For example, all Post Office branches and Safeway stores let you pay using the new method, and Dixons and Asda are starting to use the technology at the tills. But Sainsbury’s isn’t introducing chip and PIN until September. and only 13 Tesco stores let you pay with the new cards.And even if you are shopping in a store that accepts the technology, you may find your credit or debit card isn’t one of the 17.2 million primed for use.Banks are sending out the new chip and PIN cards but they are some way off hitting their targets. Gendarmes in eastern France have dismantled an elaborate poaching network which has been preying on a protected species and much-prized delicacy: the frog.
Seven people have been arrested, accused of conspiring to evade French laws establishing quotas and closed seasons for the catching of pool frogs and edible frogs, whose legs have been a staple of French cuisine for centuries.A restaurateur in the Haute-Sa?area of Franche-Comt?near the Swiss border, is also said to be facing possible legal action for buying contraband grenouilles de pays , or local frogs.

She is believed to have been the inspiration for other works including Proserpine and Astarte Syriaca .. Their fetishistic images of women with dark, distinctive features shocked those who knew his work, particularly Carol-Ann, who declared: “They are me”.One of two studies that Rossetti made in 1869 for an oil painting, Pandora was modelled on Jane Morris, the wife of his fellow artist and friend William Morris. Lowry had a similar obsession with a particular kind of face – very heavily featured, androgynous women, with strongly delineated eyebrows and very full lips. It’s very typical of a series of heads of a woman called Ann that Lowry painted in the 1950s.”Lowry never married and blamed a lack of female relationships on the claustrophobic bond he had with his mother.

Aside from his portrait series – believed to be based on Carol-Ann – this female interest prevails in a cache of paintings discovered after his death in 1976. He later left her his entire fortune of around £300,000.”Lowry was mesmerised by Rossetti’s work and would have had a lot of opportunity to study it, because of the number of Rossettis in Manchester Art Gallery,” said Lindsay Brooks, the senior curator at the Lowry Gallery in Salford.”He was drawn to the very linear style of Rossetti and the way that Rossetti brings figures very close to the picture frame. Entry required ownership of a Pre-Raphaelite work, so in 1968 Lowry bought Pandora for Carol-Ann, so that she could join the society. “It’s one of the finest works on paper that has ever been offered at auction,” said a spokeswoman for Christie’s.The drawing’s high value has been attributed to its colourful catalogue of owners – particularly in its passing from Lowry to his “adopted god-daughter” Carol-Ann Lowry, whom he befriended when she wrote to him at the age of 13, excited at sharing his name, and asking for his advice on how to become an artist.In 1966, Lowry set up the Pre-Raphaelite Society with his friend Tilly Marshall, the owner of the Stone Gallery in Newcastle.