A centuries-old diamond passed down through generations of European royalty fetched nine million Swiss francs ($9.7 million) at auction in Geneva on Tuesday louboutin online.

The 35-carat "Beau Sancy" diamond was worn by Marie de Medici, Queen consort of Henry IV, at her coronation in 1610.

Five bidders spanning three continents competed for the historic jewel at a Sotheby's auction where there was little evidence of the current global financial woes.

An anonymous telephone bidder purchased the jewel, put on the market by the House of Prussia and described by Sotheby's as one of the "most fascinating and romantic" gems ever to come to auction.

The buyer paid 9,042,500 Swiss francs ($9,699,618) including the buyer's premium for the pear-shaped, double rose cut diamond -- more than double the $2 million to $4 million estimate.

"You are buying an historic work of art -- you are not buying a diamond," said Philipp Herzog von Wuerttenberg, chairman of Sotheby's Europe, following the sale cheap louboutins.

"I fell in love with it when I saw it. It's the cut, it's the history," he said.

The Beau Sancy attracted bids from North America, Europe and Asia, he said, refusing to give further details about the buyer.

The diamond's royal connections date back to 1604 when it was bought for Henri IV of France at the insistence of his wife Marie de Medici who wore it atop her crown at her coronation.

Later that century it was acquired by the Dutch and used to seal the wedding of Willem II of Orange Nassau to Mary Stuart, daughter of Charles I of England.

Stuart pawned the rose-cut gem to finance her brother Charles II's fight for the throne.

In 1702, the first king of Prussia gave it pride of place in the new royal crown and it has passed through generations of the House of Prussia until today.

"We've sold much larger diamonds but it has this wonderful romantic history, an unparalleled royal history -- it has never been in non-royal hands," said David Bennett, co-chairman of Sotheby's Switzerland, ahead of the sale louboutin shoes.

The Beau Sancy went under the hammer at Geneva's Beau Rivage hotel as part of Sotheby's "Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels" sale.

A second historic diamond, a 7.3-carat "fancy yellow" formerly belonging to Charles Edward Stuart, one-time pretender to the thrones of Great Britain and Ireland, sold to a telephone bidder for 902,500 francs ($968,085) including the buyers premium christian louboutin online.

Perhaps he is actually the first pop culture president. President Obama appeared on ABC's "The View" Tuesday for an interview in which he discussed Wall Street, gay marriage and the Hulk louboutin online.

Co-host Joy Behar administered a zeitgeist quiz to the president during the show, taped Monday, asking him to name three characters from "The Avengers." "I just saw it, so this is easy," Obama said. "You've got the Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man."

Asked which Kardashian was married for 72 days, the president answered correctly, "That would be Kim." Obama quickly explained his knowledge of the reality star as accidental. "Because he was a ballplayer," he said, referring to Kardashian's ex-husband, NBA player Kris Humphries. "That’s how I know, from watching basketball cheap louboutins."

Obama has made entertainment programs an increasingly important venue for his public appearances. In 2010 he became the first sitting president to appear on a daytime talk show when he visited "The View," and last month he talked about student loans on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon." Such shows are a way to reach demographic groups key to the president's re-election campaign — women and young people.

A record-setting fundraiser at George Clooney's Studio City home last week also relied on the president's Hollywood ties: Organizers used the joint star power of Obama and Clooney to lure campaign donations from tens of thousands of participants in an online contest vying to attend louboutin shoes.

On "The View" episode that aired Tuesday, the commander in chief seemed pretty pop culture savvy for a man with a country to run and a hotly contested campaign underway — he said he DVRs the shows "Mad Men" and "Homeland" for viewing on his long flights.

But the president did miss some questions. He didn't know that Jessica Simpson had recently had a baby, and he deflected a query on the hot-selling erotic novel "Fifty Shades of Grey." When asked "What’s the controversial sex book that’s on millions of women’s bedside tables?" the president said: "I don't know that. I’ll ask Michelle when I get home louboutin sandals."

“The Avengers” passed the $1-billion mark in worldwide ticket sales this weekend, and a sequel is already in the works. Does that mean writer-director Joss Whedon will be back at the helm of the franchise that unites Marvel’s box-office heavyweights, including Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk louboutin online?

“You know, I’m very torn,” Whedon said in a sit-down interview in Beverly Hills before the film’s U.S. opening. “It’s an enormous amount of work telling what is ultimately somebody else’s story, even though I feel like I did get to put myself into it. But at the same time, I have a bunch of ideas, and they all seem really cool.”

Whether he gets his hands on the sequel, Whedon’s fingerprints are all over “The Avengers,” which echoes some tropes found in his other work in comics and television.

For one, Mark Ruffalo’s much-praised performance as Bruce Banner and his raging alter-ego the Hulk parallels Seth Green’s Oz, the werewolf character in Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Like Banner, Oz tries to run from the beast within, isolating himself in far-flung lands while he learns to master his inner monster. Ultimately, Oz learns to accept the wolf and displays Zen-like (though imperfect) mastery over his full-moon manifestations. Similarly, Banner learns to master the Hulk only by accepting and eventually embracing the anger that incites “the other guy cheap louboutins.”

“I hadn’t really connected those,” Whedon said, when asked about the Oz-Hulk parallel. “But the Oz thing for me was kind of an intellectual exercise. And for Bruce, for me, it felt like a new truth — even though it really is similar and therefore isn’t new at all — because Mark and I had spent so much time talking about the way anger manifests. And I’ve even talked about the Hulk as a werewolf. As much as he’s a superhero, he’s that type of monster.”

Fans of Whedon’s work in comics also may have noticed similarities between Tony Stark’s “sacrifice play,” saving the world from a nuclear missile at the end of the film, and Kitty Pryde‘s act of self-sacrifice when she saved the world from a giant missile-bullet in “Astonishing X-Men.”

“I was afraid you were going to mention ‘Superman,’ the first movie,” Whedon said. “I had never thought about that, since she’s more inside [the bullet], but there is a little bit of that. But the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate threat, when you mix ‘em up, usually somebody’s trying to divert a rocket louboutin shoes.”

Whedon said any parallels between his previous work and the characters and plot in “The Avengers” are unintentional.

“I’m not going to do the same thing on purpose; I’m going to do the same thing because I’m creatively bereft, and I’ve run out of ideas,” he joked. “Awkward…”

But one trademark characteristic Whedon embraces in his work is his ability to unite groups of raggedy misfits against imminent evil. Led by anti-hero Capt. Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), “Firefly’s” crew of lost space-wanderers exposed the misdoings of an interplanetary government that stepped out of line. A teenage girl and her “Scooby gang” of freaks and geeks saved Sunnydale and Earth from demons and demented gods in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” And now, in “The Avengers,” disparate superheroes worked through their egos and hangups, pulling together as a team to defend the planet against alien invaders louboutin sandals.

On one level, American films are thick in the main competition, with a roster that includes new movies by Lee Daniels, who is following his Oscar-winning drama “Precious” with “The Paperboy,” and Jeff Nichols, whose “Mud” comes after the acclaimed apocalyptic meditation “Take Shelter louboutin online.”

But some of the most eagerly anticipated American films — Walter Salles' take on Jack Kerouac's legendary “On the Road,” Andrew Dominik's Brad Pitt-starring “Killing Them Softly” (based on George V. Higgins' “Cogan's Trade”) and John Hillcoat's Prohibition era “Lawless” — were all directed by filmmakers who hail from other countries.

Speaking of elsewhere, new films are also on offer from such stalwarts as France's Jacques Audiard (“Rust & Bone”), Italy's Matteo Garrone (“Reality,” following up on “Gomorrah”), Britain's Ken Loach (“The Angels' Share”) and Austria's Michael Haneke (the Isabelle Huppert-starring “Amour”) cheap louboutins.

The honor of being the oldest director in the competition goes to 89-year-old Alain Resnais, here with the puckishly titled “You Haven't Seen Anything Yet.” Considerably younger, with films in the Un Certain Regard section, are debuting Americans Adam Leon, whose “Gimme the Loot” took the grand jury prize at this year's South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, and Benh Zeitlin, whose “Beasts of the Southern Wild” did the same at Sundance in January.

Straddling the young-old divide in a personal way are Canadian director David Cronenberg, in competition with the Robert Pattinson-starring “Cosmopolis” from the Don DeLillo novel, and his son Brandon, in Un Certain Regard with the thriller “Antiviral.”

Though the world's artier directors are always to be found at the festival, Cannes is also determined to embroil itself in the commercial side of things, which it does by scheduling the animated adventure “Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted” in an out-of-competition slot.

Then there are the numerous billboards for features that dot the city's streets and the fronts of hotels. Most noticeable this year is the way names that were considered edgy once upon a time have now become commercial enough to merit major-league spending louboutin shoes.

Billboards could be seen not only for Quentin Tarantino's “Django Unchained” but also for Harmony Korine's “Spring Breakers.” And who should look right at home in the prime real estate of the entrance to the Carlton Hotel but Sacha Baron Cohen in full Admiral General Aladeen regalia for his satirical comedy “The Dictator.” Thus pass the bad boys of the world.

Perhaps even more startling, however, is the recent announcement from Canada's Alliance Films that it would charge Canadian journalists for interview access to the stars of some of the company's films.

If this is starting to sound all too frivolous, Cannes has political antidotes all ready to go. There will be a special screening of “The Oath of Tobruk,” Bernard-Henri Levy's doc about the fall of Moammar Kadafi, with “four key figures of the Libyan revolution” in attendance.

Closer to home is “The Central Park Five,” a quietly devastating documentary co-directed by Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon, that examines how and why five innocent teenagers ended up being convicted of and imprisoned for the savage rape of a jogger in New York's Central Park in a case that became an international media sensation.

If you view film as a refuge from the cares of the real world, Cannes is ready for you as well. The ever-expanding Cannes Classics section features an impressive variety of restorations, including Alfred Hitchcock's silent “The Ring,” a 4-hour, 13-minute reconstruction of Sergio Leone's “Once Upon a Time in America” and Andrei Konchalovsky's aptly named “Runaway Train.”

Also, there are master class lectures by director Philip Kaufman (here with HBO's “Hemingway & Gellhorn” starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen) and 97-year-old Norman Lloyd, who has seen a lot (he co-founded the Mercury Theater with Welles) and remembers it all louboutin sandals.

Organisers have vowed to fight for a Lady Gaga concert to go ahead in Indonesia, despite police refusing a permit and Islamic hardliners threatening "chaos" if she comes to the Muslim-majority nation louboutin online.

Big Daddy Productions reached out on Twitter to Lady Gaga fans, known as "little monsters", saying it still hoped to find a way to hold the June 3 event after already selling more than 50,000 tickets.

"Little monsters, be patient please. We will keep you updated. We are still fighting," the company tweeted on Wednesday.

But the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) said it would create havoc if Lady Gaga were allowed to perform in Indonesia, calling her the "devil's messenger" who wears only a "bra and panties" on stage cheap louboutins.

"If Lady Gaga still wants to perform here, go ahead. But please be prepared for chaos in Jakarta. We are ready to be thrown to jail and be killed - we will do anything to stop it," FPI Jakarta chairman Habib Salim Alatas told AFP.

Big Daddy Production spokesman Arif Ramadhoni said they were discussing the issue with several parties but declined to specify which ones louboutin shoes.

"We are still in the process of finding a way to do it and we ask for everyone's patience and forgiveness for the trouble," Ramadhoni said.

The national police, responsible for issuing event permits, showed no signs of budging on Wednesday, saying they could not grant the US star permission to perform without a recommendation from Jakarta police louboutin sandals.