Paris

The world's slowest love affair is picking up steam.The seventh in a series of Taster's Choice coffee commercials aired on CBS' "Northern Exposure" Monday night. And it concludes with a kiss. So what, you say?So this kiss has been a long time coming.This particular ad campaign, created by McCann-Erickson for Nestle Co., which makes Taster's Choice, features a romance between two sophisticated singles. It first began percolating after she knocked on his door and asked to borrow some coffee.

Robert D. Myers, a retired Baltimore advertising executive and Civil War enthusiast who drank tea with famed author and art collector Gertrude Stein shortly after Paris was liberated during World War II, died March 14 of senile dementia at Church Home. The Stevenson resident was 78.Mr. Myers, who began his advertising career as an office boy at 16 when he went to work for the Mahool Advertising Agency, retired as vice president of Emory Advertising in 1984.He merged Mahool in 1961 with Peter Torrieri Advertising to create Torrieri-Myers Advertising, and was president of the combined firm until 1982, when it was merged into Emory Advertising.

PARIS -In the middle, there is no need to choose. And the middle of the City of Light is the Seine River and the two small islands that sit within its flowing waters. Those islands are the heart of Paris tourist activity. Visitors come for the country's most famous ice cream shop, lining up beside well-dressed children with balloons tied to their wrists. They come for the hulking Notre Dame Cathedral, to point cameras at kneeling worshipers. And they come simply because it is the middle of the city.

If you want to spend April in Paris but can't afford it, a short hop to Philadelphia may at least give you that French feeling. After nearly three years of planning, the city kicks off the first Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts this weekend, featuring 1,500 artists and 135 exhibits, performances, lectures and films, all paying homage to Paris. The theme of the festival at the city's Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts focuses on Paris from 1910 to 1920, celebrating a time when great artists, including Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Ernest Hemmingway, were gravitating to the French city.

PARIS -- With her pink-and-orange dyed hair and pierced lower lip, Manuella Pereira considers herself a rebel standing up for young people across France. But the 17-year-old from a well-to-do suburb learned a harsh lesson about solidarity when she went to Paris last week to join a student march at the Invalides military monument. "A friend of mine got robbed and I got tear-gassed," said Pereira, a student at Albert Schweitzer High School in Le Raincy. In scenes shown on television, swarms of hooded, masked youths infiltrated the march Thursday in an upscale tourist district in the heart of Paris, beating and stomping marchers, stealing their cell phones and money, and setting cars on fire.

PARIS - Members of a Jewish soccer team, practicing in a deserted suburban sports field, were attacked by a gang of hooded and masked youths on Wednesday evening in what authorities are calling the first organized assault on Jews since the recent increase in anti-Semitic attacks in France. The attackers - some shouting "death to Jews," according to the victims - wielded sticks, metal bars and, in one case, a heavy ball used for petanque, a kind of bowling. Most of the soccer players, ages 16 to 18, were able to run from the field unhurt.

Sylvan Learning Systems Inc. announced yesterday its purchase of a business school in Paris, the fifth university that it has bought in Europe and Latin America during the past two years as part of its growing international universities division. Executives of the Baltimore-based education services company have said they may spin off the unit as a separate company, possibly next year. Sylvan purchased a 98.8 percent interest in Ecole Superieure du Commerce Exterieur, a four-year school in business and management with roughly 1,000 students, for about $8.1 million in cash.

On a blue-green sea under stormy skies, the amazed disciples stand unsteadily in their wave-tossed boat to witness a miracle: Christ, appearing as a shining column of pure light, is walking on the waters. Henry Ossawa Tanner, the greatest African-American artist of the 19th century, painted this scene in 1907, nearly two decades after he had moved to Paris from his native Philadelphia. It is a work redolent of deep religious feeling and the brilliant color and lighting effects for which Tanner was famed, and it is one of the highlights of the intriguing exhibition Henry Ossawa Tanner and the Lure of Paris that opens today at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The show of about 40 works by Tanner and his contemporaries examines the network of influences that shaped his art, from religious-themed etchings of Rembrandt and landscapes of Corot and Daubigny to the Impressionism of Pissarro and Degas and the pictorial photography of Alvin Langdon Coburn.

PARIS -- Tom J. Billman, accused of looting his Maryland savings and loan and taking off for a four-year international spending spree, spent his last months of freedom posing as a champagne entrepreneur in an ordinary, one-bedroom apartment above an unemployment office."

PARIS -- If you sit in Fouquet's on the Champs-Elysees, sheltered beneath its thick red awning, you can see through the bare winter trees across the street to the Burger King.It is a long way from here to there, from $5 for a tiny cup of coffee in Fouquet's to less than that for a whole meal in the other place.They are chiseling up the concrete at the entry to Fouquet's snug terrace to lay a new line of brass plaques for the names of future movie stars.The Burger King also decorates with movie stars, old black and white photos of the likes of Robert Mitchum, James Dean and Catherine Deneuve.