POTRAITS

Di’s love for Dodi

PrincessDiana was madly in love with Dodi Fayed when they died in a car accident in Paris last August, and their relationship was not just some “holiday romance”, Diana’s stepmother said. In an interview with Britain’s Mirror tabloid,Countess Spencer, 68, backed Dodi’s father, the Egyptian millionaire Mohamed al-Fayed, who has been criticised by Diana’s brother,Earl Spencer, for claiming that the two were to marry. “What Diana and Dodi had was no holiday romance. This was real love, the kind you can look for all your life and never find. I know because they both told me,” the countess said. Diana and Dodi enjoyed a Mediterranean cruise days before they died. “People should know the truth about their relationship, rather than what the rumour-mongers with their own agendas would have us believe,” she added.

In a recent BBC documentary, Spencer dismissed claims Diana was about to marry DOdi, saying the relationship had not gone past the “heady stage”. He also branded Al-Fayed’s claims thatthe car crash was no accident as “monstrous”. But Al-Fayed, owner of the luxury Harrod’s store in London, said it was “unwise” for the earl to dismiss the relationship between Diana and his late son. Countess Spencer rallied to the defence of al-Fayed, saying that her step-daughter “would never have wanted anyone to treat him the way he has been treated”. “What people don’t realise when they attack him so viciously is that Diana liked him very much herself,” said Countess Spencer, who was married to Diana’s father, Earl Spencer, until his death in 1992.

Tenor trials

Paris’s Eiffel Tower provided the magnificent backdrop and a free grandstand for thousands of spectators at a concert of the “three tenors” late on Friday to mark the final of the football World Cup. Some 12,000 people had paid for seats to hear the performance byJose Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti at the foot of the famous Seine-side tower, but an estimated 150,000 more enjoyed it for no more than theprice of standing for two hours. A sophisticated sound system employing 18 cameras and 165 microphones broadcast the concert into the surrounding sky and live all over the world to one billion viewers, as well as on to giant television screens on each side of the platform. The audience filled the first floor of the tower, bathed in orange light, and climbed ever higher up the thousands of steps to thrill to the music and view the panorama of Paris by night spread below them. The tenors praised the French capital with songs in Italian, English and German, as well as performing what they do best, arias from well known operas. The Paris symphony orchestra conducted byJames Levine of New York’s Metropolitan Opera also played extracts byBerlioz and Saint-Saens. The concert was the third by the tenors for a World Cup, after Rome in 1990 and Los Angeles in 1994. Meanwhile, another tenor Gabriel Sade will have to pay $35,000 to the Stuttgart Opera after a mistaken diary entry made him missa performance. As some 1,400 opera fans waited for more than an hour to hear him sing inPuccini’sTosca on Wednesday night, Sade was strolling the streets of Stuttgart, having noted the performance in his diary for the following evening. The audience had their tickets refunded, and Sade agreed to pay the cost, a spokesman for the Opera said.

Return ofGodzilla

The Hollywood-made monster filmGodzilla opened on a record 385 screens across Japan on Saturday as fans queued overnight to see the return of the fire-breathing Japanese character. “The first session started at 7.20 a.m. But the theatre was packed with 1,240 people,” saidToshiro Tanaka of central Tokyo’s Nichigeki Theatre. “We got off to a good start,” he said, adding 80 people had already been waiting outside the movie house on Friday afternoon. “I took a day off yesterday so that I could queue up here,” a man said outside the Nichigeki cinema. A boy said: “The American version is cool. I wanted to seethe movie at its opening.” A more guarded welcome came from Tokyo’s Toho film studios. “I don’t like its face very much although its eyes are close to what I used to make,” Koichi Kawakita, a special-effects director for the JapaneseGodzilla films , told a TV station. The computer-generated creature’s rampage through New York is already being dismissed in cult circles as no match for the monster that terrorised Tokyo for more than 40 years. The $120-million digitalGodzilla was, despite a major promotional campaign, disappointing at the US box office.

Two presidents in a family

The presidents of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have always treated each other like family, but soon they will have an official reason to do so when their children marry later this month, Kyrgyz officials said. Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev’s son, Aidar, and his Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev’s daughter, Aliya, plan to marry on July 17 in the town of Cholpon-Ata about 210 km east of Kyrgyzstan’scapital, Bishkek, the officials said. The ceremony will take place at Akayev’s residence on the picturesque shores of Issyk-Kul lake in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, Interfax reported. Despite their busy schedules, the fathers of the bride and groom won’t have far to travel to the ceremony. Earlier in the day, they will attend a Central Asian union meeting in Cholpon-Ata with presidents Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan and Emomali Rakhmanov of Tajikistan. Aliya Nazarbayev graduated this spring from the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics and Strategic Research, a Kazakh presidential spokesman said. Aliya is the youngest of Nazarbayev’s three daughters and the last to marry, the spokesman said. Aidar Akayev, a student, is the second eldest of Akayev’s four children, a Kyrgyz presidential spokesman said.