The Rembrandt Affair
''The Rembrandt Affair'' is a 2010 spy novel by Daniel Silva. It is the tenth in the Gabriel Allon series, based in the world of Israeli intelligence. Plot Gabriel Allon and his team seek a lost Rembrandt whose previous owners have included both Holocaust victims and terrorists. In addition to regularly recurring characters, Julian Isherwood in his role as a gallery owner features prominently. Background Part of the reason that Silva delved into the topic of art theft was the realization of the impact it has on the art world. Beginning with the role it played during and after the Holocaust, art theft has continued into the present. Each year, between four and six billion dollars' worth of art and antiquities are stolen, ranking it as the fourth-most lucrative crime behind drug trafficking, arms dealing, and money laundering. Silva touched on arms trafficking when dealing with the crimes of Ivan Kharkov in '' The Defector'' and ''Moscow Rules''. Silva was also intrigued ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Daniel Silva (novelist)
Daniel Silva (born 1960) is an American journalist and author of thriller and spy novels. Early life Silva was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. When Silva was seven years old, his family moved to Merced, California. He was raised as a Catholic. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from California State University, Fresno and began a graduate program in international relations at San Francisco State University, but left when offered employment as a journalist at United Press International (UPI). Career Journalist Silva began his writing career as a journalist with a temporary position at UPI in 1984. His assignment was to cover the Democratic National Convention. UPI made Silva's position permanent and, a year later transferred him to the Washington, D.C. headquarters. After two more years, he was appointed as UPI's Middle East correspondent and moved to Cairo. Silva returned to Washington, D.C., for a position with Cable News Network's Washington bureau. He worked as a produc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Antiquities
Antiquities are objects from antiquity, especially the civilizations of the Mediterranean: the Classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, Ancient Egypt and the other Ancient Near Eastern cultures. Artifacts from earlier periods such as the Mesolithic, and other civilizations from Asia and elsewhere may also be covered by the term. The phenomenon of giving a high value to ancient artifacts is found in other cultures, notably China, where Chinese ritual bronzes, three to two thousand years old, have been avidly collected and imitated for centuries, and the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, where in particular the artifacts of the earliest Olmec civilization are found reburied in significant sites of later cultures up to the Spanish Conquest. A person who studies antiquities, as opposed to just collecting them, is often called an antiquarian. Definition The definition of the term is not always precise, and institutional definitions such as museum "Departments of Antiquities ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Novels By Daniel Silva
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historica ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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WorldCat
WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the OCLC member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's database, the world's largest bibliographic database. The database includes other information sources in addition to member library collections. OCLC makes WorldCat itself available free to libraries, but the catalog is the foundation for other subscription OCLC services (such as resource sharing and collection management). WorldCat is used by librarians for cataloging and research and by the general public. , WorldCat contained over 540 million bibliographic records in 483 languages, representing over 3 billion physical and digital library assets, and the WorldCat persons dataset (Data mining, mined from WorldCat) included over 100 million people. History OCLC OCLC, Inc., doing bus ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Deadline Hollywood
''Deadline Hollywood'', commonly known as ''Deadline'' and also referred to as ''Deadline.com'', is an online news site founded as the news blog ''Deadline Hollywood Daily'' by Nikki Finke in 2006. The site is updated several times a day, with entertainment industry news as its focus. It has been a brand of Penske Media Corporation since 2009. History ''Deadline'' was founded by Nikki Finke, who began writing an '' LA Weekly'' column series called ''Deadline Hollywood'' in June 2002. She began the ''Deadline Hollywood Daily'' (DHD) blog in March 2006 as an online version of her column. She officially launched it as an entertainment trade website in 2006. The site became one of Hollywood's most followed websites by 2009. In 2009, Finke sold ''Deadline'' to Penske Media Corporation (then Mail.com Media) for a low-seven-figure sum. Finke was also given a five-year-plus employment contract reported by the ''Los Angeles Times'' as being worth "millions of dollars", as well as part ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital media, digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as ''The Daily (podcast), The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones (publisher), George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won List of Pulitzer Prizes awarded to The New York Times, 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national "newspaper of record". For print it is ranked List of newspapers by circulation, 18th in the world by circulation and List of newspapers in the United States, 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is Public company, publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 189 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The New York Times Best Seller List
''The New York Times'' Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. John Bear, ''The #1 New York Times Best Seller: intriguing facts about the 484 books that have been #1 New York Times bestsellers since the first list, 50 years ago'', Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1992. Since October 12, 1931, ''The New York Times Book Review'' has published the list weekly. In the 21st century, it has evolved into multiple lists, grouped by genre and format, including fiction and non-fiction, hardcover, paperback and electronic. The list is based on a proprietary method that uses sales figures, other data and internal guidelines that are unpublished—how the ''Times'' compiles the list is a trade secret. In 1983 (as part of a legal argument), the ''Times'' stated that the list is not mathematically objective but rather editorial content. In 2017, a ''Times'' representative said that the goal is that the lists reflect authentic best selle ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Great Recession
The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline, i.e. a recession, observed in national economies globally that occurred from late 2007 into 2009. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country (see map). At the time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded that it was the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression. One result was a serious disruption of normal international relations. The causes of the Great Recession include a combination of vulnerabilities that developed in the financial system, along with a series of triggering events that began with the bursting of the United States housing bubble in 2005–2012. When housing prices fell and homeowners began to abandon their mortgages, the value of mortgage-backed securities held by investment banks declined in 2007–2008, causing several to collapse or be bailed out in September 2008. This 2007–2008 phase was called the subprime mortgage crisis. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bernie Madoff
Bernard Lawrence Madoff ( ; April 29, 1938April 14, 2021) was an American fraudster and financier who was the admitted mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, worth about $64.8 billion. He was at one time chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He advanced the proliferation of electronic trading platforms and the concept of payment for order flow, which has been described as a "legal kickback." Madoff founded a penny stock brokerage in 1960, which eventually grew into Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. He served as the company's chairman until his arrest on December 11, 2008. That year, the firm was the 6th-largest market maker in S&P 500 stocks. At the firm, he employed his brother Peter Madoff as senior managing director and chief compliance officer, Peter's daughter Shana Madoff as the firm's rules and compliance officer and attorney, and his now deceased sons Mark Madoff and Andrew Madoff. Peter was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2012, and Mark h ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Moscow Rules (Daniel Silva Novel)
''Moscow Rules'' is a 2008 spy novel by Daniel Silva. Featuring Gabriel Allon as a spy/assassin who works undercover as an art restorer, ''Moscow Rules'' explores the world of a rising Russia. The villain is a rich Russian oligarch who is a weapons dealer. The title is based on the Cold War rules in which CIA agents were trained when operating against the Soviet Union, known as the " Moscow Rules" — for example, "Don't look back, you are never alone". Plot summary New terror calls Gabriel Allon away from his wife Chiara and blissful honeymoon in Italy. Boris Ostrovsky, editor of the independent ''Moskovsky Gazeta'', claims to have exclusive information about imminent terror threats to the West and Israel but only dares entrust his knowledge with the now-famous Gabriel Allon. However, Ostrovsky's sudden assassination cuts short his message and leaves intelligence officers within the Israeli-based Office to guess at the scope of the purported threat against their country. Ostro ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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HarperCollins
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Corp. The name is a combination of several publishing firm names: Harper & Row, an American publishing company acquired in 1987—whose own name was the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers (founded in 1817) and Row, Peterson & Company—together with Scottish publishing company William Collins, Sons (founded in 1819), acquired in 1989. The worldwide CEO of HarperCollins is Brian Murray. HarperCollins has publishing groups in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India, and China. The company publishes many different imprints, both former independent publishing houses and new imprints. History Collins Harper Mergers and acquisitions Collins was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corpora ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Money Laundering
Money laundering is the process of concealing the origin of money, obtained from illicit activities such as drug trafficking, corruption, embezzlement or gambling, by converting it into a legitimate source. It is a crime in many jurisdictions with varying definitions. It is usually a key operation of organized crime. In US law, money laundering is the practice of engaging in financial transactions to conceal the identity, source, or destination of illegally gained money. In UK law the common law definition is wider. The act is defined as "taking any action with property of any form which is either wholly or in part the proceeds of a crime that will disguise the fact that that property is the proceeds of a crime or obscure the beneficial ownership of said property". In the past, the term "money laundering" was applied only to financial transactions related to organized crime. Today its definition is often expanded by government and international regulators such as the US Offic ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |