Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie visited a refugee camp in Mardin in southeastern Turkey on Saturday. The camp shelters people who have fled the civil war in neighbouring Syria. Her visit alongside the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, Antonio Guterres, was part of Jolie’s work as his special envoy. Afterwards, she said: “Never before have so many people been dispossessed or stripped of their human rights. There is an explosion of human suffering and displacement on a level that has never been seen before.” She added that there were no more safe havens for Syrians and Iraqis as neighbouring countries reached the limit of how many people they can shelter. Jolie’s visit was the third since 2011 she has made to Turkey, which hosts the greatest number of refugees in the world – 1.59 million, according to UN figures. Jolie was seen earlier in the day walking around town, brieflystopping off at a handicraft shop with her daughter, Shiloh, and their minders. Later, she and Guterres met Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in of Midyat, close to the Syrian border and attended an ifter at a camp. The UN says the number of Syrian refugees seeking its help now tops 2 million – and could be much higher. – AP
Picasso postcard fetches record price
A postcard with a signed drawing by Picasso fetched a record 166,000 euros at auction on Saturday. The sales set a “world record for a postcard”, according the Gaertner auction house in Bietigheim-Bissingen, southern Germany. The buyer, described as a “trans-Atlantic collector”, clinched the deal by telephone following frenzied bidding. With commissions, the card will cost the buyer more than 200,000 euros, it said. The card, sent by Pablo Picasso to his friend, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, is dated September 5, 1918, and has an authenticated drawing that “can be considered part of the artist’s cubist still life series,” Gaertner said. The picture on the other side of the postcard is a simple aerial view of the southwestern French town of Pau. The postcard never made it to Apollinaire because Picasso had addressed it in Spanish. It is marked with the French equivalent of “return to sender”. – AP
Renowned writer James Salter dead at 90
James Salter, the prize-winning author acclaimed for his sophisticated, granular prose and sobering insights in Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime and other fiction, has died at the age of 90. The writer, who had been in good health, collapsed on Friday while at a gym in Sag Harbor on New York's Long Island, said his wife, Kay Eldredge. The cause of his death was not immediately known. Robin Desser, his editor at publisher Alfred A. Knopf, called Salter a "great American writer who spoke to us in a voice always pure and true". The Manhattan native didn't enjoy great commercial success but was highly admired by critics and peers. He won the PEN/Faulkner prize for the 1988 collection Dusk and Other Stories and received two lifetime achievement honours for short story writing, the Rea Award and the PEN/Malamud prize. In addition to his writing, Salter was also a US Air Force pilot who retired with the rank of major and flew more than 100 missions during the Korean War, a swimming-pool salesman and a filmmaker, with credits that included the short documentary Team Team Team and the feature film Three, starring Sam Waterston. He left the military in 1957, the same year his first novel, The Hunters, was published, a tough story in the Hemingway tradition. It was adapted into a 1958 film of the same name, starring Robert Mitchum. Salter was married twice and had five children. He worked slowly, publishing only six novels and two story collections, along with his memoir and writings about food and travel. – AP
