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French fashion company Pierre Cardin said on Monday it was negotiating with two Chinese firms to sell certain licenses in China.

The 86-year-old designer said it has been negotiating to sell textile and accessory licenses in China to two Chinese firms for 200 million euros (280 million U.S. dollars).

A spokesman with the company said the two Chinese firms were private shoemakers Jiansheng Trading Ltd. and Cardanro.

According to company sources, the sale to the Chinese companies of 32 licenses had been in talks for the past two months and a deal would be signed “imminently.”

Earlier on Monday, the company denied that it was to sell off to Chinese firms. It said: “This is not about the sales of the Pierre Cardin group. The couturier is in talks with Chinese companies only on the sale of certain licenses in China, as it was in the past for Japan for example.”

Pierre Cardin was the first Western fashion designer to hold a fashion show in Beijing in 1979, shortly after China started its reform and opening-up.

What is anything worth? Easy: The amount of fear, pain and suffering you are willing to risk to get it.
But of course we know the math is infinitely more complicated–especially for those suffused with fear, greed and hubris that inevitably fog the equation.

The crisis on Wall Street, now coursing like a virus throughout the broader economy, is testament to our collective innumeracy when it comes to estimating risk. Complicating matters: a vast web of impenetrable financial contracts putatively designed to “absorb” risk (and reap billions in transaction fees) by sprinkling it throughout the entire financial system. Thanks to such securitization, thousands of people moved into homes they couldn’t afford. No cash? No worries–there’s plastic. And the band played on.

So the question remains: What’s worth the risk? In search of illumination, we asked a slew of strivers–entrepreneurs, politicians, athletes and show-business types–what they consider to have been the riskiest moves of their lives.

Their responses were as diverse as their careers, but all support the same conclusion: The best results come to those willing to take a chance–an important reminder for entrepreneurs, financiers and political leaders as the global economy braces for even rougher weather.

Several subjects spoke of moments when their careers hung in the balance–the sputtering start-up, a challenging job offer or the decision to walk away from what they knew to pursue far grander dreams.

Some sneered at death, or at least dismemberment. Take Kit DesLauriers, the first person to ski from all seven summits. Of her descent from the top of Mount Everest, she says: “There were no safety nets, no fixed lines established, freezing winds. We had to spend an unplanned night at 26,000 feet, with very little food and water. The next day, we skied the Lhotse Face, 5,000 feet of blue ice on a 50-degree slope … At one point, we ran out of oxygen. I kept telling myself: ‘Don’t sit down and die. Just keep going.’ It’s really easy to let your mind get a hold of you, but the journey taught me we are much more than our minds.”

In 1992, Puneet Nanda, chief executive of Dr. Fresh, maker of oral care products, then based in New Delhi, decided to brave the burgeoning Russian market. “Everybody there had to pay a Mafia fee,” he recalls. “These ex-KGB guys controlled everything.”

One day, he continues, a new Mafia boss came by and chopped off his office manager’s hand; later, thugs roughed up Nanda in his own home. Nanda fled Russia, but not the fight. Dr. Fresh products now sell in 42 different countries–including, just as of August, Russia.

Richard Jackson, chief executive of Jackson Healthcare–which provides clinician staffing, anesthesia management and heath-care IT services for U.S. hospitals–has a story for risk-taking entrepreneurs hunting for suddenly cheap assets. Two years ago, Jackson decided to acquire World Health Alternatives, a publicly traded medical-staffing firm which was then twice the size of Jackson’s company.

Jackson recalls: “It was a hairy deal: [World Health] was pulling in $300 million in annual revenue but losing $1 million per month and rapidly approaching bankruptcy; its financial documents were inaccurate, the CEO had quit after some suspicious ethical behavior and the FBI was getting involved. But I believed we had the industry expertise to turn the business around. We paid $43 million for the company in 2006; last year, it took in $18 million on $220 million in sales. It was a huge risk–and an even bigger success.”

Michael Chasen, co-founder of Blackboard (nasdaq: BBBB), an education technology company, went so far as to jeopardize his new marriage. Despite making nice coin at KPMG, Chasen and college buddy Matthew Pittinsky decided to start their own company making software to facilitate instruction at schools that were outfitting fully Internet-wired classrooms and dormitories.

“The biggest risk was telling my fiancéone month before our wedding that I was going to quit my high-paying job to gamble on a ‘big idea’ with my old college roommate,” says Chasen. “Not exactly what she had signed up for.” (Happy ending: They still tied the knot. “Risk averted,” he adds.)

Still others we spoke with considered smaller, even mundane challenges to carry enormous risk. Case in point: Brian Binnie, whom Forbes.com interviewed for the first iteration of this article in 2007. Binnie piloted the craft that rocketed 69 miles above the earth in pursuit of the $10 million Ansari X Prize, funded by the likes of First USA Bank, a unit of JPMorgan Chase (nyse: JPM), and author Tom Clancy.

Ironically, the sky-scraping aviator’s greatest risk was among the most down-to-earth: speaking in front of a public audience. “The choice between a poke in the eye or the opportunity for public speaking sends me into serious deliberation,” admitted Binnie. (Still, an invitation to appear on The Late Show with David Letterman proved too tasty to pass up.)

Who better to assess risk then a guy who gets paid big bucks to do just that? When asked last year about his greatest risk, gold-plated venture capitalist Tim Draper, co-founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, recalled not one of his sizable bets on a promising (but by no means proven) young company; rather, he mentioned the time he mustered the courage to board an unknown, unsaddled horse.

“I don’t remember all the risks I have taken, since if they worked out, they were no big deal,” said Draper.

That’s one way of looking at it.

A French court awarded first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy 40,000 euros ($57,500) in damages from a company that sold bags emblazoned with a picture of her in the nude.

The case was the latest in a series of legal actions over the presidential couple’s image, which have drawn accusations of frivolity from critics of the media-savvy Sarkozys.

The nude photo of Bruni-Sarkozy was taken in 1993, when she was a professional model. She had asked for 125,000 euros in damages from Pardon, a fashion chain in the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion that used it without her permission.

“The unauthorized use of the image of Carla Bruni caused her moral and economic damage,” a court in the island capital Saint Denis de la Reunion said yesterday.

Bruni-Sarkozy’s lawyers had indicated that she would donate any damages awarded to charity.

The founder and manager of the Pardon chain, Peter Mertes, said he would appeal because 40,000 euros seemed expensive to him for “a small blunder”.

Mertes said 10,000 of the bags had been made and about half of those sold before Bruni-Sarkozy took legal action. He promised to dispose of the remaining stock. Pardon does not trade in mainland France.

Bruni-Sarkozy, 40, rose to fame as a model before becoming a successful pop singer. Public interest in her has surged since her whirlwind romance with President Nicolas Sarkozy, whom she married in February less than three months after they met.

The nude image printed on the Pardon bags was in the news earlier in the year, when an original black-and-white print of the Michel Comte photo fetched $91,000 at auction in New York.

It shows the young Bruni standing in a pigeon-toed pose, covering her private parts with her hands.

The Pardon bags were on sale last week for 3 euros each. Customers were given a free bag if they spent more than 5 euros. They are now banned from being sold on penalty of 100 euros per bag. )

A new Internet shopping mall is opening in China next month that will take payments in the widely used China UnionPay Co. cards for Japanese products, company officials said Friday.

The electronic shopping site “Buy-J.com” will sell gadgets, clothing and cosmetics from about 100 Japanese companies, aiming 4 billion yen ($44 million) in sales in the first year, said Ryuichi Kobayashi, spokesman for Sumitomo Mitsui Card Co., a credit card company that tied up with China UnionPay.

It would be the first of its kind that allows settlements with the Chinese cards, hoping to cash in on the growing interest in Japanese electronics goods, fashion and food among Chinese consumers, he said.

Some 1.8 billion UnionPay cards — which include both credit and debit cards — have been issued in China, far more plentiful than credit cards like Visa.

The number of Chinese who use the Internet is estimated at some 250 million.

Among those considering opening shop at Buy-J.com are electronics retailer Yodobashi Camera Co., drugstore chain Matsumoto Kiyoshi Co., children’s clothing maker Narumiya International Co. and mail-order company Cecile Co., Kobayashi said.

Chinese will be able to buy the products through the Net and pay with their cards to have the products shipped to them, said Shota Ko of SBI VeriTrans Co., a Tokyo-based e-commerce company, which will run the site.

Sun Lingling now knows the sound a free-falling body makes when it smacks against pavement,according to today’s China Daily.

And though she’ll try, she’ll never forget the smell of charred skin hanging loosely off scores of faces. Or the frightful image of a young woman with hair peeling off her scalp.

Those were the horrors that greeted Sun, a China Daily employee stationed in New York City, after she stumbled down 33 flights of the World Trade Center to freedom on Tuesday.

All Sun lost was a shoe.

She continued her escape across the street when a loud boom jolted her head back in the direction of the towering inferno.

Within seconds, the No 2 building collapsed into a pile of rubble and ash.

By the time she reached the Brooklyn Bridge, the skyscraper where she had worked for eight years toppled as well.

All she could do was watch helplessly.

“It was as if a huge piece of chocolate had been melted down,” Sun said. “I thought of friends at Morgan Stanley, whom we met during our exercises at the gym nearby. I knew it was almost impossible for them to survive.”

Sun, 46, who handles China Daily’s distribution in North America, had arrived at work at 8 am as usual. No other China Daily employees worked at the tower with her.

She was chatting on the phone when the first crash came. “The whole building was shaking,” she recalled hours later in a long-distance telephone interview with China Daily.

She heard a second explosion and ran into the hall, but nothing looked out of place. By the time she grabbed her purse from her office and returned to the hall, it was clogged with smoke and people scrambling to get out.

“Nobody knew what was happening,”she said.

News spread quickly enough, when her husband, Zhang Kening, called her cell phone from his office at the International Sea-Bed Authorities in Jamaica, where he had been watching CNN.

“He told me to calm down and evacuate immediately,” she said.

So she followed a throng of people down the stairway from her 33rd-floor office. “Everybody seemed to be calm, and they tried to help each other,” she said.

When the masses reached the 30th floor, they made way for stretchers carrying the injured, and trained dogs leading the blind.

At the 20th floor, firefighters raced by her and asked how many more flights they had to go before they reached the blaze.

The firefighters lingered long enough to let Sun and the others throw water on them. She does not know if they ever made it back down to safety.

“All of us had the deepest respect for those firefighters,” Sun said, sobbing.

When Sun finally reached the lobby, she discovered that all eight elevators had crashed.

“I don’t know how many people were trapped in there,” she said.

Chunks of granite were falling off the lobby walls around her. Dazed people soaked in mud and water were milling about.

“A guard at the exit kept saying ‘Don’t run, but hurry,’ “Sun said.

Sun made it home seven hours later.

More than 70 voice mail messages were blinking at her.

The first was from Zhang Ping, the general manager of www. Chinadaily.com.cn.

Friends from Australia and the United States called as well, worried about her.

“They were offering to help with anything I needed,” Sun said. “It was really comforting.”

Sun is expected to stay in New York and continue overseeing the mailings of the few thousand China Dailys each day.

Although a fan of jazz and pop music, 24-year-old Zhang Wei, who works in a UK consulting company in Beijing, confessed that she rarely buys CD except for her favorite musicians: Norah Jones and Leehom Wang, a pop singer from Taiwan.

Instead, she simply goes online and downloads music. For her favorite musicians, she also downloads demo versions before loosening her purse strings for a CD.

“Although I am their loyal fan, not every single song of theirs interests me,” Zhang says. “Sometimes, only one particular track sounds interesting in a whole album.”

Zhang used to listen to cheap pirated CDs or music radios as a poor student. Downloading music from the Internet is “free and convenient” to Zhang, who likes to kill time listening to MP3s while commuting.

Yue Zuhong, 25, who works at MTV-Asia, often downloads music from websites like Baidu.com, because it saves time to find a song. “Just input the names, and bang, they are all there.”

The popularity of digital music among young Chinese was recently confirmed in a survey by market research company, Synovate. In March, Synovate polled 3,857 urban respondents aged 15 to 34 about their music habits, activities and attitudes in ten Asian markets including Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore.

The survey shows that in February, 84 percent of Chinese consumers have played music on a computer, 72 percent on an MP3 and 39 percent have downloaded and saved a song to their mobile phone.

The survey also shows that 63 percent of Chinese respondents downloaded a song without paying for it and 38 percent used a file-sharing program to share music with others.

Facing the popular digital music trend, the Chinese music industry has changed its attitude from denial to eager participation.

In 2005, seven major record companies who have branches in China such as Sony, EMI, Universe and Warner, sued Baidu.com, a Chinese search engine company, for illegally providing free online music and download service.

The record companies were unsuccessful in this case. The Beijing No 1 Intermediate People’s Court ruled in November 2006 that Baidu is a search engine service provider that links all available websites including illegal ones who post pirate music on their websites, therefore Baidu shouldn’t take full responsibility for it.

On January 16, 2007, EMI authorized Baidu to provide all of its Chinese songs to the public for free, in return for sharing Baidu’s advertising income.

“Rather than getting involved in endless dispute, it would be a wise change for record companies to cooperate with digital media like Baidu,” said Huang Weixiang, chairman of EMI China.

Music copyright has always been an important issue in the industry with the biggest concern being who will pay for music in the future.

The global music industry looks at China as an ideal experimental field to launch a revolution, says Song Ke, CEO of Taihe Rye Music Co Ltd, which was founded in 2004 as a joint venture of Rye Music Producing Company and Taihe Media. Prior to this role, Song was a chief music executive at Warner Music.

“China is a newcomer to the modern music industry and we are all freshmen,” Song explains. “The positive side is that we accept new things fast and easily.” But Song says the downside is that people will not pay as long as they can still obtain free music. “The key point is to explore potential market and operate properly,” Song says.

The Synovate survey reveals that 14 percent of the Chinese respondents have paid to download music online - the same as the regional average.

Zhang Wei prefers free music, but she would accept paying small money for quality works and services. She has subscribed to a service for mobile phone ring tone downloads, which charges 10 yuan ($1.30) a month.

Ringtone is a new member of digital music industry, but it has already generated a market around 5 billion yuan ($649 million) this year, Song says.

Ringtone was born in South Korea and considered as a toy at first, Song says. However, it is estimated that the overall revenue of ring tone could reach 7 billion yuan ($909 million) in China in 2007.

The Synovate survey reveals that 65 percent of Chinese respondents are ready to replace their mobile digital music player with a music-playing mobile phone.

“Ringtone has been the most profitable business of my company and there is still a large potential market,” Song says.

Besides consumers, new technology has also provided great opportunities for musicians. Yue Zuhong used to play bass in a local band in Xi’an of Northwest China’s Shaanxi Province. He says that widespread adoption of digital technology enables musicians to distribute their work widely to the public through the Internet.

“We’ll find more popular songs by individual musicians from music websites and private blogs,” Yue says. “New technology helps gifted musician succeed.”

In 2001, Xue Cun, a musician from Northeast China, put his track All Northeasterners are Living Lei Feng on the Internet. Many anonymous artists created hilarious flash pieces to match the song’s humorous lyric and lively rhythm, which made this song popular all over China. Xue Cun has since signed up with a Beijing company to produce albums.

Nowadays, more and more music lovers put their works on the web and record companies have also spotted and signed contracts with them.

Song says it’s possible that all wireless digital music devices would integrate into a mobile phone and a home entertainment system connected to broadband. But it’s hard to predict how the digital music industry will develop.

“One thing is for sure: human beings will need music forever,” Song says. “I am confident with the future of digital music in China.”

The Maldives won the final of the 7th South Asian Football Federation (SAFF) Championship Saturday night after beating India with 1-0 in Colombo.

It was the first time for the India Ocean archipelago to bag the championship cup since the event started in 1993.

Mukthar Naseer unleashed a powerful shot into India’s citadel when the match was into its 88th minute, leaving the defending champion very little time to revenge.

The Maldives’ players played well with the presence of Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and thousands of fans from their country.

India won the championship four times in 1993, 1997, 1999 and 2005 while the Maldives emerged runner up in 1997 and 2003.

The winners carried away the SAFF Championship Cup and a purse worth 50,000 U.S. dollars, while the runner-up got 25,000 dollars.

The championship, starting on June 3, was co-hosted by Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

Maldives and India made their way to the final after defeating Sri Lanka and Bhutan respectively Wednesday night.

Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan also participated in this year’s championship.

The spreading of the financial problems have hit consumer confidence, leaving the luxury industry another victim of the ebbing tide.

A five-diamond seller surnamed Lin on Taobao closed her online auction store recently. Living in the United States, she used to provide procurement services to domestic buyers for luxury goods of leading brands.

Talking about the “good old days”, she said, “I could sell tens of leading brand handbags in a week, and get more than 20 orders when a limited edition LV came on the market.”

Unfortunately, due to the financial crisis in the US, her husband’s salary has shrunk, making it hard for her to pay for luxury goods in advance, and brand enthusiasts in China are less passionate than before.

Seeing fewer buyers and falling profits, Lin has had to end her business. She said that she planned to save money and to find a stable job until the recovery of the economy.

Like Lin, luxury stores are also feeling the pinch of recession. “Business this year is really hard, especially after golden week,” the Shanghai-based Youth Daily quoted several store managers.

A shopkeeper of a world leading brand boutique said that their sales volume had slid downwards since June, nearly 20 percent under the same period last year. “Most visitors now are the old customers, but they appreciate more than buy.”

A luxury enthusiast surnamed Li who used to buy luxury goods at intervals has to curb her impulse now, as the rising living cost has taken much of her decreasing salary, she said.

At the same time, second-hand luxury goods stores have witnessed the white collar workers’ shift in spending patterns.

A Shanghai store owner said that buyers are 20 percent less than before, and the label runners had become more rational. Some sell their luxuries to the store for cash, with 10 percent commission for the store, and some sell used handbags and then pay the extra for the latest “in” bags.

Surveys have it that office workers constitute the main purchasers of luxury goods in China. With the stock market shrinking more than two thirds and the real economy affected by the global slowdown, the new rich are tightening their purse strings.

In the wake of the damaged market, brands are finding ways out. I.T., a mecca for fashion followers, promised to refund 6,000 yuan ($877.18) worth of goods to customers who spend 10,000 yuan or more at its Shanghai store during the National Holiday.

Just about two weeks after the promotion, the Shanghai outlet offered another substantial discount on October 19, by refunding 10,000 yuan worth of goods to those spend 15,000 yuan or above. It is the first time the Hong Kong based master boutique has launched such large scale promotion campaigns consecutively.

World leading brands are also trying to hook consumers through discounts. Chanel, Gucci, Fendi and Prada have offered 70 percent discount for some of their products.

There may be good news for Lin. These promotions have aroused interest among white collar workers in Shanghai, and many put up posts for procurement services on fashion websites. Statistics from an online shopping website show that such posts have more than doubled every week since October.

A 25-year-old Chinese woman was reported missing at the weekend during a ferry trip from Finland back to Sweden, the Chinese embassy in Stockholm said on Wednesday.

Early Saturday morning, Xu Xun disappeared from a Viking Lines ferry returning from Turku in Finland to Stockholm, according to the embassy.

Xu told her friends Friday evening that she was going up onto the deck to watch the sunrise Saturday morning. But she did not return to the cabin and her purse and other personal belongings remained there, the embassy said.

“Xu Xun comes from Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. She has previously studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. After her graduation in 2008 she worked for a Dutch company but lost the job not long ago because of the global economic crisis. She traveled to Finland together with three friends,” Yang Shuaiqi, consul of the Chinese embassy in Stockholm, told Xinhua on the telephone.

The Chinese embassy has contacted Xu’s family, the ferry security and local police. The police are working on the case, Yang added.

An explosive charge went off among a crowd of construction workers in central Baghdad early on Thursday, killing at least three people and wounding 21 others, an Interior Ministry source said.

The blast took place at about 6:00 a.m. (0200 GMT) in the Tayaran Square when a bomb hidden in a plastic bag detonated among dozens of workers who were waiting to be hired for daily work, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Several shops and nearby cars were damaged in the blast while the police cordoned off the area and ambulances rushed the casualties to nearby hospitals, he added.

Violence has persisted in Iraq despite the formation of a new unity government.