Queen’s 10 000 diamonds on display Strauss-kahn and wife go their separate ways

LONDON: More than 10 000 diamonds go on show at London’s Buckingham Palace this week to mark Queen Elizabeth’s 60th year on the throne.

The exhibition runs from tomorrow to July 8 and then from July 31 to October 7.

“The aim of the exhibition is to show how rulers have used diamonds as visible signs of wealth and power,” said curator, Caroline de Guitaut.

De Guitaut said the 86-yearold monarch was consulted on what would be used for the ex- hibition, housed in a darkened room inside Buckingham Palace and accessed via gilded corridors lined with royal portraits going back generations.

The first item on show in a brightly lit glass case is Queen Victoria’s small diamond crown which features more than 1 100 diamonds.

After her husband Prince Albert’s death in 1861, the only other British monarch to have marked a diamond jubilee wore only mourning clothes, meaning that colourless stones such as clear diamonds were an ideal adornment.

Victoria was regularly pictured wearing it, including in her official diamond jubilee portrait.

Perhaps the most impressive display is that containing seven of the nine major stones cut from the Cullinan Diamond, the largest ever found.

The gemstone was discovered in South Africa in 1905.

It produced nine principal stones and 96 small diamonds. – Reuters PARIS: Former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is facing a probe into his alleged involvement with a prostitution ring in France, and his wife have separated.

Anne Sinclair, a wealthy heiress who recently relaunched her media career as a news editor at the Huffington Post’s French edition, and Strauss-Kahn separated about a month ago and they are living in separate residences in Paris.

The weekly magazine, Closer, earlier reported in its online edition that Sinclair threw Strauss-Kahn out of their home in central Paris.

Strauss-Kahn is under investigation in France to establish whether he knew he was dealing with prostitutes and pimps when he attended sex parties in northern France, Paris and Washington in 2010 and 2011 allegedly organised by business acquaintances.

Public prosecutors last month widened the inquiry to include a possible gang rape charge after a prostitute told them Strauss-Kahn and friends had forced her to have sex in a group when she came to Washington to meet him in December 2010. The woman has not filed a formal complaint.

Strauss-Kahn denies knowing that the women at the parties were prostitutes or that there was any violence.

His career at the head of the Washington-based IMF was cut short when he was arrested in New York in May 2011 on charges, which he denied and that have since been dropped, of attempting to rape a hotel maid. After criminal charges were abandoned over concerns about her credibility, the maid pressed ahead with a civil case.

Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, and Sinclair have been married for 20 years. The scandal destroyed his hopes of running for French president in the AprilMay 2012 election for the Socialist Party, which instead won power under François Hollande. – Reuters