The good news is that Dr Pollack believes that her type of cancer is not especially aggressive.Even so, Friedman will undergo a seven-week course of radiation next month that can only sap her energy But for the moment she is resolute The show will go on – and with her at the very heart of it.. No to Starbucks

It says something about the stubbornness of Jerusalem’s coffee drinkers that Starbucks has, not for want of trying, totally failed to penetrate the city. Howard Schulz, chairman of that most global of companies, is well known for his passionately pro-Israel views. But this has cut no ice with Israelis in Jewish West Jerusalem. In the past 15 years or so – after a long, bleak period when Nescaf?nd a muddy concoction that constituted the Israeli version of Turkish coffee were all that was available – the city has spawned an excellent home-grown espresso bar culture.

In a short stretch of Emek Refaim, the main street of the German colony, there are half a dozen first-rate caf? each with its own distinctive character. Clients frequently spend the entire morning there working on their laptops. One, Aroma, is even open on Saturdays, when it is always packed. (My favourite in East Jerusalem is the elegant El Dorado, which gives you a chocolate with your Arabic coffee or espresso and where the orange juice is always freshly squeezed.) Who needs Starbucks?
Vicious cycleIt’s odd, but petty crime still comes as a surprise here. A bicycle I bought while I was covering the Israeli disengagement from Gaza was unharmed during a week in the now destroyed settlement of Neve Dekalim, and then for a month outside a municipal building in southern Israel.

I eventually brought it back to Jerusalem and, ignoring all the warnings, locked it to the railings opposite my flat, only to find the next day that the front wheel had been stolen. Before I had time to take it to the shop I bought it from, the rest of the bike had gone too. But then the city has always combined worldliness with holiness. I had only been here a week or so when the well-known Jewish lawyer Danny Seidmann told me cheerfully, if dispiritingly for a journalist, that “everyone lies in Jerusalem”.. The story of what really happened inside the Iraq Museum when thousands of valuable antiquities were stolen in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 US invasion has been revealed in a new book. Written by the chief investigator, it says there were three separate thefts, at least one of which was an inside job, another the work of professionals, and a third where fleeing Iraq military had left open a door which let in the looters. At least 13,864 objects were stolen, making it the biggest museum theft in history.

But the book reveals that, with an estimated 500,000 objects in the museum and thieves having the run of the place for 36 hours, the wonder is the loss was not far closer to the original, inaccurate, reports of 170,000 items. And the efforts of Iraqi, US and Italian officials, plus police and customs worldwide, have so far led to the recovery of 5,400 items, nearly 700 from inside the US and Britain. All this – as well as the remarkable tale of the reclaiming of the fabulous Treasure of Nimrud – is told in Thieves of Baghdad, available only in the US, and written by Matthew Bogdanos who has been described, with only a minimum of hyperbole, as a real-life Indiana Jones. He was born in New York, as a boy worked in his family’s Greek restaurant, became a marine, a reservist, a lawyer in the city’s district attorney’s office, lost his home in the 9/11 attacks, and had to use all his marine training to fight through crowds and emergency service workers to rescue his family from an flat whose windows were blown in and contents covered in two inches of ash.