An old image of an Islamic observatory, showing an astrolabe in use.

Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, one of the numerous major museums on the city’s Museum Island, is currently hosting an exhibition of Islamic art from the private collection of Edmund de Unger, showcasing a 112-piece group of Islamic artifacts including 25 pieces from the Ottoman period.
The collection, titled “Collector’s Fortune Islamic Art from the Edmund de Unger Collection,“ will be on display at the Pergamon Museum’s Islamic Arts Museum until Feb. 17, 2008.
The exhibit is only a small part of de Unger’s private collection of Islamic art, which consists of around 2,000 pieces, museum officials said, according to Todayszaman.
Islamic Art Museum director Claus-Peter Haase told reporters that the 112 pieces on display were reflective of all eras of Islamic art history and that the exhibition included examples from all Islamic countries in the Mediterranean and from Central Asia.
Haase said the exhibited items complemented the museum’s own collection and added that he was pleased to host the collection in Berlin.
The exhibit features some 25 artifacts from the Ottoman period, Haase noted, including miniatures, carpets and garments, which he said were “all very important pieces.“
He added that the exhibit offered insight into the history of Islamic culture. Other items showcased at the exhibit include samples of calligraphy, handwritten manuscripts, ancient vases, Egyptian rock crystals, early Arabic and Iranian painted miniatures and as Spanish-Islamic and Turkish textiles.
Edmund de Unger’s son, Richard, upon a question regarding the reason the family chose to put the collection on display in Berlin, said: “Similar exhibits have been on show in Britain, the US and France. These artifacts were lacking in the Berlin museum.
That’s why we selected Berlin.“ He added that the de Unger family would like the artifacts to remain in Berlin even after the exhibit wraps up and hopes to realize this after completing the legal procedures required to keep the collection at the museum.
The collection that Edmund de Unger assembled in England over a period of nearly 50 years is counted among the largest private collections of Islamic art in the world.

Noted English poet and writer Rudyard Kipling’s birthplace in the Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay) is being converted into an art museum. The Maharashtra state government, of which Mumbai is the capital, has formed a committee to implement the project by 2009.
The timber and stone two-storey cottage, built more than 100 years ago, is surprisingly not much affected by the ravages of time and sits delicately in the womb of the famous JJ School of Art campus in the heart of bustling Mumbai, according to BBC.
The art school has a vast collection of contemporary paintings, dating from 1850, which will now be part of the museum. And so will be a few articles of the author of Jungle Book, who also penned the beautiful poem, ’If’.
A bust of Kipling, installed on the veranda of the cottage, greets visitors, announcing in fading letters the day and year he was born in the house.
Vikas Dilawari, who teaches architecture on the campus, says foreign visitors often come to take a look at the bungalow, where Kipling was born on 30 December 1865--the year his father John Lockwood Kipling joined the art school as its dean.
Dilawari believes once the bungalow is converted into a heritage museum many more people will visit it.
“It’s an attempt on our part to pay homage to a great writer, who was born in Mumbai,“ he says. Dilawari’s colleague Santosh Shivsagar is on the committee which will implement the project.
“It’s a tribute to a great writer. The museum will become a reference point for Kipling,“ he says.

’If’ By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!“

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And--which is more--you’ll be a Man, my son!

Piece by priceless piece, artifact by ancient artifact, Iraq is slowly recovering its Mesopotamian treasures looted by bandits, militiamen and soldiers after Saddam Hussein was toppled.
Lured by offers of rewards, Iraqis are increasingly handing in an assortment of cups, vases, statuettes, daggers, plates and coins dating back to the very cradle of civilization, a government official said.
“We had 594 pieces returned this week alone,“ Abdul Zahra al-Talaqani, media director in the ministry of culture, tourism and antiquities, told AFP in an interview in his office in Baghdad’s tightly-protected Green Zone.
“Each day we get more and more.“
The antiques, unless clearly identifiable as stolen museum pieces--which are stamped--, are sent to a laboratory for testing. “We get many fakes,“ said Talaqani.
He said that in all, at least 32,000 items of antiquity are known to have been pillaged from the National Museum in Baghdad and the country’s 12,000 archeological locations since the US-led invasion in 2003.
The actual number is believed to be far higher though. Many items were not recorded and some are still disappearing from the thousands of archeological sites in Iraq, some dating back up to 10,000 years.
Wispy-bearded Talaqani bitterly blamed the US military as being responsible for a large share of the looting by failing to protect the valuable items.
“There are two seas in Iraq--a sea of oil and a sea of antiquities. The multinational forces have done everything to protect the sea of oil but they have done very little to protect the other sea. We are not accusing them of stealing the antiquities, but they have not protected them.“
Among the more important pieces known to be missing are a Sumerian period female head from Uruk--modern Warka--and large numbers of plates, daggers, cups and statues--of both human and animals--from the Babylonian and Assyrian periods.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

New translation of The Brothers Karamazov with continuation recently published in Japan has boomed as a bestseller.
Its author is Ikuo Kameyama, a professor of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies who started with translating the famous novel by Dostoevski and was so carried away by it that he could not stop himself from continuing it.
In order to make the novel more understandable for the Japanese readers, the translator simplified the names of the characters and got rid of their patronymic names along with imparting Japanese rhythm to the text, Russia-ic.com reported.
The scholar insists that his work was based on scientific approach. He is sure that Dostoevski himself would have thanked the translator for the creative interpretation of the classic.
This is not the first case of free interpretation of great Russian classics abroad. A month ago controversy was boiling around the new American translation of The War and Peace that made Leo Tolstoy’s novel one third shorter and changed its ending.

The French government has a plan for cutting music and film piracy on the Internet: cut off the pirates’ Internet access.
The penalty is part of a range of measures to deal with the unauthorized copying of music and video online proposed by the French Ministry of Culture including watermarking content, tracking surfers’ activities, and creating a registry of those accused by copyright holders of piracy, AFP reported.
Minister for culture Christine Albanel said the problem of digital piracy was “urgent“--despite the introduction last year of a controversial law that made unauthorized file-sharing a criminal offense punishable by up to six months in prison and a fine of US$ 45,000.
“We can’t accept for much longer that artists be deprived of the fruits of their work,“ she said.
The government has won agreement for its latest proposals from the French media industry, which will implement the watermarking measures and make legal downloads of films more widely and rapidly available. Albanel signed the agreement with TV channels, Internet service providers (ISPs), and groups representing filmmakers, authors and musicians rights groups.
In return for the support of these organizations, the government will create a new agency to monitor Internet traffic for the presence of watermarked files and handle complaints from rights holders. Anyone whose Internet connection is used to download such files could receive an official warning from their ISP.
A second offense could result in their contract with the ISP being terminated and their name being added to a registry of offenders
The register could potentially lead to a new class of digital have-nots unable to find a new ISP, at a time when the government is increasingly moving services for citizens online.
Consumer rights groups rejected the new measures. Cutting off Internet connections without a fair trial flouts the constitutional principal that citizens are “innocent until proven guilty,“ said the Union of French Consumers (UFC).
The plans are “repressive“ and will lead to the creation of a private Internet police force, said FrŽdŽric Couchet, a spokesman for APRIL, an association that promotes and researches free and open-source computing.

Ruins of the old Apadana Palace in IranÕs Khuzestan province. Apadana, which was built during the first half of the 5th century BC by Darius the Great, covered an area of 112,000 square meters, its roof supported by 72 columns, each standing 20m tall. Photo by Ali Hassanpour.

The 2008 Berlin film festival will honor renowned Italian director Francesco Rosi with an Honorary Golden Bear for his life’s work, the organisers said, AFP reported.
“His works are classics of politically engaged cinema,“ Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick said, adding that Rosi had “helped to shape 50 years of Italian film history.“
Rosi, now 85, won the Golden Lion in Venice for “Hands Over the City“ in 1963 and the Palme D’Or at the Cannes film festival with his Mafia-film “The Mattei Case“ in 1972.
He brought Carlo Levi’s popular novel “Christ Stopped at Eboli“ to the screen in the late 1970s. The Napoli-born director began his cinema career as an assistant to Luschino Visconti, the acclaimed director of “Death in Venice“ and “The Leopard“.
Organizers announced that Greek-French director Costa-Gavras, also known for tackling political themes, will be the president of the festival’s international jury.
It will screen a retrospective of late Spanish surrealist film director Luis Bunuel’s works. The festival, one of Europe’s top three, runs from February 7-17.

A landscape by Ferdinand Hodler, which had been out of the public eye for more than half a century, failed to reach its guide price at auction. The painting by one of Switzerland’s best-known artists attracted a top bid of 4.9 million Swiss francs ($4.46 million), below a guide price range of 5 to 7 million francs. An official of Sotheby’s auction house in Zurich was stunned at the painting’s failure to attract higher bids. “We have had year after year of records with Hodler paintings.“
“This is really a surprise considering there is a major exhibition of his work in Paris at the moment,“ the official said, wrote Reuters.
“It might mean that we are seeing a shift in the market, suggesting that modern art is falling from favor.“
The oil, depicting the Dents-Du-Midi mountain range in bluish hues, was painted by Hodler in the Alpine resort of Champery in the Valais canton (state) in 1916.
Hodler sold the painting the following year to a Swiss collector and it was displayed only twice in exhibitions, in 1938 and 1950. It was the second time in the past month that a major work was withdrawn from auction after failing to attract a high enough bid. A Vincent van Gogh landscape came up short at a Sotheby’s auction in New York.
Sotheby’s declined to identify the owner of the Hodler work but said the work had been in the same family since 1917.
Hodler’s “Lake Geneva as seen from Saint-Prex“ fetched nearly 11 million Swiss francs in June, doubling its pre-sale estimate.
The Swiss artist lived from 1853 to 1918. “Hodler didn’t just paint Alpine landscapes, he captured the essence of mountains,“ Urs Lanter, head of the Swiss art department at Sotheby’s, told Reuters.
A Hodler exhibition opened at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris in mid-November and will end in February.