classic book, "The Second Sex", wrote to the film-maker Claude Lanzmann in 1953 saying she would throw herself into his "arms and I will stay there forever. I am your wife forever."

The note is one of 112 love letters written to the only man de Beauvoir ever lived with, which has been bought by Yale University.

It reveals that Sartre -- who had many other lovers and always kept a separate apartment -- was never able to satisfy her physically in the same way.

"I loved him for sure," she wrote to Lanzmann, "but without it being returned -- our bodies were for nothing."

Nor did she find the same bliss in bed with the American novelist Nelson Algren, author of "The Man with the Golden Arm".

"I loved him because of the love he had for me, without any real intimacy and without ever giving to him from inside of myself," she added.

Lanzmann was 26 and Sartre's secretary when the pair met. De Beauvoir was 44.

The golden couple of French intellectual life had a famously open relationship, and enjoyed -- and endured -- a number of similar love triangles. 

- Feud with daughter -

Lanzmann, now 92, who went on to make the acclaimed Holocaust documentary "Shoah", told Le Monde newspaper that the full story of their love was only coming out because of a clash with Beauvoir's adopted daughter.

He accused Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir -- who under French law will hold the copyright to the letters on his death -- of trying to write him out of her mother's life.

Le Bon was de Beauvoir's last lover and companion and remains her literary executor.

Fearing that Le Bon wanted to "purely and simply eliminate me from the existence of Simone de Beauvoir", he sold the letters to Yale so that historians would have access to them.

Lanzmann said he never had any intention to make them public until he realised that Le Bon was going to "publish all de Beauvoir's letters except the correspondence between her and me."

He feared he would die and no one would know about the letters.

The film-maker has previously written of their "mad passion" in his memoir "The Patagonian Hare", but the existence of such a torrid correspondence was not known.

In de Beauvoir's letter from Amsterdam published by Le Monde, she writes, "My darling child, you are my first absolute love, the one that only happens once (in life) or maybe never. 

"I thought I would never say the words that now come naturally to me when I see you -- I adore you. I adore you with all my body and soul... You are my destiny, my eternity, my life."Lanzmann, who edited "Les Temps Modernes", the ground-breaking review de Beauvoir and Sartre founded after World War II, insisted that it wasn't a menage a trois. "We weren't a trio. I had a relationship of my own with Sartre."

It was a complicated one, however.

"Sartre fell totally in love with my sister Evelyne Rey when he saw her acting in (his play) 'No Exit'", the drama with his famous line "Hell is other people".

"Also on stage that night was my first wife Judith Magre," he added.

Le Bon de Beauvoir could not be contacted by AFP. Le Monde said she did not reply to their requests for an interview.

Lanzmann believes she holds his letters to de Beauvoir and that she made sure he was not invited to the unveiling of a plaque on the house where he lived with de Beauvoir for eight years. 

Agnes Poirier, author of "Left Bank", a new book about how "the ideas that shaped the modern world" were formed in the French capital during the tumult of the 1940s, said Lanzmann always maintained de Beauvoir was a "'grande amoureuse', a very passionate lover." 

"After the age of 40 de Beauvoir thought she was not desirable anymore but she had a second youth with him," Poirier said -- and she lived it "like a rebirth".

"They would work together in the mornings, then in the afternoons she would go and write with Sartre."

Just as with Sartre, it was an open relationship "but de Beauvoir took it badly when she discovered that Lanzmann had had an affair he didn't tell her about." 

The letters can now be consulted only by researchers at the Yale University library.

They're wide-eyed, brightly colored, and completely adorable. But can Japan's Olympic mascots bring in the cash, in a country where cuddly icons promote everything from regional tourism to local prisons?

Japan unveiled three sets of prospective mascots for the 2020 games last year. The winning duo will be announced in February, graduating into a landscape packed with cute and quirky characters.

Known locally as yuru-kyara or "laid-back characters", mascots can be major money spinners.

The pot-bellied, red-cheeked bear known as Kumamon -- created in 2010 to promote Japan's southern Kumamoto region -- raked in nearly 1 billion yen last year for local businesses selling branded products.

Mascots capitalise on a local love of all things adorable, including characters that have gained international fame like the perky-eared yellow Pokemon, and the demure Hello Kitty with her signature hair bow.

"Japan has a tradition of creating personalised characters out of nature -- mountains, rivers, animals and plants," said Sadashige Aoki, professor of advertisement theory at Hosei University. "It has a tradition of animism, a belief that every natural thing has a soul."

Now the hope is that the Tokyo Olympics mascots can serve as both ambassadors for Japan's expanding tourism industry, and a way to recoup some of the billions spent on staging the Games.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance for Japan to promote its tradition, culture and how its society looks," said Aoki. "The question is how to make them globally popular, like Mickey Mouse."

In the past, Olympic mascots have been anything but a sure bet in terms of revenue.

Brazil netted $300 million in profits from licensing intellectual property from the 2016 Games, according to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Merchandise featuring Rio's feline mascot Vinicius was the top-selling item.

But Wenlock and Mandeville, the widely mocked mascots of the 2012 London Games, proved far from Olympic gold. The one-eyed characters were dubbed "bizarre" and "creepy" by some, reportedly sending shares in their manufacturer down by more than a third.

Without the cute factor, mascots are unlikely to have much success, said Munehiko Harada, professor of sports business at Waseda University.

"It's important that mascots are popular among children," he told AFP.

But even if the mascots have mass appeal, they may not be long-term money-makers for Japan because of licensing issues.

"Olympic mascots in the past have been forgotten after the Games were over," said Harada. "But there is a chance they remain alive and remembered as a legacy of the Tokyo Olympics, depending on how they operate the business."

Tokyo 2020 owns the intellectual property rights to the mascots for now, but will have to transfer them to the IOC and the International Paralympics Committee after the Games.

"If I were head of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee, I would demand the IOC loosen its control over rights," Harada said.

Without those rights, there will be no way to capitalise on the mascots after the Games, including developing back stories that drive ongoing interest.

There has been no indication so far that Japan intends to request rights to the mascots, with a spokeswoman for Tokyo 2020 confirming that it expects to relinquish them after the Games.

But the organizers say they are still expecting a substantial windfall from the mascots and other merchandise and licensing opportunities.

"Of the total revenues, $130 million is forecast to accrue from licensing" of mascots and other Olympic emblems, a Tokyo 2020 official told AFP. "While we have the target number, we aim to increase it."

The money is desperately needed, with officials drawing flak for the massive cost of the Games.

Japan has already slashed the Tokyo 2020 budget by $1.4 billion, but is under pressure to further reduce the $12.6-billion bill.

The country's children will decide which pair of characters will represent the Olympics. They are voting in schools across the country, with the results to be announced on Feb 28.

At one school in northern Tokyo, delegates proudly dropped the names of the winners of each class's vote into a ballot box.

There was little love there for category C: a fox wearing ancient beads and a slightly bemused-looking red raccoon. The pair failed to get a single vote.

Also left behind was category B: a hybrid of a lucky cat and a fox, and a blue lion-dog of the type seen guarding Japanese shrines. They managed just five votes.

The clear winner, with 14 votes, was category A's sleek, manga-inspired duo, with their pointy ears, oversized eyes and bold checkered uniforms.

"As soon as I saw pair A, I made my choice," said 10-year-old Taiki. "They're cool. They're far ahead, I think they will win."

This is probably the best deal of Dubai Shopping Festival 2018.

This DSF, Dubai Festival City mall has given away more than Dh200,000 in prizes, but the the icing on the cake is the 20 iPhone X devices and the 2018 Jeep Cherokee that are still to be won.

All you need to do is shop for Dh250, and you get a chance to win.

Friday surprises: One day deals

The DSF this year will also boast of special offers on every Friday of the Dubai Shopping Festival. The brands will be reducing the prices of their products from 10:00am in the morning to 12:00pm in the night. The details of each of the offers will be made available on the DSF social media channels.

If it were a conspiracy thriller it would be dismissed as far-fetched, but Tim Wardell's astonishing story of triplets separated at birth and reunited by pure chance is all too real.

His debut feature documentary "Three Identical Strangers," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, introduces Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, who had no idea they were triplets until the age of 19.

But don't expect "The Parent Trap," for this altogether darker film shows how the trio's joyous reunion set in motion a chain of events that unearthed a conspiracy that went far beyond their own lives.

The amazing saga began in 1980 when Shafran enrolled at Sullivan County Community College, a two-hour drive north of New York, and was told he had a double called Eddy Galland, who had just quit.

Shafran tracked down Galland and, sure enough, they were stunned to find they looked exactly alike, and had the same birthday, interests, voices, mannerisms and even hands.

The chance reunion of twins separated at birth was enough to make the front pages of the local tabloids but the coverage unearthed a far more intriguing story.

Kellman was reading about the newly-acquainted brothers and realized he, too, looked exactly like them, shared their birthday and was also adopted.

The men hit it off immediately, moving in together, transferring to the same degree course in international marketing.

The public lapped up their inspiring story and they became celebrities in the Manhattan club scene, even making cameo appearances in Madonna's first major movie, "Desperately Seeking Susan."

- 'Complete surrealism' -

"The initial meeting was just complete surrealism. These things that were happening were just so unreal that they were almost dreamlike," Shafran told AFP.

"But then once we got together there was a joy that I had never experienced in my life and it lasted a really long time."

They opened a restaurant -- Triplets -- selling Eastern European fare and had a ball in the early days, but eventually tempers began to fray as arguments flared over work responsibilities.

Wardle uses a mix of reenactments and interviews with Shafran and Kellman, now 56, to deliver the first bombshell -- a disillusioned Shafran quitting the business.

Then the story takes a tragic turn as it is revealed that Galland had become increasingly depressed and unstable, eventually taking his own life at the age of 33.

The mystery around their infancy -- why they knew nothing about each other despite growing up within a 100-mile radius -- took another twist as journalist and writer Lawrence Wright made a stunning discovery.

The triplets, it turned out, were among a number of identical siblings split up as part of a dark "nature versus nurture" social experiment which began in 1960 and was led by psychoanalyst Peter Neubauer, head of The Child Development Center.

Neubaur's center merged in 1963 into the Jewish Board of Guardians, which would later merge with what would become the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services in Manhattan.

Visits by researchers throughout their childhoods were explained away as a "child development study," when in reality Neubauer was scrutinizing the brothers' personalities and relationships with their very diverse adoptive families.

"We really didn't understand just how egregiously these people behaved," said Kellman, who told AFP all six adoptive parents were angered that they too had been kept in the dark.

"As we got older, got married, became parents ourselves, we realized how impactful it was."

- 'Victims, not participants' -

Wardle, who came across the story while scouting for new documentary ideas and has spent five years on the film, describes the story as "one of most extraordinary" he'd ever heard.

"Right from the off they are very characterful, warm people but there was also a degree of mistrust, which I completely understand," he told AFP.

"When you hear the full depth of their story and what has happened to them it's quite understandable that they'd be a bit wary of people."

The Jewish Board finally agreed to give the surviving brothers access to 100,000 pages of heavily-redacted notes on their evaluations after filming was completed.

But these were far from a formal research paper and included no explanation as to what Neubauer was doing and why, or what his researchers had learned.

Kellman went on running the restaurant for another five years but with Shafran out of the picture and Eddy no longer alive, the venture lost its luster.

He went on to work as an insurance consultant while Shafran became an attorney.

No one has ever apologized to Shafran or Kellman, and the Jewish Board declined to take part in the documentary.

"The Jewish Board does not endorse the Neubauer Study," a spokeswoman told AFP.

She said the organization was "committed to providing identified Neubauer study participants access to their records in a timely and transparent manner."

It is not the kind of language that sits easily with the brothers, however.

"They refer to us as participants," says Kellman. "We weren't participants, we were victims."

French films doubled their global box office in 2017 thanks to the popularity in China of the sci-fi epic "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets", which was a flop in the West.

The acclaimed low-budget horror, "Raw", about a vegetarian student who becomes a cannibal, by debut director Julia Ducournau, also helped to pull more than 80.5 million people into cinemas overseas to see French films, new figures showed.

"Valerian", the most expensive European movie ever made, seemed destined to be a financial disaster for its director and producer Luc Besson when it bombed in the US.

American and British critics savaged its leading actors Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, though they praised its special effects.

But the maker of the "Fifth Element" has more than made back his enormous $180-million (147 million-euro) budget thanks to box office receipts elsewhere, with 10 million Chinese flocking to see it.

French films took 468 million euros outside France last year, close to doubling the 2016 figures, UniFrance which helps distribute them overseas told AFP.

The big jump in takings followed a disastrous year in 2016, when the global audience for French films fell below 50 million for the first time since records began.

- Second biggest film exporter -

France remains the second-biggest film exporter in the world after the US, said UniFrance head Isabelle Giordano, who added that the figures showed "the stability of the industry and how reactive its independent producers were."

"Raw", for example, was seen by 231,000 people in Mexico alone, far more than saw it in France where it only sold 153,000 tickets.

The comedy "Two is a Family" starring Omar Sy was the second best-performing French film abroad, with an audience of nearly five million people.

The story of a man who raises a child that a woman leaves him with, after claiming it is his, went down a storm in Italy.

The action film, "Overdrive", about the a gang of luxury car thieves, sold nearly two million tickets abroad.

Paul Verhoeven's controversial rape drama "Elle" -- which won actress Isabelle Huppert a Golden Globe award -- pulled in nearly a million people as "it continued to shine beyond our frontiers" even though was released in 2016, UniFrance said.

Western Europe still accounts for French films' biggest foreign audience ahead of Asia (22.9 percent) and central and eastern Europe (12 percent).

But Giordano said she was thrilled with their progress in "new territories like Mexico and Russia", and said there was huge potential in Africa and southeast Asia.

She said "2018 already looks promising" with a new Ikea-set comedy from comic star Dany Boon and the next instalment of the "Asterix" franchise.

Paul Bocuse, one of the greatest French chefs of all time, died on Saturday aged 91 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.

Dubbed the "pope" of French cuisine, Bocuse helped shake up the food world in the 1970s with the Nouvelle Cuisine revolution and create the idea of the celebrity chef.

French President Emmanuel Macron led tributes, calling him a "mythic figure who transformed French cuisine. Chefs are crying in their kitchens across France".

"He was one of the greatest figures of French gastronomy, the General Charles de Gaulle of cuisine," said French food critic Francois Simon, comparing him to France's wartime saviour and dominant postwar leader.

"He brought prestige to the job of a cook," said Alain Ducasse, who like Bocuse has three Michelin stars, in a statement to AFP.

"The beacon of world gastronomy is no more."

A giant in a nation that prides itself as the beating heart of gastronomy, Bocuse was France's only chef to keep the Michelin food bible's coveted three-star rating for more than four decades.

The heart of his empire, L'Auberge de Collonges au Mont D'Or, his father's village inn near Lyon in food-obsessed southeastern France, earned three stars in 1965, and never lost a single one.

"Monsieur Paul," as he was known, was named "chef of the century" by Michelin's rival guide, the Gault-Millau in 1989, and again by The Culinary Institute of America in 2011.

A great upholder of tradition as well as an innovator, several of his trademark dishes at the Auberge remained unchanged for decades including the black truffle soup he created for French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing in 1975, who named him a commander of the Legion of Honour.

- Lover of food, wine and women -

Born into a family of cooks since 1765, Bocuse began his apprenticeship at the age of 16 and came to epitomise a certain type of French epicurean -- a lover of fine wine, food and women.

He slept in the same room where he was born, and managed to maintain a relationship with his wife Raymonde and at least two lovers.

"I love women and we live too long these days to spend one's entire life with just one," Bocuse told the Daily Telegraph in 2005.

Polygamy was part of his huge appetite for life, he insisted. Married to Raymonde since 1946, he also shared his life with Raymone -- with whom he had a son Jerome, also a chef -- and Patricia, who looked after his image for the last 40 years.

"There is one for lunch, one for tea, and one for dinner," he once joked, explained how he lunched with Raymonde, spent his afternoons with Raymone and took Patricia on business trips.

Bocuse became a driving force behind Nouvelle Cuisine in the 1970s, sweeping away the rich and heavy sauces of yesteryear in favour of super-fresh ingredients, sleek aesthetics and innovation.

The term was invented by Gault-Millau to describe food Bocuse helped prepare for the maiden flight of the Concorde airliner in 1969.

Slashing cooking times, paring down menus and paying new attention to health, Nouvelle Cuisine was a craze that fizzled out but left a lasting legacy.

"It was a real revolution," said Simon. "They coined a concept that came at exactly the right moment -- at a time when gastronomy was a bit dull and heavy and not sexy at all."

Personally, Bocuse preferred to eat more hearty traditional fare. "I love butter, cream and wine," he said, "not little peas cut into four."

And he drew the line at Nouvelle Cuisine's extreme minimalism, saying the label "was more about the bill than what was on the plate".

- Great showman -

"Good cooking for me is when you lift up the lid and it smells delicious, and you reach for a second helping," Bocuse wrote a few years before his illness struck.

His status as the giant of haute cuisine owed as much to his showmanship and business sense as it did to his culinary genius.

"His cuisine was built around the classic French repertoire," said Simon. "But people came for the emotion, for his banter, his sense of humour."

"I work as if I will live till I'm 100 and I savour each day as if it was my last," Bocuse once declared as he proudly displayed the French cock American GIs tattooed on his shoulder when he fought alongside them during World War II.

US chef Anthony Bourdain, author of the bestseller "Kitchen Confidential", tweeted an image of the tattoo in homage to "a great, great chef... a hero to me from my earliest days as a cook."

"He wasn't a pain in the arse -- unlike some who reckon they are great chefs," Simon said. "And he always played the part, greeting people with a smile.

Even though he paved the way for today's celebrity chefs, he poked fun at their newfound status, joking in 2007 that "maybe it's time they went back into the kitchens. They've had enough air."

In 1965, Bocuse left his own stove for Japan, the first of many trips to promote French culinary know-how around the world.

From his travels he picked up a flair for marketing, going on to launch an international range of Bocuse branded products and a successful chain of open-plan brasseries, setting up catering schools and competitions.

He also gave his name to the world's top international cookery competition, the annual "Bocuse d'Or".

In 2007, more than 80 top chefs flew to France from around the world to celebrate his 81st birthday and his legacy.

North Korea has informed Seoul it will send a delegation on Sunday to prepare cultural performances during the Winter Olympics, the South's unification minister said, a day after Pyongyang abruptly cancelled the visit.

The North had initially planned to send a seven-member advance team headed by the leader of a popular all-female Western-style band for a two-day visit from Saturday to inspect venues for proposed performances in Seoul and the eastern city of Gangneung.Hyon Song-Wol, reportedly an ex-girlfriend of leader Kim Jong-Un, would be the first North Korean official to visit the South in four years.

But Pyongyang said late Friday it had suspended the plan, giving no reason.

"The North informed us that it will send the arts delegation on Sunday", a day later than initially planned, the ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

Hyon was the subject of lurid 2013 reports in the South that she and around a dozen other state musicians had been executed for appearing in porn movies.

Pyongyang angrily denied the claims and Hyon later appeared on state television.

The two Koreas have agreed to march together under a unification flag -- a pale blue silhouette of the Korean peninsula -- at the opening ceremony of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics on February 9, and to form a unified women's ice hockey team.

But critics in the South have said a unified team would disrupt the side and deprive some Southern squad members of the chance to play on the Olympic stage.

The conservative opposition Liberty Korea Party has strongly objected to the agreement, arguing the North is seeking to exploit the South's Olympics for its own propaganda.

"The Pyeongchang Olympics is becoming like a Pyongyang Olympics", its leader Hong Jun-Pyo said on Friday.

A Realmeter poll released Thursday showed only 40.5 percent of South Koreans supported the joint march under a unification flag.

A larger share -- 49.4 percent -- were in favour of the neighbours holding their own national flags.

In 2015, the Moranbong Band led by Hyon cancelled a series of concerts in Beijing just hours before they were due on stage, reportedly because of disputes over stage backdrop footage showing a North Korean missile being launched.

The Lebanese government has allowed the release of Steven Spielberg's latest film, "The Post", overturning a ban by the General Security authority, a ministry said Wednesday.

The security body had on Monday announced it was banning the Hollywood thriller to comply with an Arab League boycott targeting supporters of Israel.

In a rare move, the interior ministry chose not to sign off on the decision by General Security, which in addition to controlling Lebanon's borders, is responsible for censoring films, plays, and books.

In a statement, it said Interior Minister Nohad Mashnouk "sees no objection to the broadcast of the film", which "has no connection with Lebanon, or to the conflict with the Israeli enemy".

The company distributing the film in Lebanon confirmed that the film, starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, would be released in cinemas in Beirut and elsewhere on Thursday.

The acclaimed production tells the behind-the-scenes story of the 1971 publication by The Washington Post of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the lies behind US involvement in the Vietnam War.

Lebanon is divided on the boycott-driven bans, with some welcoming them as a bulwark against the "cultural normalisation" of Israel's occupation.

Banned films can often be found in bootleg movie shops across the country for as little as one dollar, and even blacklisted books can sometimes be found in regular bookstores.

The Bayeux Tapestry may not be lent to Britain until at least 2023 as French experts voiced their opposition Thursday to the historic treasure ever crossing the English Channel.

While French President Emmanuel Macron was basking in the afterglow of British praise for his diplomatic masterstroke made on the eve of an Anglo-French summit near London, reactions back home were less enthusiastic to say the least.

The former director of the museum in the Normandy town which houses the 68 metre-long (224 foot) embroidered account of the Norman conquest of England in 1066, hit out at the decision.

Isabelle Attard said moving such a "fragile, near-1,000-year-old roll of wool and linen" even a few metres was risky, never mind transporting it overseas.

"A temporary exhibition in Britain is worrying on several levels," she said, adding that she had "huge doubts" about whether such a loan was practically possible.

Even curator Pierre Bouet, who cares for the tapestry at the museum, said he thought "it was a hoax" when he first heard of the plan.

"If you were to ask my advice, despite the regard I have for my English colleagues who I have worked with for many years, I would say no," he told AFP.

Bayeux mayor Patrick Gomont, while hailing the loan as a "great opportunity" for the town, said huge precautions would have to be taken to protect the artefact.

- Not until 2023 -

Bouet, who has written a book on the tapestry's many mysteries, said although it was in a good state for its age it "was still fragile, with between 400 and 500 spots where the material has had to be patched."

A recent report warned that holes, oxidation and the patches had put the tapestry "under stress" in places, while authorities have commissioned a new study on how to "stabilise" the roll and stop it degrading any further.

"Only when it has been stabilised can a decision be taken on lending it," the Bayeux mayor's office said in a statement.

If everything were to go to plan, the tapestry -- which shows how the English King Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye at the Battle of Hastings -- could possibly cross the Channel when the museum closes for a major refurbishment in 2022 and 2023, it added.

The tapestry is presently protected from fire and dampness by a sealed glass case, and would have to be shown in Britain in same way, "which would be extremely costly", Bouet said.

"I said no myself to the loan, although I really would like to say yes," he added.

Many angry Normans, however, do not want the tapestry leaving France. Mayor Gomont's Facebook page was bombarded with hostile reactions from locals.

Attard, who is also an ecologist politician, said the loan would be an economic blow to the town.

"Will there be compensation for the businesses who live off the 400,000 visitors a year the museum attracts," she asked on Twitter.

The origins of the epic account of William the Conqueror's claim on the English throne is shrouded in mystery, although many believe it was made in Kent near London.

The first written reference to it is in 1476, and Napoleon brought it to Paris in 1804 to try to stir up public opinion in favour of his own ultimately unrealised plans to invade Britain.

Adolf Hitler had it moved to the Louvre museum in Paris in June 1944 after the Allied landings on the beaches nearby Bayeux, but it was never taken to Berlin as he had ordered.

Many would prefer probably not to dwell on what becomes of books thrown into the rubbish bin when their onetime reader declutters their shelves.

In the Turkish capital Ankara, however, discarded books need not necessarily end up heading for a papery oblivion.

Instead, a surprising life after death is now in store for them thanks to a rather unconventional library.

A group of the city's rubbish collectors has set up the library boasting thousands of works that would otherwise have been swallowed up by landfill.

The books had been left out on residential streets together with other refuse for collection, sparking the idea to recycle them for a whole new readership.

Opened more than seven months ago by one district's garbage collectors and their manager, the library is housed in a disused brick factory that was already serving as a base for the workers.

The once decaying plant, abandoned 20 years ago, is now a thriving space where staff can spend their break perusing the shelves stacked with some 4,750 books.

Originally intended just for the refuse workers and their families so they could borrow books for up to 15 days, it is now open to the public too, said Emirali Urtekin, the site's manager, whose office is equipped with other rescued items like magazines and a typewriter.There are another nearly 1,500 books yet to be placed on the shelves as more are rescued and now donated, he added.

No book goes to waste, with some of the nonusable books employed as shelves for the others.

The renovated building -- where even copper pipes find a use as lights -- is also home to a barber's shop, cafeteria, social area and offices for administrative staff.

- 'Encourage new ideas' -

The books have so far been sorted into 17 categories, and counting, ranging from romance novels, economics textbooks, thrillers and children's fiction.

The library boasts a variety of works by top foreign and Turkish authors, including JK Rowling, Charles Dickens, JRR Tolkien, Orhan Pamuk and "Fifty Shades of Grey" author EL James.

It's accessible 24 hours a day for the refuse workers and has its own librarian, paid by the municipality: 20-year-old Eray Yilmaz.

Up until now Yilmaz said a total of 147 books had been borrowed from the library, whose members can potentially include the up to 700 rubbish collectors working for the Cankaya district.According to the municipality, the new service is the only kind of library in the district open to the public.

"Reading books develops a person's intelligence, encourages new ideas... and here we introduce those new ideas from books to people," enthused Yilmaz.

"This is something that makes a person beyond happy. I take books to my mother too."

Malik Ercan, one of several disabled staff members, said he took books home to his wife and child and that the library was drawing those outside of the city as well.

"Recently I showed my cousin around who had come from (the central Turkish province of) Sivas. They had heard about it in the news. They wanted to see it.

"More friends are calling and saying they want to see it after seeing the news, 'let us see it... it's very different', they say," added Ercan, who has been working for the municipality for two and a half years.

- 'New lease of life' -

The library has received plenty of local and international attention, leading to the arrival of more books and not just from rubbish bins.

People from other Turkish cities now even pay the postal costs to send books to the library, Urtekin said, while refuse collectors continue to gather unwanted books on their daily rounds.

"We're getting many visits from members of the public but also donations. They say: 'This is such a good project, we want to support it as well'," Urtekin said."We have given a new lease of life to those books that have been thrown away... and the books are available for free."

- Next: mobile library -

Although there are no plans to expand the current space, the library has sparked further projects for discarded books.

The manager told AFP that later in the year they will create a mobile library and visit some Ankara schools every 15 days so more children have access.

It will serve schools without libraries or with a limited choice on their shelves.

Students will also benefit during the visits from musical performances by "Tin Group" -- made up of 11 workers using broken rubbish containers and discarded metal objects.

The group started around the same time as the library opened, Urtekin said.

"We are happy," the manager said. "It has given us a different identity."

Under a blazing sun, a procession carrying a replica of the Ark of the Covenant marched on a path of red carpets through the streets of Ethiopia's capital, sending believers to their knees in reverence.

The occasion was Timkat, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church's celebration of Jesus Christ's baptism that began Thursday afternoon and concluded Friday.

Held annually and second in importance only to Christmas in the eyes of the church, the tradition sees the replica Ark that every Ethiopian Orthodox church normally keeps out of public view brought outside.

Shaded beneath canopies of blue, red and gold, the precious receptacle is then paraded through the streets.

For the churches of the capital Addis Ababa, priests carry their Ark -- known as a Tabot -- to an open field where it is kept overnight before being returned after an early morning mass baptism during which Orthodox priests douse crowds of believers with holy water.

"This is our culture and tradition, and a religious symbol for us," said Belay Shiferaw, one of tens of thousands of Orthodox faithful, cloaked in in white, who thronged the capital's roads to witness the processions.

The tradition dates to the time of the country's first emperor Menelik I, the founder of the Ethiopian empire who is traditionally believed to be the son of the Biblical Queen of Sheba and King Solomon.

Church lore says Menelik I took the Ark of the Covenant from the Jews in Jerusalem because they had lost faith and were no longer observing God's commandments.

Even though they are copies of the original Ark that Orthodox adherents say is now housed in the northern Ethiopian city of Axum, the replicas carried through the streets of the capital are considered so holy that young men unroll lengths of carpet beneath the clergymen so their feet do not have to touch the asphalt.

Following them were musicians playing the begena, a harp-like instrument used for church functions whose strings are made from sheep guts.

In the countryside, people celebrating Timkat dive into rivers to simulate Christ's baptism, but finding a suitable body of water amid Addis Ababa's sprawl is impractical.

As the sun rose after a night spent praying over the assembled Arks, Orthodox priests mounted platforms overlooking a field normally used by the capital's footballers and aspiring marathoners, and hosed down thousands of assembled believers with holy water.

"I'm feeling very satisfied and, at the same time, I feeling like all my sins were washed away," said Teklie Fikre, whose reliance on crutches did not stop him from pushing his way through the crowd to be baptised.

Vienna is marking 100 years since the death of a string of luminaries from its fin-de-siecle glory days with an avalanche of exhibitions of modernist art, design and architecture that still inspire and shock today.

The year 1918 did not only mark defeat in World War I and the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire but also saw artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Koloman Moser and architect Otto Wagner pass away.

Klimt died from a stroke at 55, an infection claimed Wagner's life at 76 and cancer killed Moser aged 50. Schiele survived being conscripted into the war only to die in the Spanish flu pandemic, three days after his pregnant wife Edith. He was just 28.

All were leading lights in the revolutions in art, literature, architecture, psychology, philosophy and music that made the imperial city on the Danube the buzzing intellectual hub of the world at the time.

"It was a unique collision of all forms of art and science -- the literature of Hofmannsthal, the atonal music of Schoenberg, psychoanalysis with Freud and even economics with Schumpeter," Hans-Peter Wipplinger, director of the Leopold Museum, told AFP.

"Vienna was not always a trend setter, but always good at making something special out of something which already existed," said art historian Alexandra Brauner. "We made something really special out of it."

- Stairway to Klimt -

The Leopold kicked off the anniversary year this week with the first of its six special exhibitions -- in Vienna and around there are around 20 -- focusing on Klimt, Moser as well as Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka.

It also showcases examples of classic 1900-era design such as furniture, artisan craftwork and posters created by Moser and others in the Wiener Werkstaette community of artists that he co-founded.

From February a special Leopold show shines the light on Schiele, whose tortured eroticism still causes blushes to this day -- as witnessed by the prudish covering up genitals on advertising posters in London last year.

The Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) will from December 19 show off some of its Wiener Werkstaette treasures and from May 30 looks at the influence of Wagner's influence on contemporaries, pupils and subsequent generations of architects and designers.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum will next month erect again its "Stairway to Klimt" allowing visitors to examine up close some of the works painted by the artist between the pillars and arches of the building early in his career.

- Nazi looters -

The Bank Austria Kunstforum will explore Japanese influences, the Jewish Museum will from May hark back to the artistic salons of the time, while the Klimt Villa will look into the looting of many works by the Nazis and what happened later.

Vienna's thriving Jewish community were big drivers in the city's flourishing intellectual, scientific and artistic scene, not least in buying up artworks to fill their homes.

In his later years Klimt's studio had "two separate entrances. One for models who would then wait in an antechamber, often with next to no clothes on, and another for his rich customers," said Baris Alakus, director of the Klimt Villa.

By 1918, Vienna was already starting to be eclipsed, and 20 years later Hitler -- rejected as a young man by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts -- annexed his native country, first robbing and then destroying the Jewish population.

The postwar restitution of artworks to their former owners' descendants, now spread around the globe, has been tortuous and in some cases incomplete, with many paintings controversially ending up in state hands.

It took until 1998 for the Austrian parliament to pass a law allowing some 10,000 works to be returned.

In one of the biggest cases, five Klimt masterpieces were returned in 2006 to the descendant of the Jewish family they were stolen from after a legal battle with Austria's Belvedere Museum.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has released new age-progressed images of four suspects in the deadly hijacking of a Pan Am plane in the Pakistani city of Karachi in 1986.

Twenty passengers and crew, including two US citizens, were killed on September 5 that year when the hijackers took control of Frankfurt-bound Pan Am flight 73 for some 16 hours during a stopover in the southern port megacity.

It came to an end when the hijackers opened fire on passengers and crew, causing Pakistani commandos to storm the plane.

The suspects are believed to belong to Abu Nidal, accused of having carried out attacks in more than 20 countries under the banner of Palestinian liberation.

The group is designated a terrorist organisation by the US State Department and each of the men -- Wadoud Muhammad Hafiz al-Turki, Jamal Saeed Abdul Rahim, Muhammad Abdullah Khalil Hussain ar-Rahayyal, and Muhammad Ahmed al-Munawar -- is on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists List.

According to a statement posted on the FBI website, images of the suspects obtained in the year 2000 were age-progressed by the FBI Laboratory.

"We're hoping that with the age-progression photos next to the original photos maybe that will jar some memories or maybe someone has seen these guys walking around," the statement said, quoting a case officer.

The US State Department is also offering a $5 million reward for information leading to their arrest, through its Rewards for Justice Programme.

At a trial held in Pakistan 1988, the four men plus a fifth hijacker, Zaid Hassan Abd Latif Safarini, admitted to having carried out the attack and were given death sentences that were later commuted to life imprisonment.

Safarini was released from prison in Pakistan in 2001 but was quickly arrested by the FBI. In May 2004, a US federal judge in Washington sentenced him to 160 years.

The four other hijackers were released by Pakistan after completing their jail terms in 2008. In 2010, some news reports claimed that Rahim was killed in a US drone strike in North Waziristan.

Indigenous leaders from the Amazon who will meet Pope Francis in Peru on Friday will present him with a bow and arrow, a gift rich in symbolism for a vulnerable people clinging to a simple past, facing an uncertain future.

"We are a people who have been stripped of their original lands," summed up Cesar Jojaje Eriney, the 43-year-old head of the Ese Eja tribe.

Adjusting his crown of colorful parrot feathers and slipping on a necklace made from the teeth of jaguars and wild pigs, Cesar says he looks to the pope's visit "with hope" that it can spur the return of indigenous lands by the state.

"It's a unique window. A unique opportunity," he said.

His and other leaders' main concern is rampant illegal gold mining and logging that have devastated their ancestral lands.

His tiny settlement of 230 inhabitants, at Palma Real, is accessible only via a two-hour boat trip into the Amazon rainforest from the dusty river town of Puerto Maldonado, in Peru's wild southeast.

Children run barefoot through flocks of scattering chickens. Modernity has largely been kept at bay despite the gradual appearance of motorbikes, some mobile phones and the ubiquitous soccer jersey.

The 81-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church will visit remote Puerto Maldonado for a meeting with 3,500 indigenous people from the Amazon basin on Friday.

For the Ese Eja, it's a big day. A total 187 people have signed up for the trip - almost the entire local community -- will be transported up the Amazon tributary Madre de Dios river on boats chartered by the Catholic Church.

- 'Kind old man' -

Eight boats were chartered for Palma Real and whole families settled in, loaded with luggage, food and water for the three days their stay is to last. Armed with a megaphone, Cesar shouted out instructions to those boarding the vessels.

But who is the pope for them? "They know he is the great bishop of all," said Martin Ramirez, sent by Catholic charity Caritas to oversee the transfer.

However, he said the Church had to send a delegation "to explain who the pope is and why this meeting is taking place."

"We call him Papachi, the kind daddy, the little old man," says Cesar. Other indigenous neighbors in the region refer to Francis as "Apaktone" - the old man.

On Friday, Cesar said he wants to give the pope a message: "Thank you for saving our lives" -- remembering that the Catholic Church protected the community in a volatile period of the 1940s when rubber prices soared and many indigenous people were killed.

"We were 25-30,000 people, today there are barely 600 of us left," he said, counting the two other Ese Eja Tribes in the area.

A second message is even starker: "That he saves our lives a second time, so that we won't disappear altogether," he said, denouncing the Peruvian state for appropriating more and more tribal lands.

- Gold panning threat -

Though the Ese Eja live a subsistence existence mainly through cultivating chestnuts, their lands sit atop vast reserves of gold, gas and oil that has made them irresistable to fortune hunters.

Gold panning is already a scourge in the area, creating huge craters of mud in the forest and spilling mercury, used to extract gold, into the water system.

"Yesterday they killed us by shooting at us, today they want to exterminate us by starving us," lamented Cesar, accusing the government of ceding to commercial interests drawn by Peru's gold-rush.

In addition to crafts made by local women, the community will offer Francis the gift of a bow and arrow "so he can defend us."

Nearby, Jacinto Savera Chatawa, a 70-year-old father of 12 children, was unmoved by all the excitement generated ahead of Francis' visit.

Evangelizers have long imposed their own rules on a people who lived differently to them, he said.

"We were civilized, and the natives had the right to three or four wives, but the priest forbade it," he said, a small black monkey lounging on his knee.

"Our God, it's Edosikiana," and not the Catholic god, said Jacinto, who wont' be going to Puerto Maldonado to see the pope on Friday.

"If it would be a God who came from the sky with wings that were two meters long, then maybe," he said, laughing with his family.

"But this guy's just a human."

Sony's family film "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" had a lock on the top spot at the North American box office this holiday weekend, for the second straight week.

"Jumanji," starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, funnymen Jack Black and Kevin Hart, netted $35.2 million over the Martin Luther King Day weekend, bringing its domestic total to $291.3 million in its fourth week out, industry tracker Exhibitor Relations reported.

The film follows four teens who find themselves inside the video game world of Jumanji.

In second place was Fox's "The Post," which pulled in $23 million over the Friday-Monday MLK weekend after heading into wide release.

A critically-acclaimed film starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, the political thriller recounts the nail-biting behind-the-scenes story of the 1971 publication by The Washington Post of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the lies behind US involvement in the Vietnam War.

Fox's "The Greatest Showman" which tells the story of larger-than-life circus impresario P.T. Barnum, netted $16.2 million for third place.

"The Commuter," a new action thriller from Lionsgate, took $15.8 million in its first week, putting it in fourth place.

In the film, a man played by Liam Neeson takes his regular train ride home and is unwittingly enticed into a murder conspiracy by a mysterious woman, played by Vera Farmiga.

"Paddington 2" netted $15 million to take the fifth spot.

And "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" brought in $14.6 million in North America for sixth place. The space saga stars Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver and two members of the series' original cast, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker and the late Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia.

Rounding out the top 10 were:

"Insidious: the Last Key" ($14.3 million)

"Proud Mary" ($11.7 million)

"Pitch Perfect 3" ($7.3 million)

"Darkest Hour" ($5.4 million)

In a gesture of abiding friendship, or perhaps a subtle act of diplomatic trolling, French President Emmanuel Macron will offer to loan Britain the famed Bayeux Tapestry, depicting the French conquest of England, during his visit to the UK on Thursday.

The 40-year-old French leader likes to accompany his diplomacy with symbolic moves and gifts as he sets about trying to restore France's international prestige.

On a trip to Beijing, he offered the Chinese president a French stallion, while Russian leader Vladimir Putin was given a tour around an exhibition at the Versailles Palace last year that marked 300 years of Franco-Russian friendship.

In Britain on Thursday, Macron will offer to transport the 70-metre-long (230-foot) Bayeux Tapestry to Britain for the first time, in an unprecedented and technically difficult journey for the priceless thousand-year-old artwork.

"It will not be before 2020 because it's an extremely fragile cultural treasure which will be subject to major restoration work before being transported anywhere," an official in Macron's office said Wednesday.

The tapestry, which dates from around 1077, depicts the famed Battle of Hastings when William the Conqueror from France defeated English forces in southern England.

The story of the 1066 military defeat, in which the English King Harold famously died after taking a French arrow in the eye, is still taught to British school children and is a founding moment in the long and bloody history of Anglo-French rivalry.

"It is very significant that the Bayeux Tapestry is going to be coming to the UK and that people are going to be able to see this," British Prime Minister Theresa May said Wednesday.

- Gallic joke? -

Many historians and politicians on Monday welcomed the gesture as a friendly move that underlined the two countries' shared history and intermingled blood at a time when Britain is leaving the European Union.

"It's an absolutely fantastic opportunity for British people from around the country to come, I hope to the British Museum, and see it in all its glory," said Tom Tugendhat, chairman of a foreign affairs committee at the British parliament.

"This is a real demonstration on how diplomacy is done," he told BBC radio.

But other commentators wondered exactly what Macron was trying to say by focusing on an inglorious moment in British military history.

The Times newspaper published a cartoon showing Macron in Middle Ages military garb skewering British Prime Minister Theresa May: "Emmanuel The Conqueror: It's One In The Eye for Theresa Regina."

Writing on Twitter, broadcast journalist Robert Peston commented that "lending the UK a magnificent depiction of the last time this country was invaded and subjugated is a wonderful Gallic joke by Emmanuel Macron."

Jockeying over who would display the work was already underway, with the British Museum's director Hartwig Fischer saying he would be "delighted" to show the work.

Lawmakers representing the seaside town of Hastings, as well as the village of Battle, where the historic clash took place, are also hoping for the honour.

"I'm sure we will be looking very carefully to ensure the maximum number of people can take benefit from seeing this tapestry," May said.

- Argument over origins -

The loan might also reopen an unsettled argument about the creators of the tapestry, which has rarely moved from its home in a museum in Bayeux in France.

It was displayed in Paris in 1804 and again briefly at the Louvre Museum in 1945.

"There is a reasonable case that it could have been made in Canterbury" in southern England, British historian David Musgrove, who authored a book on the subject, told the BBC.

Other theories are that it was made in Bayeux itself or perhaps in an abbey in the Loire region of central France.

French historian Pierre Bouet said the tapestry should be seen by Britons as evidence of the role of France in the country's history.

The tapestry "is a reminder of the military exploit of the founder of the current royal dynasty," Bouet told AFP. "Even if he doesn't descend directly from him, Prince Charles is aware that he has the blood of William the Conqueror in his veins."

The British royal family still has the French words "Dieu Et Mon Droit" (God and my Right) on its coat of arms.

Macron will hold talks with May at Sandhurst, a British military academy outside London, on Thursday.

Germany loaned Lithuania its long-lost declaration of independence on Wednesday as the Baltic nation prepares to mark one hundred years since it restored statehood after World War I.

The 1918 document, which was unearthed in a Berlin archive last year by a Lithuanian professor, will stay in the country for five years under a bilateral agreement.

"I want to thank our friend Germany which managed to preserve the document of great importance for us during turbulent times," Lithuania's President Dalia Grybauskaite said as she received the document during a ceremony in capital Vilnius.

"After a 100 years the Act of #Lithuania's Independence is finally back home!," she added in a tweet.

The arrival of the document, which has been called the country's "birth certificate", launches year-long festivities including an Independence Day celebration on February 16 when EU leaders will travel to Vilnius to mark the 100th anniversary of the declaration.

Lithuania's Catholic Church has also given its faithful a special gift by allowing them to eat meat on the national holiday, which falls on a Friday during Lent when Christians must observe a period of fasting.

Lithuania ruled over one of medieval Europe's largest military empires, encompassing large territories of present-day Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and Russia, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

But by the late 1700s, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were gradually partitioned between neighbouring empires.

Russia ruled Lithuanian territories until the empire's collapse during World War I.

Historians say that up to five copies of independence declarations could have been signed on February 16, 1918, when Lithuania was under German occupation, but all traces of other copies vanished.

During World War II, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Lithuania, which became the first Soviet republic to declare independence in 1990.

The nation of 2.8 million joined EU and NATO in 2004. Lithuania has repeatedly warned its Western allies of Russia's imperial ambitions, notably after Moscow annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014.