Zhang Zilin, mainland beauty and Miss World 2007, married investment banker Nie Lei, in Phuket, Thailand, last month, following a three-year courtship. Zhang, who has revealed that her favourite animal is the giraffe and who is known to her Chinese fans as Purple Sweet Potato, has modelled for Giorgio Armani and Dolce & Gabbana, among others. She was a "smile ambassador" for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and also recorded a song for the Games, Welcome to Beijing. The 2007 Miss World pageant was co-hosted by Mexican Renaissance man Fernando Allende …
The prince (whose wife's name is not Michael but rather Marie Christine Anna Agnes Hedwig Ida, née von Reibnitz) was named for Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia, the first cousin of three of his grandparents; but his Russian connections do not end there: he has come under close scrutiny over payments made to one of his businesses by late oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whose death in London last year by hanging was described by police as "unexplained". Numbering among Prince Michael's several illustrious godparents when he was christened, in 1942, was United States president Franklin Delano Roosevelt …
The chubby crime boss, whose murderous syndicate counted Cermak's predecessor, William Hale Thompson (a man who made Chicago "a byword for the collapse of American civilisation", according to the Chicago Tribune), among its abettors, had his bulletproof, armoured Cadillac Town Sedan seized by the US Treasury Department when he was arrested for tax fraud in 1931. On December 8, 1941, Roosevelt was driven in the vehicle to the US Capitol in Washington to ask Congress to declare war on Japan. A more recent poster boy for Cadillac cars is Chinese star athlete Liu Xiang …