| Christie's holds mammoth auction to sell mammoths
PARIS (AP) - Here's your chance to buy something really old. Today, Christie's auction house in Paris is selling a 15-thousand-year-old Siberian mammoth skeleton. You'll need plenty of room and plenty of cash if you want it. Bidding starts at nearly 200-thousand dollars. Tusks and all, it's more than 12 feet high and 16 feet long. The other items up for auction today include an unhatched dinosaur egg and a 330-pound meteorite. (Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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DIB denies bidding for Egypt’s NBD
DUBAI: Dubai Islamic Bank, the third-largest Gulf Arab Islamic lender by market value, denied on Saturday a report it was bidding to acquire Egypts National Bank for Development (NBD).
UAE daily al-Bayan reported Dubai Islamic was among three bidders for the bank. Others were Saudi Arabias National Commercial Bank and a UAE-Gulf consortium, the paper said, quoting unnamed Egyptian banking sources.
The news is totally untrue, a Dubai Islamic Bank official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters, adding the bank was in no way involved in any such deal. Dubai Islamic said in an emailed statement to Reuters the article was incorrect. NBD said in March Egypts central bank had approved an unspecified number of technical offers submitted by banks seeking to acquire it.
Publishers in bidding war over Agassi's memoir
To be filed under the rich getting richer: the current bidding war among book publishers over a memoir from retired tennis star Andre Agassi. Crains' New York Business Web site reported Friday that bids had reached $5.35 million. No doubt he needs it, and just the chapter on his romance with Brooke Shields will be worth it. .
Controversial 'Jane Austen' portrait fails to sell at auction
NEW YORK (AFP) - The painting, which depicts a young woman in a full-length white dress holding a green parasol, failed to reach its reserve price, Christie's auction house said. It had been expected to fetch between 400,000 and 800,000 dollars. The so-called Rice Portrait, described by Christie's as one of the world's most intriguing literary portraits, was believed to have been painted by British painter Ozias Humphry and is owned by Austen's direct descendants. The controversy over the portrait goes back to the 1940s, when leading Austen scholar R.W. Chapman said that the fashions in the picture dated from 1805 or later, and not from the late 1780s, when it was supposedly painted. Another debate has focused on the supplier's stamp on the reverse of the original canvas. Detractors say the merchant's mark does not fit with the period, while Christie's disputed both arguments.
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