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There are challenges. Some ads have fallen flat. Consumers complained that the reality in one TV spot ruined the fantasy of romantic love. It showed a man giving his girlfriend a diamond ring. It then flashed ahead to show the couple, years later, strolling along the beach with their son. It bombed. "'Don't show the child when I'm thinking about love,'" Hudson recalls hearing from consumers.Another time De Beers organized a splashy traveling exhibition of famous diamonds, including one of Elizabeth Taylor's rings, for Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. But it made only two stops because customs officials in Guangzhou refused entry.

There's some risk diamond sales will slow this year because superstitious cushion jewelry sale will pause from the wedding rush during the Year of the Rooster, considered an unlucky time for such unions. But De Beers is undaunted. Its latest TV commercial shows a groom leading his bride through a maze by pulling a red string. When she finds him, a diamond slides down the string onto her finger.

Yad Vashem never honored Max Schmeling, who died on February 2 at age 99, among its Righteous Gentiles. No one, say researchers, ever nominated him. More's the pity. The one-time world heavyweight champion stuck his neck out for a Jewish friend in 1938 when more obscure Germans were paying a heavy price for less.

The Nazi press trumpeted Schmeling's 12th-round knockout over Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium in 1936 as "a victory for the white race." Back in Berlin, Hitler invited him for lunch. "I had to go," he said apologetically. The two watched a film of the fight. Every elsa peretti sale the German boxer landed a blow, Hitler slapped his leg with delight.

Yet Schmeling never bought the Fuehrer's racist ideology. He refused to sack his American Jewish manager, Joe Jacobs (the man who coined the immortal phrase "We wuz robbed," after one of his fights). Schmeling said he was relieved when the "Brown Bomber" won the rematch two years later, though he can hardly have relished being knocked out in the first round and shipped home on a stretcher. The defeat made it easier for him to refuse to act as a Nazi paloma picasso sale. Conscripted, he did serve as a paratrooper during World War II and made his fortune afterwards marketing Coca-Cola in his native land.

One of his Jewish buddies was David Lewin, a flamboyant Berlin businessman with a passion for sports and for the cabaret world of the sickly Weimar Republic. Lewin owned a hotel in the Potsdam suburb, where Schmeling trained for his big bouts. The two men shared a frank gehry sale nightspot, the Zigeunerkeller, the Gypsy Cellar, where they drank and sang together.

On November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, when anti-Semitic mobs were sacking Jewish property throughout the Reich, Lewin turned to his fighter friend. Schmeling was in Berlin on a business trip. Lewin asked him to shelter his two sons, Heinz and Werner, aged 14 and 15 respectively. Schmeling took them to his room in the downtown Excelsior Hotel and kept them there for three days. He told the desk clerk that he was ill and must not be disturbed. When the riots abated, Schmeling drove them to his home in his Mercedes convertible. After waiting another two days, he delivered them to their father.

Soon afterwards the family sailed to Shanghai, where Lewin went return to tiffany sale into the hotel business. They moved to the U.S. in 1946. Heinz, now Henri, followed in his father's footsteps and eventually became president of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.