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Sources

No Berlusconi, But Belgian Prime Minister Gets Passionate Public Kiss

LE SOIR (Belgium)

MONS – Rock stars aren't the only ones with groupies – bow-tied prime ministers have some too. During local celebrations last Friday, Belgium Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was targeted by just such a super-fan. While the professorial PM was posing with Socialist Party supporters, a young woman pounced on him and kissed him ... passionately ... on the lips!

Photographer Philippe Bourguet, who snapped the picture that went viral in Belgium (see below), saw it this way: She kissed him and "embraced him for a while – for almost five minutes. She couldn't stop repeating ‘Elio, I'm in love with you"," Belgium newspaper Le Soir reports.

But Karin Wauters, the woman in question, has another version. She said she has known Di Rupo since she was a little girl. "This was a friendly kiss and that's all. I have a lot of respect for Elio," she declared.

All's fair, it seems, in love and politics....

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Ideas

Shame On The García Márquez Heirs — Cashing In On The "Scraps" Of A Legend

A decision to publish a sketchy manuscript as a posthumous novel by the late Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia's Nobel laureate, given his painstaking devotion to the precision of the written word.

Photo of a window with a sticker of the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with butterfly notes at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Poster of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Juan David Torres Duarte

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — When a writer dies, there are several ways of administering the literary estate, depending on the ambitions of the heirs. One is to exercise a millimetric check on any use or edition of the author's works, in the manner of James Joyce's nephew, Stephen, who inherited his literary rights. He refused to let even academic papers quote from Joyce's landmark novel, Ulysses.

Or, you continue to publish the works, making small additions to their corpus, as with Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, or none at all, which will probably happen with Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy.

Another way is to seek out every scrap of paper the author left and every little word that was jotted down — on a piece of cloth, say — and drip-feed them to publishers every two to three years with great pomp and publicity, to revive the writer's renown.

This has happened with the Argentine Julio Cortázar (who seems to have sold more books dead than alive), the French author Albert Camus (now with 200 volumes of personal and unfinished works) and with the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The latter's posthumous oeuvre is so abundant I am starting to wonder if his heirs haven't hired a ghost writer — typing and smoking away in some bedsit in Barcelona — to churn out "newly discovered" works.

Which group, I wonder, will our late, great novelist Gabriel García Márquez fit into?

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