SIEM REAP, Cambodia – It has taken over half a century, but the painstaking task of piecing together the fabled Baphuon Temple in Cambodia’s ancient Angkor complex is finally complete. A French-led team of archaeologists had to assemble hundreds of thousands of sandstone blocks in exactly the right spot – a restoration project that’s been called the biggest jigsaw puzzle in the world. Click below to view a voiced AFPTV report.
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Monte Carlo, MONACO – Monaco is gearing up for the “other” royal wedding of the year. Prince Albert will tie the knot with former Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock from South Africa later this week. But not to be overshadowed by Britain’s Prince William and Catherine Middleton, there will be two days of ceremonies, on Friday and Saturday, including a concert performance by the Eagles. Click below for a video and voiced report.
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Lawyer Pu Zhiqiang said an appeal was filed with the Beijing Local Taxation Bureau by Ai’s wife, Lu Qing. She is the legal representative of his design company Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd.
The appeal demands proof of the alleged tax evasion and a review of the case, Pu said. Ai’s family previously denied he evaded any taxes and activists say the accusations were a false premise for detaining Ai, who spoke out against the authoritarian government.
During Ai’s detention, authorities seized accounting records and other items that have yet to be returned, which means the company has not way of checking the allegations, Pu said.
“Also the allegations in the document are very general, they don’t say which year or years the tax violations occurred or whether the tax evaded was corporate tax, income tax or something else,” Pu said.
Calls to the local tax office in Chaoyang district, where Ai’s studio is located, rang unanswered Wednesday.
Chinese authorities previously have said Ai was released after he confessed to tax evasion and pledged to repay the money owed.
Tax officials visited Ai’s studio on Monday to inform him the company owed $770,000 in back taxes from the last decade and $1.1 million in fines. Ai refused to sign the documents and was told he had three days to appeal, his mother, Gao Ying, said Tuesday.
Ai is internationally known and has earned huge sums selling his work at auctions and through galleries. In February, a 100-kilogram pile of handmade porcelain sunflower seeds he commissioned for a show in London sold for more than $550,000 at a Sotheby’s auction.
Ai was detained April 3 after disappearing from the Beijing airport and was released June 22. He has declined interviews since then, saying the terms of his bail prohibit it.
Chinese authorities have said that although Ai was released, he is technically still under investigation for at least a year and could be brought in for further questioning at any time.
It was not immediately clear how the appeal would affect the government’s handling of his case, or whether he could be taken into custody again if he refuses to pay the money allegedly owed.
Chinese authorities have tried to silence other critics by accusing them of tax violations or other nonpolitical crimes.
Zhao Yan, a news assistant for The New York Times, was jailed for three years in 2007 on charges of financial fraud. Xu Zhiyong, an outspoken lawyer, was investigated for alleged tax evasion in 2009 but later released.
Ai’s family and supporters say he is being punished for his critical views of the Communist leadership and social problems. Before his own detention, he tracked other cases of detained activists in a recent widespread crackdown by the government.
He had spoken out fearlessly about a number of national scandals, including the deaths of students in shoddily built schools that collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, children killed or sickened by tainted infant formula and a deadly high-rise fire in Shanghai that killed 58 people and was blamed on negligent workers and corrupt inspectors.
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Associated Press writer Isolda Morillo contributed to this report.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-06-29-11 1413GMT
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French architect Paul Andreu was handed what he calls a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when Chinese authorities picked him to design an ultra-modern opera house in the centre of Beijing.
“I’m grateful towards China,” said Andreu, whose $430 million opera house – a rounded titanium and glass structure – rises from a man-made moat next to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.
“That was an opportunity that you only get once in your life, if at all,” the award-winning architect, who is currently working on two other projects in China, told AFP.
“China is building a huge amount, so opportunities are huge. But China also has a lot of ambition. For years, they didn’t do much, and I’m sure they had the feeling they were lagging behind.”
Now, the Asian powerhouse – whose breakneck growth over the past 30 years has transformed it into the world’s second-largest economy and fueled a colossal construction boom – is making up for lost time.
The 90,000-seat “Bird’s Nest” stadium, which became the centrepiece of the 2008 Olympics with its threads of interlocking steel beams, is probably the best-known of innovative structures that dot China’s skyline.
Beijing’s soaring CCTV tower – described as one of the most daring pieces of architecture ever attempted – and Shanghai’s 101-storey World Finance Center are also high-profile examples of cutting-edge design.
Andreu is designing a colorful archaeological museum in the northern city of Taiyuan and Zaha Hadid – the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize – has just finished a 1,800-seat opera house in southern Guangzhou.
Renowned British architect Norman Foster, who designed the much-acclaimed Terminal 3 at Beijing’s international airport, is also building the headquarters for CITIC Bank in the eastern city of Hangzhou. Foreign firms are not the only ones taking advantage of opportunities in China.
Homegrown architects are also making their mark at home and abroad. Ma Qingyun, whose firm MADA s.p.a.m. has countless projects across China, was named one of the world’s most influential designers by Businessweek last year, along with Hadid. Earlier this month, the French Architecture Academy gave its gold medal – a top award – to Wang Shu, who focuses on sustainable design.
“The architectural arena is changing – it’s leaning towards more intellectual and creative freedom,” said Andreu.
Michael Tunkey, the Shanghai-based partner at international firm Cannon Design, said other countries in Asia were also proving a boon for architects.
“The fact that Chinese salaries have been rocketing over the last couple of years has generated larger opportunities for places like Vietnam and Thailand,” he said.
Nguyen Chi Tam, design director at HighEnd Architecture in Hanoi, said there had been “more and more” architect offices opening in Vietnam in recent years – both midsize firms and global giants.
“With a downturn in Europe, foreign firms have turned to Asia, including Vietnam,” he said.
Tam’s office is collaborating with famed Italian architect Renzo Piano on a project for a new opera house in Hanoi, while the New York-based Carlos Zapata recently worked on the 68-storey Bitexco Financial Tower in Ho Chi Minh City.
But, as in Beijing where much of the old town has been torn down, Hanoi is having trouble preserving its heritage despite a law on conservation enacted in 2001.
“On paper there are still more than 1,000 French villas in Hanoi, but in my opinion, there are really only a few hundred that have kept their original colonial style,” Hoang Dao Kinh, a Hanoi-based architect, told AFP.
Preserving the old while embracing the new is a challenge that other Asian nations face too. Singapore, for one, has been relatively successful.
To date, more than 7,000 old buildings have been preserved by the city-state’s national planning authority, adapted into restaurants, offices or homes.
But it is also the home of architectural feats such as the $5.5 billion Marina Bay Sands resort that boasts three 55-story hotel towers linked by a huge sky park 656 feet above the sea.
Sustainable engineering is also starting to take hold in Asia. Ciputra World, a business and entertainment complex in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, is one such example.
The $350 million project aims to reduce energy usage by at least 20 percent compared to a regular building, with double-glazed windows and a sophisticated indoor air system.
Back in China, the Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, due to be completed this year, has been dubbed “the world’s greenest skyscraper.”
Its structure directs winds to openings where they push turbines that generate the building’s energy, according to architecture firm SOM, which is working on the project.
Tunkey said China is still lagging far behind the United States and Europe in terms of clean technology buildings.
“But if it decides to get in front of the curve, it has got the potential to ramp it up in a way that no other country really can,” he said.
Ma, meanwhile, said China faced a key challenge in the next few years in finding its own architectural path “that corresponds to Chinese people’s aesthetic habits and experiences.”
DECATUR, Ill. (AP) – It’s easy to get all wrapped up in antiques and then carried away by what we think they might be worth.
Who hasn’t seen that appraisal on an episode of the PBS Antiques Roadshow, now used as a promotional segment for the program, where the guy from Tucson, Ariz., brings in a circa 1840 to 1860 Navajo blanket he keeps draped on the back of a chair? Asked how much he thinks its worth, he has no idea. Then viewers can almost see the color drain from his face as he’s told between $350,000 and $500,000.
We all want to be that man. Trouble is, ultra-valuable tribal blankets don’t gallop along that often, so how are you going to know if you’ve got one? Or an Old Master painting? Valuable clock? Rare Turkish rug?
Some fans say scoring a massively oversubscribed ticket to a Roadshow episode is tougher than winning the lottery, so not much chance of getting satisfaction there. But local professional help is at hand to tell you how much your old things are worth if you are willing to cross their hands with silver. Just don’t bank too much on getting good news.
Decatur-based Edwin Walker is a personal property appraiser who is an accredited member of the International Society of Appraisers. You pay him to price antiquities, and he sticks rigorously to an honesty-is-the-best-policy approach, warts and all.
“I would say, in probably 75 percent of the situations, especially when people have me look at one item, like a painting, then 75 percent of the time, I am the bearer of bad news,” he said. “It’s about being diplomatic and good-natured and convincing enough to let them down easily.”
Walker, who offers formal written appraisals and cheaper “verbal approximations of value,” said clients are generally more accepting of the verdicts once they see the research and effort that goes into them. An associate professor of art at Millikin University teaching graphic design and computer graphics, he specializes in fine arts himself, but through his professional appraisers association, said experts in other fields are only a phone call away.
At the end of the day, he said, what he’s selling is peace of mind. “People then have an idea; they know they don’t have the Hope Diamond sitting around at home,” he added. “If they are considering sending stuff to the Salvation Army or whatever, they want to know they made the right choices and no major mistakes.”
Appraisers can be found in the phone book, but be wary of any situation in which an appraiser turns around and offers to buy the item. “That is a serious conflict of interest,” Walker said.
Decatur appraiser and auctioneer Mike Hall has been in the business for more than 40 years and has seen more estates and estate goodies than he could shake a gavel at. In a sad commentary on the state of the American family, he said many of the appraisals he does involve the carving up and valuation of property, antiques and otherwise after a divorce, when people might be arguing over who gets what and what it’s worth.
He prefers to avoid showing up at the family home when either party is present. That way, he avoids getting into verbal tussles with some unhappy spouse who insists, for example, that the Indian rug by the fireplace must be worth at least X number of dollars because they’d seen one just like it on TV.
“I usually tell them I charge by the hour, and this is costing you standing here and arguing with me and telling your story,” he said. “Stories which I’ve heard many times.”
Like Walker, he said the secret to a solid appraisal is fearless honesty, which he seasons with knowledge and lots of experience. He said Internet selling has radically reshaped the antiques and collectibles marketplace, but a real world local auction, advertised to the right specialist buyers far and wide, will still bring top prices if the lots deserve it.
“You will get it sold, and it’ll bring what it’s worth,” he added.
Appraiser Virginia Cannon said part of the fun of the profession is that you never know what you will be asked to judge the worth of next. She recalls, for example, being asked to calculate the value of giant collections of dead bugs donated to the Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois and Illinois State University in Normal.
Add both collections together, and Cannon was faced with more than 13,000 dead insects, but she wasn’t creeped out. “No, bugs don’t bother me,” she said. “But, with all the formaldehyde, they kind of smelled bad.”
A certified appraiser with the International Society of Appraisers and an accredited senior appraiser with the American Society of Appraisers, she said it helps to have a wide field of expert contacts you can turn to for help on pricing the unusual. The collections turned out to be valued in the thousands of dollars each, and Cannon said people who have valuable things they may never want to sell should still get them appraised for insurance purposes.
“To replace that item, you are going to have to go out to an antiques shop or somewhere and find it,” she explains. “And you might have to pay through the nose to get it.”
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Information from: Herald & Review, http://www.herald-review.com
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-06-29-11 1027GMT
The ossuary bears an inscription with the name “Miriam daughter of Yeshua son of Caiaphas, priest of Maaziah from Beth Imri.”
An ossuary is a stone chest used to store bones. Caiaphas was a temple priest and an adversary of Jesus who played a key role in his crucifixion.
The Israel Antiquities Authority says the ossuary was seized from tomb robbers three years ago and has since been undergoing analysis. Forgery is common in the world of biblical artifacts.
The IAA says in Wednesday’s statement that microscopic tests have confirmed the inscription is “genuine and ancient.”
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-06-29-11 1227GMT
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