LONDON, June 17:  Hollywood star Michael Douglas has admitted that he took his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones for granted.
In a recent interview, the 69-year-old ‘Wall Street’ star said that he learnt from his past mistakes after temporarily splitting from his wife last year, reported Digital Spy.
“When you are younger you care what other people think. And you take the person closest to you for granted. You waste a lot of energy on strangers to make a good impression,” he said.
“When you’re older you focus that energy on the people closest to you, on your family. And you’re courteous.”
Douglas also explained that he thinks mistakes are only bad if people fail to learn from them.
“First you have to admit that you made a mistake, then dealing with it is easy. Of course it’s important to make mistakes, as long as you grow from them,” he said.
Douglas is due to appear in ‘Ant-Man’ as Dr Hank Pym and recently said that it is “very disappointing” that Edgar Wright has departed from the project. (PTI)

UNITED NATIONS, June 17:  Prince Zeid al Hussein of Jordan, a veteran diplomat and campaigner for international justice, will become the first UN human rights chief from the Muslim and Arab worlds following his unanimous election by the UN General Assembly.
The 193-member world body burst into applause yesterday when assembly President John Ashe banged his gavel signifying approval by consensus of the prince’s nomination to the UN’s top human rights job by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Zeid, who is currently Jordan’s UN ambassador, praised current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay of South Africa “for her courageous endeavors” and pledged “to build on her noteworthy achievements.”
His four-year term in the post which was created by the General Assembly in 1993, will begin on Sept 1.
“I am going to be the first high commissioner from the Asian continent and from the Muslim and Arab worlds,” the prince said. “This reflects the commitment of the international community towards this important dossier, and this important commitment to push it forward in this continent (Asia) as well as in other regions of the world.”
Zeid stressed the independence of the high commissioner’s job which he said “requires wisdom and a high level of coordination and communication with different governments as well as with civil society and all the UN agencies.”
The European Union’s Thomas Mayr-Harting, one of many regional representatives to welcome his selection, said the prince’s “proven track record in the promotion and protection of human rights, the fight against impunity as well as his exceptional diplomatic experience will be an invaluable asset” in his new job.
Zeid spent five years as an officer in the Jordanian desert police, the successor to the Arab Legion, before joining the UN protection force in former Yugoslavia from 1994-1996. In his long diplomatic career, he has been ambassador to the United Nations twice as well as ambassador to the United States from 2007-2010.
The prince is a strong supporter of the International Criminal Court, has served as president of its Assembly of States Parties, and has spoken out often against sexual violence.
Zeid was a candidate for secretary-general when Ban was chosen for the job. (AGENCIES)

LIMA (Peru), June 17: A rare and fragile pre-Incan funeral shroud was displayed to reporters, part of the first batch of ancient Paracas textiles that Sweden is returning to Peru 80 years after they were smuggled out by a diplomat.
The intricately coloured shroud, measuring 41 inches by 21 inches (104 centimetres by 53 centimetres), and 88 other textiles were donated to a museum in Gothenburg in the early 1930s by Swedish consul Sven Karell. He had secreted them out of Peru after they were discovered in the Paracas Peninsula, a desert south of Lima where the extremely dry climate helped protect the Alpaca wool fibers.
Despite being some 2,000 years old, “it is perfectly preserved,” Krzysztof Makowski, a University of Warsaw archaeologist who has studied the shroud as a professor at the Catholic University of Peru, said yesterday. “Across the world, the discoveries of textiles of this age are much rarer than any precious metal.”
“If you wanted to find a Roman textile, you won’t find anything because nothing was preserved,” Makowski said. “Textiles are very fragile. There are very few countries in the world that have conserved fabrics. Peru is one of them.” The so-called Shroud of Gothenburg is uniquely complex. It includes some 80 different colour tones and subtones such as blue, green, yellow, red and orange.It is divided into 32
Frames decorated with items resembling condors, frogs, cats, corn, cassava and human-like figures. Some researchers believe the shroud may be a sort of calendar related to the tracking of farming seasons, said Jahl Dulanto, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne who leads the Paracas investigation team at the Catholic University of Peru.
Dulanto said experts still do not fully understand how the shroud’s creators achieved the combination of sewing techniques and pigments.
The shroud and three other pieces were flown to Peru last week, fulfilling a friendly agreement reached with the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg in 2013. The rest of the Paracas textiles will return to Peru over the next seven years.
Peruvian officials have been working to reclaim its cultural antiquities from other countries. In June, it recovered more than 3,800 pre-Incan items held in Argentina. In 2011, Yale University returned 366 pieces from the Incan city of Machu Picchu that it had held for more than a century. (AGENCIES)
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