Postwar

"Badland" strikes like a bolt of lightning out of nowhere. This modest-budget picture with starkly effective Canadian locales standing in for Montana and Wyoming arrives with scant notice, no major studio campaign or big-name cast, but it unflinchingly illuminates the toll exacted by the Iraq War in a raw, deeply personal and completely compelling manner.

Jan Wolkers, 81, a Dutch author and sculptor whose sex-charged books helped shake off the shackles of postwar conservatism in the Netherlands, died Friday at his home on the North Sea island of Texel, his publisher De Bezige Bij announced. Considered one of the most important postwar Dutch writers, Wolkers won but declined the country's highest literary honors.

Elfi von Dassanowsky, a classical musician and filmmaker who narrowly avoided a career in Nazi Germany's movie studio system before she co-founded Belvedere Film in Austria after World War II, has died. She was 83. Von Dassanowsky died of heart failure Tuesday at Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, her son Robert said. She had been a resident of Los Angeles since the 1960s. Born Elfriede Marie Charlotte von Dassanowsky in Vienna on Feb.

For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay. There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn't want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution.

VIENNA -- Baron Elie Robert de Rothschild, who helped France's renowned Rothschild winemaking and banking dynasty recover from the ravages of World War II, died Monday while vacationing at his Austrian hunting lodge. He was 90. Rothschild had been on a hunting trip with friends at his lodge outside Innsbruck when he suffered a fatal heart attack, according to police in the province of Tyrol. He was the second prominent Rothschild to die this year.

The way Masahiro Shimizu sees it, he and Japan's other baby boomers built the country into an economic powerhouse -- and now it's time to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Shimizu will leave his job in the department store business next year, having become one of some 5.4 million Japanese boomer employees who will reach the standard retirement age of 60 over the next three years.

The record price for postwar art was broken twice at a Sotheby's auction in New York this week, first with a Francis Bacon work and later with a Mark Rothko painting. The 1950 Rothko painting, "White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)," of blocks of color, sold for $72.8 million Tuesday to an anonymous bidder, Sotheby's said. Shortly before, a 1962 Bacon painting of a pope, "Study From Innocent X," sold to an anonymous bidder for $52.6 million.

In a stinging indictment of the U.S. handling of the Iraq war, former CIA Director George J. Tenet accuses the Bush administration in a new book of ignoring repeated warnings that the country was collapsing into civil war and voices deep skepticism that the current "surge" in troops can succeed. Tenet accuses the White House of having "no strategy" for handling postwar Iraq, and concludes that the recent effort to deploy more troops has come far too late.

Wars seldom end when a peace accord is signed, and that is especially true of the conflict in what survivors still call "ex-Yugoslavia." Because what combatants did was so savage, and because enemies, especially in the city of Sarajevo, had been so close, the war is a wound that has difficulty healing, a nightmare that even daylight can't dispel.

For nearly 40 years, David Geffen has been making big deals in the realms of music, movies and Broadway musicals. Now, 63 years old and a billionaire four times over, he's caused a stir by selling one painting for a record $140 million and two others for a combined $143.5 million, all within the last two months. But this hardly leaves him with empty walls to fill. For years, insiders have acknowledged Geffen's inventory as one of the largely unseen wonders of the contemporary art world.