Visit Malaysia for the birds, the bees and the leeches October 7, 2012 MY HERO swoops down in the nick of time. I’m perched atop a bare rock, too petrified to move when she flies to my rescue. Barely seven inches tall, the blue-winged pitta flits to the ground and within moments, her beak is filled with what look like needle-thin worms. I’ve never been happier to see [...]
Yacht owners threatened by rise of piracy September 19, 2012 THERE’S no escape for the ultra-rich following reports that their superyachts are the new favoured target for pirates off the coast of Africa. While most people’s main holiday concern is remembering to pack the suncream, maritime security firm MAST says the number of enquiries it has received from private individuals has risen by 80 per [...]
City Moves | Who’s switching jobs September 18, 2012 Barclays Tom Wood has been appointed head of professional services at the banking group. He joined Barclays in 2007 as a relationship director, and most recently spent three and half years as corporate director and deputy head of its professional services team. Wood has also held roles at RBS. Jupiter Asset Management Andrew Clark has [...]
Sunderland Liverpool September 13, 2012 IT has been an incredibly emotional week for everyone involved with Liverpool Football Club and if ever a team is likely to be fired up for a game, it is the Reds against Sunderland in tomorrow’s early evening kick-off. Brendan Rodgers, similarly to Villas-Boas, will be very disappointed with the start his team has made [...]
Even dead cats can bounce back to life August 20, 2012 WHEN things go disastrously wrong, the market is always ready to obliterate a stock. It could be because of mistakes made in a company’s operations, as in the case of Carnival earlier this year when one of its liners ran aground off Italy’s west coast. It could be like Facebook’s IPO, where the price rose [...]
The Manchester medal factory: Be grateful for this strange cluster of genius August 16, 2012 THE Manchester velodrome is a medal factory. It won as many golds in this summer’s Olympics as the whole of Australia. As well as a cause for national celebration, that’s a problem. Because the truth is, we don’t know enough about why. Genius clusters. Renaissance Florence. Elizabethan London. The Scottish Enlightenment. Extraordinary individual achievements, sporting [...]
Give the mod a home: Wiggo’s canine honour August 2, 2012 SPORTING immortality, lucrative endorsement deals, invites to swanky parties where the drinks are free – some things go with the territory of becoming an Olympic champion. But Britain’s first gold medallists of London 2012, cycling messiah Bradley Wiggins and rowing wunderkinds Helen Glover and Heather Stanning, have also been honoured in less conventional fashion. In [...]
I Against I is a formulaic, humourless crime flop August 2, 2012 FILM I AGAINST I Cert 15 | By Steve Dinneen ** THE British crime drama hasn’t fared very well since the glory days of The Long Good Friday; all Danny Dyer romps and hackneyed mockney geezers. I Against I does little to redress the balance. Co-directors Mark Cripps, David Ellison and James Marquand set out [...]
No fear of dead cat bounces here July 15, 2012 EARLY risers were greeted yesterday by a bungee ballet over the Thames. At 7.30am, 16 performers leapt from the Millennium Bridge to touch the water before flying back up. Inspired by a Latin American rite of passage, this hair-raising spectacle was the opening act in a whole day of gravity-defying action commissioned by the Mayor [...]
High-frequency trading is not the devil behind every market mishap July 15, 2012 TO SAY that high-frequency trading (HFT) is blamed for every big financial mishap is to exaggerate – but only slightly. Regardless of the hard evidence from academics, exchanges and regulators about the positive impact of HFT, the critics continue to dominate headlines. It’s not hard to see why. Innovation in any industry has always attracted [...]