Heart you!

I'm strangely addicted to coverage of the Conard Black trial. This is something lousy to be addicted to in the States, since the coverage during the actual trial phase would amount to two articles per week in your average paper. His recent conviction on 4 of the 13 charges against him was a boon, because now there are stories everywhere!

Umm, I guess it helps that I started looking for stories on Google News around the time the verdicts came in, thus exponentially increasing the number of stories to read. But nevermind that.

Much of the coverage is hilarious, especially when it's written by personal friends and enemies of Conrad Black. Today, though, I discovered an article written by an ideological enemy of Barbara Amiel, Black's wife. The article is in the possibly prestigious Lebanese newspaper Dar Al Hayat, and was written by the maybe-distinguished-who-knows Jihad el-Khazen. Here's my favorite paragraph:

Amiel is a clever woman and she was once pretty, yet she is 66 today in comparison with her husband Black, who is 62 and who is the fourth husband in the life of this woman. It is hard to estimate the number of her lovers as it is equally hard to write on what is known of her relationships and practices in an Arab newspaper.

I wish more stories in the NY Times were written like that. (The NY Post, of course, is almost entirely written in that style.)