What Katie Didn’t Know – Tom Cruise and Scientology

In the fall of 2004 Nazanin Boniadi was allegedly selected by officials in the Scientology organization to be Tom Cruise’s next girlfriend. Her never-before-told story—of the months inseparable from the star (and his watchers), before she fell out of favor—reveals a complex dynamic that also affected Cruise’s relationships with Nicole Kidman, Penélope Cruz, and, now, Katie Holmes.

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Mongolia: The New Frontier for Luxury Shopping

What happens when a country previously hindered by vastness and foreign rule awakens to wealth on its doorstep? With Louis Vuitton on one corner and one of the world’s largest gold deposits down the road, the previously nomadic society of Mongolia is putting down some rich roots.

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Into the Mystic: Inside Cartagena

Rafael del Castillo and I had never met, but a mutual friend put us in touch before I left for Cartagena. “Rafa” came from one of the leading families there and had married a former beauty queen. “The night you arrive, come to dinner at my house,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I’ll pick you up.” True to his word, Rafa appeared promptly at my hotel and brought me to his home, the top-floor apartment in a gleaming twelve-story glass and concrete building in the Bocagrande area. The slick boutiques and luxury residential towers of this chic stretch of waterfront, bordering a peninsula just south of the city’s colonial center, sprang up only in the past decade. Today Bocagrande, which has some of Colombia’s most expensive real estate, is the neighborhood of choice for those who prefer, and can afford, ocean-side modern.

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Cassini Royal

By the time he died, in 2006, designer Oleg Cassini had seduced the “top top girls” of his day, from Grace Kelly to Marilyn Monroe to Anita Ekberg, married Hollywood stunner Gene Tierney, and shaped the look of the absolutely toppest girl of all, Jacqueline Kennedy. But, for all Cassini’s success with women, the battle over his estate, between his daughter Tina and his last (and secret) wife, Marianne Nestor, suggests a chilling calculation behind the dashing image.

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Letter from Paris Season of Scandale

For decades France ignored its presidents’ private lives, but the ascension of Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, has turned that tradition on its head. Will rumors of infidelity, secret marriage contracts, and illegal wiretaps derail Sarkozy’s presidency? And is any of it true?

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