Hot PropertySharon Stone is Hollywood's hottest property for French men of all ages, while French women are divided between Omar Sharif and Brad Pitt, depending on their generation, according to a Paris-Match poll. Pitt captures the heart of 38 per cent of the women polled, but chiefly thanks to his sway over young women, with 61 per cent of under-25s believing him to be the ideal man. By contrast, 60 per cent of the over 60s prefer Sharif, who wins second place overall with a 27 per cent share of French women's affections, well ahead of actor Eddie Murphy's 15 per cent stake. According to the survey, Stone is the ideal woman for 37 per cent of French men overall and for 45 per cent of those aged between 25 and 34. Her popularity exceeds that of supermodel Naomi Campbell (29 percent) and Baywatch star Yasmine Bleeth, who claimed a mere 11 per cent of French male affections.Smoking iconsHollywood actor Johnny Depp and model Kate Moss are amongst several youth icons seen smoking in style magazines like The Face and Loaded, which have come in for criticism from the Health Education Authority in Britain. According to a study by the authority, these magazines are fuelling an increase in smoking among young people by glamourising the image of cigarettes. The study found that men's magazines are using images of cigarettes more heavily than female magazines and far more than Sunday newspaper lifestyle sections. Researchers looked at a variety of magazines including The Face, FHM, Dazed and Confused, GQ, Loaded, ID, Time Out, Elle, and Vogue. Over a three-month period, The Face carried 22 such images and Loaded 21, but both magazines declined to comment.Diana's new manA worldwide bidding war for pictures showing Diana, Princess of Wales, `kissing and cuddling' with `the new man in her life' erupted on Thursday. Photographs of Diana and Dodi Fayed on a yachting holiday in Sardinia and Corsica appeared in numerous newspapers, whetting newspaper editors' appetites. And later the London Evening Standard newspaper disclosed that Italian paparazzi who snapped the photographs were offering more ``compromising'' pictures for which the bidding had reached -300,000. ``The new man in Princess Diana's life is dark, handsome, rich and single. He is also about to become public property,'' the Standard wrote. Diana, 36, was said to have enjoyed a five-day Mediterranean cruise with Dodi, the 41-year-old son of Mohammed Al Fayed and heir to the London Harrods department store fortune. Last month, Diana and sons Prince William, 15, and Prince Harry, 12, holidayed at Al Fayed's villa at St Tropez in the South of France.Britain's oldest man diesBritain's oldest man has died in hospital aged 109, his family said. Vincent Gulliver, who earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records, died peacefully. The former train driver continued to enjoy a tot of his ``elixir of life'' - whiskey with orange and honey - and remained alert almost until his death. ``He'd enjoyed his life but he said he was quite ready to go and in the end he just drifted off,'' said his daughter, Doreen Jackson, 66. Gulliver, born in November 1887, had said he was weary of the advances of the modern age, and that he ``despaired at today's new-fangled society''. Gulliver's death followed that on Monday of the oldest person in the world, Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who was 122.Commemmorating sexual freedomAn exhibition entitled `Goodbye to Berlin? - 100 years of Gay Liberation' is running in the Academy of Arts in Berlin, a short walk from the place where the pioneering Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Research once stood. The exhibition commemorates the century of emancipation that began with the establishment of the Institute in May 1897, the first organisation in the world openly committed to fighting sexual intolerance. They were the first defenders of homosexuality and one of their earliest and most prominent defectors was Sigmund Freud, who had insisted that homosexuality, while not a crime, was a disease. In 1933, with Hitler's coming to power, the institute was singled out for early ransacking and burning of books. Though nothing is left of the place today, it is witness to the fact that Berlin in its golden days, was more than just a string of wild cabaret spots and that it drank its fill of freedom long before the rest of the world.Climbing Everest without oxygenYannick Navarro, a 31-year-old Frenchwoman, has said she will attempt in October to become the second woman to scale Mount Everest without oxygen. In May 1995, Briton Alison Hargreaves became the first woman to accomplish the feat. She died several months later in an avalanche on K-2 after reaching the summit. Navarro, who works as a guide for climbers in the South-eastern French region of Haute Savoie, has already scaled several great peaks: in 1995 and 1996 she climbed Mount Shishapangma (8,046 meters or 26,500 feet) and Mount Pumori, in Tibet. Mountain-climber Jean-Christophe Lafaille, with whom Navarro trekked up Pumori last year, said he believed she had ``all the necessary physical and mental qualities'' to succeed.
