When Frenchman François Driard decided to settle in Nepal, just one thing was missing - good cheese. So the 31-year-old former business writer decided to make his own. For the past year and a half, Driard has been running a small dairy farm in the foothills of the Himalayas, producing mountain cheeses using traditional methods honed over centuries in the French Alps.
'Cakemaker to the kings' dies
S.G. Sender, the Belgian-born pastry chef who created the cake for the wedding of Britain's Prince Charles and Lady Diana, has died at the age of 78 near Paris, his family told AFP yesterday.
Dubbed the "cakemaker to the kings", he was born Sender Wayntraub in Montsur-Marchienne in Belgium but had lived for a long time in France.
The descendant of generations of patissiers - he said one of his ancestors had worked for Louis XIV and another for the celebrated 19th century chef Antonin Careme - Sender had been employed in courts in Belgium, Britain, Japan, the Netherlands and Sweden.
Festival tragedy
At least one person died after a huge tent collapsed yesterday, injuring dozens of revellers and forcing the cancellation of Slovakia's largest musical festival, a report said.
Organisers abandoned the Pohoda music festival in the western town of Trencin, featuring Patti Smith, Basement Jaxx and Scotland's Travis, and evacuated all 33,000 festival-goers after the tent collapsed. Thirty-eight people were taken to hospital, 15 of them with serious injuries, the report said. Three of the injured required surgery, a doctor told the agency.
One report said as many as three people could have died in the accident.
Pope 'can't pray' with wrist in plaster
Pope Benedict XVI celebrated mass yesterday with his broken wrist in plaster but bemoaned an inability to clasp his hands together in prayer, his closest officials said.
Vatican number two Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone told ANSA news agency that the injury would hold up progress on Pope Benedict's follow-up to his 2007 book entitled Jesus of Nazareth.
He added that Pope Benedict had told him he was feeling pain but that "some suffering is not a bad thing. What pains him the most is to be no longer able to bless with his right hand and to be no longer able to clasp his hands together" in prayer.
Japan's smokers - only cafes have health campaigners fuming
Japan has banned smoking from most public places, including many city streets, but one company has given refuge to the dwindling ranks of tobacco addicts by opening smokers-only cafes.
Thick cigarette smoke wafts through the 'Cafe Tobacco' shops in the heart of Tokyo, filled with office workers and shoppers looking to take a quick puff, a habit increasingly frowned upon in a country long seen as a smokers' paradise.
"We want to provide an oasis for smokers," said Tadashi Horiguchi, a board director of the coffee shop operator Towa Food Service Co, which recently opened its second smokers-only cafe in Tokyo and hopes to grow the business.
Cheap housing offers lifeline to Indian developers
"No frills, simple homes" reads the banner hanging in the Delhi headquarters of Unitech, India's leading property developer.
It's a mantra that has been taken up by realtors across the country with a new-found passion for affordable housing that owes little to their social conscience and everything to their bottom line.
The global economic down-turn ended a four-year property boom in India that had largely been driven by the luxury housing segment and saw a near three-fold increase in residential prices in major cities.
Now developers are turning their attention to middle and lower income buyers and low-cost housing that offers lower profit margins but enjoys much greater demand.
With luxury housing projects struggling to find buyers, that kind of demand sud- denly seems more attractive.