A 96-year-old woman with a history of driving fast cars might seem like an unlikely campaign weapon, but it is one that the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, has deployed to good effect. Addressing concerns yesterday that he is too old to be US president, McCain invited anyone with doubts to meet his mother, Roberta, who has shown few signs in recent years that age has slowed her down.

McCain, 71, likes to tell how his mother, who spends three months a year on holiday abroad, usually on long drives, was denied a rental car in Paris in 2006 on the grounds of age. She bought a car and drove it round France, shipped it back to the US and then drove it 3,000 miles from the east coast to the west.

Speaking in Washington yesterday at the annual meeting of the Associated Press, he said Americans should judge him on his energy, his intellect, experience and judgement, not his age. He said he had out-campaigned his Republican rivals by working between 16 and 20 hours a day.

"I am capable of doing that," he said. "I know I am doing that. If anyone has any further doubts, come and meet my 96-year-old mother."

PARIS: Nearly a year into his term, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has hardly mentioned the arts or culture. In late February, he said that French cuisine should be added to the Unesco World Heritage list.

De Gaulle had André Malraux at his elbow. François Mitterrand renovated the Louvre. Just before he left office, Jacques Chirac inaugurated an immense museum for non-Western cultures, designed by Jean Nouvel, which in its confusing, heart-of-darkness, overwrought layout, epitomizes a certain kind of French arrogance. Naturally, millions of tourists now flock to it.

Every French president since the Liberation has cooked up some such pharaonic new museum or opera house or library or initiated some legacy-minded cultural program, until now.

Sarkozy's taste is said to be for Lionel Ritchie and Céline Dion. (Mitterrand mulled over Dostoevsky; de Gaulle consumed Chateaubriand - the writer.) The current president's fondness for showbiz pals, his marriage to the Italian former model and singer Carla Bruni, and the appointment of a culture minister, Christine Albanel, who is intelligent but widely regarded as weak among Sarkozy's ministers, have combined to produce something of a culture shock.

"A rupture," is what the political scientist Pascal Perrineau calls it.

Not everyone is smitten with Carla Bruni.

A striking naked photograph of the model who became France's First Lady raised $91,000 (£46,000) for a children's hospital in Cambodia -- which promptly refused to accept the money because it disapproved of raising cash from female nudity.

Although the hospital survives from hand to mouth, its Swiss director said that he did not want to upset patients and staff, even though it might be difficult for some in the West to understand Cambodian sensibilities.

Beat Richner added that the Government in Phnom Penh might be offended if the hospital were to benefit from a perceived insult to the wife of the French President.