Duelling sounds kick off long night in empty hall

REVIEW: Richard Clayderman Michael Fowler Centre, Friday, June 21 French pianist Richard Clayderman sold millions of records by combining easy listening pop melodies and trace-around classical playing. In fact, he has sold so many albums he has been deemed the world’s most successful pianist by the never-discerning Guinness World Records.

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Starving the Rebellion: Syria’s Brutal Tactics

Abu Ibrahim, a stocky, bespectacled Syrian from the besieged southern city of Dara’a, bounded into the general store on the Jordan-Syria border in his white plastic sandals, grasping his daughter Noor’s hand as the 6-year-old struggled to keep up. He’d left Dara’a, the center of a two-month-old antigovernment uprising, just a few hours earlier and was desperate to get back before the end of Friday midday prayers — and the start of the weekly nationwide protests that have always followed.

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Abandon All Hope: The Russian Region That’s Been Left to Die

Having tucked into his first bottle of vodka earlier than usual, Anatoly Zhbanov goes on an afternoon stroll to buy another one along the dirt road through Lopotova, a dying village on Russia’s western edge, in the region of Pskov. It is mid-April, and clumps of snow are still melting at the roadside where Zhbanov, a local artist, stops to peer inside a lopsided cabin, the home of a local bootlegger.

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Plastic in the Ocean: The Pacific Trash Vortex

On film, many a desert-island castaway has put a message in a bottle and cast it out to sea, hoping it would someday reach land. Sorry, all you modern-day Robinson Crusoes, try that with a plastic bottle in real life, and your message will probably end up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, bobbing in a floating collection of trash known as the Plastic Vortex.

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