Junk mail - Globalisation

An English princess with an Egyptian boyfriend crashes in a French tunnel driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian driver, who was high on Scottish whiskey, followed closely by Italian Papparazi,treated by an American doctor, using Brazilian medicines, dies!”

From P_____ - Hey, i didn't know Mercedes engines were made even in Holland.... and ( Here i go again, blabbering about cars..) IF that princess had fastened her seat belt, the Japanese Multiple pneumatic airbags( a toyota Invention) would have protected her form all sides. As the car was doing 90mph, ( that's 145 kph for us Indians !) she could have opened the australian anti-jam doors( these come from mazda, australia) herself and perhaps even walked away. That is how safe a mercedes is..... but only when you're on the correct side of your seat-belt.
 

The above was a mail I recently received. Being rather amused and saddened by the gross inaccuracies in it I just thought I'd clear them up.

Well, if you want to be a stickler for detail: -
Henri Paul, the driver, was definitely not Belgian (whoever dreamt of that?). He was born on 3 July 1956 in Lorient, Southern Brittany, France and his nationality was very much French.

Frederic Mailliez, the doctor who first treated her, was by no means American either. On the contrary, he is a French physician.

Bruno Riou(also not American, surprise!) is head of the intensive care unit at Pitie-Salpetriere and took charge of Diana's medical treatment.
Early reports from the hospital indicate that Princess Diana went into arrest after arrival and that doctors did not discover the internal hemorrhage of Diana's left pulmonary vein until after her chest was opened. "On her arrival at the hospital, Diana was bleeding profusely in the chest area," Riou said. Cardiac arrest quickly set in. Doctors opened the princess' chest cavity and discovered "an important wound of the left pulmonary vein," he said. The wound, the apparent source of the hemorrhage, was closed, and heart massage - external, then internal - was applied for two hours. But it failed to revive her, and she was declared dead at 4 a.m. local time."

Brazilian medicines? I don't think so.

Paprazzi is a word of Italian origin but as for the reporters and photographers themselves - Nikola Arsov, of the Sipa agency; Jacques Langevin, of the Sygma agency; Laslo Veres, a freelance, Stephane Darmon, of the Gamma agency; and Serge Arnal of the Stills agency; Romuald Rat, of Gamma, and Christian Martinez, of the Angeli agency one cannot really say the same. Six are Frenchmen and one Macedonian.

 The details of all the people involved(nine photographers and one photo-agency motorcycle driver) are :-
1) ARNAL Serge
D.O.B. 10th August 1961 in PARIS 12th district
2) ARSOV Nikola
D.O.B. 20th April 1959 in SKOPJE (Yugoslavia)
3) DARMON Stéphane
D.O.B. 27th May 1965 in PARIS 1st district
4) LANGEVIN Jacques
D.O.B. 21st September 1953 in LAVAL (MAYENNE)
5) MARTINEZ Christian
D.O.B. 15th May 1954 in PARIS 12th district
6) RAT Romuald
D.O.B. 17th September 1971 in LE RAINCY (SEINE SAINT DENIS)
7) VERES Laslo
D.O.B. 1st December 1943 in BECEJ (Yugoslavia)
8) ODEKERKEN David
D.O.B. 8th March 1971 in CRETEUIL (94)
9) CHASSERY Fabrice
D.O.B. 16th March 1967 in PARIS 12th district
10) BENAMOU Serge
D.O.B. 15th September 1953 in SAIDA (Algeria)

Technically, though Dodi al Fayed was born in Egypt, his father Mohamad al Fayed has lived in England for 20 years, and all four of al Fayed's children by his second wife are British citizens. Mohamad al Fayed himself could not achieve his goal to become a British citizen. The Fayed brothers' applications for citizenship stalled in the early '90s though they have paid millions of pounds in taxes annually.

Scotch?
Paul apparently drank his first alcohol that Saturday at a bar in the Ritz Hotel after he and Dourneau(Fayed's regular chauffeur, Philippe Dourneau) took the couple there at 4 p.m. Several hotel employees said that Paul drank a couple of glasses of Ricard pastis, a French liqueur about as potent as whiskey.
Hotel security cameras showed Paul arriving back at the Ritz at 10:08 p.m. A French newspaper quoted employees at a hotel bar saying Paul drank more pastis while waiting on Fayed and Diana, who were having dinner. Pastis was Marseille slang for anis drinks mixed with water. Pastis comes from the Italian "pasticcio", which means trouble, as in troubled water. When one mixes anis with four measures of water, the result is a opaque drink, a troubled water. Hence the name pastis.
When the anti-anis law was abolished Paul Ricard commercialized his product with the slogan: "Ricard, the true pastis from Marseille!". Paul Ricard was a travelling salesman, peddling pub articles to cafés all over France in the 30s.
Obviously then we cannot refer to Ricard pastis as Scottish whiskey.

So, what did Henri Paul have to drink the night of the accident?
Four WallBangers and seven chasers.

What, you may ask, is a  ?
It is drink that would no doubt do a Shaker proud (if only they drank) thanks to its simplicity.
First, you make a Screwdriver (1/4 to 1/3 vodka -- any plain vodka -- with the rest orange juice, stirred up and over ice).

The Harvey Wallbanger secret?
Add to that a splash of Galliano, leaving it floating on the top.

Did somebody say Scotch?
Vodka is very much Russian. Galliano is that funny yellow Italian stuff that is often made in France and always comes in a tall, weird, angular bottle. Back in the 70's, they used to make giant bottles with a metal valve in the bottom. People used to covet these things to keep their loose change in. Orange juice and ice? Well, need I say more?

The car in question was reported as having been a Mercedes-Benz 600-series sedan, which is the top-of-the-line, twelve-cylinder, S-Class model. S-280 to be precise. 
As for Princess Di being able to 'walk away', the auto companies and the various governmental safety monitoring bodies crash test cars into flat barriers, sometimes offset slightly in one direction or another. No one, designs or tests cars to withstand high-speed collisions with pillars, as was the case with the crash in question here. Wolfgang Inhester, Mercedes-Benz's vice-president of passenger car press relations, issued a statement in which he noted, "This was an accident of such a dimension that any type of safety standards within the car would not have given the passengers a real chance..."

Now for the "Japanese Multiple pneumatic airbags(a toyota Invention)"
In 1952, after witnessing the speed at which a Navy torpedo canvas could be filled by compressed air, John Hetrick was granted the first patent for what would become the predecessor to the airbag. Despite the airbag's obvious utility, it would take nearly two decades for automakers to become convinced of their importance. 
Through a series of crash tests, engineers and safety experts determined what was needed to make the airbag a successful safety feature.
In 1970, the newly founded NHSTA, alarmed by the fact that fewer than 15 percent of all Americans wore seatbelts, began to look for new ways to protect accident victims. Hetrick's airbag concept was seen by many as the ultimate passive restraint, even though manufacturing safe airbags would clearly be an enormous challenge. Engineers had to determine how big the bag should be, what materials should be used in it, and how to inflate it within 30 milliseconds after impact without blowing it apart. These challenges were met, however, and by 1980, Mercedes began offering airbags as standard equipment. Eight years later, all U.S. car manufacturers were required to follow suit.