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 [...]
Barclays loses bond issue as Libor hits deals July 12, 2012 BARCLAYS yesterday lost its first major business since the Libor-fixing scandal began, as a Japanese bank pulled out of a bond issue worth around $1bn. The state-backed Japan Bank for International Cooperation had included Barclays among three banks advising on a five-year bond offering but left it out of the final offering. “Barclays was dropped [...]
One Abe struggles to overcome silliness as another battles against grinding cynicism June 21, 2012 FILM DARK HORSE Cert 15 *** Dark Horse takes the indie template dragged into the mainstream by films like Juno and Superbad, removes the Hollywood niceties and replaces them with a bleakly funny desperation. Abe is an overweight man-child who collects ThunderCats dolls and still lives with his parents. He’s the kind of guy nobody [...]
RAPID responses June 17, 2012 Broken spring [Re: Are shareholder revolts over executive pay a coherent response to poor performance?, Friday] The shareholder spring is another example of a public spurred on by a militant minority, and fuelled by a mixture of jealousy and ignorance. Anyone earning more than double the average wage has been branded a fat cat and [...]
All aboard: the QM2 does the Atlantic in style June 10, 2012 LEAVING the glamorous glitzy Big Apple on a big glitzy ship felt right. Berthed in the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, the sharp-prowed Queen Mary 2 looked both huge and majestic. On our taxi ride to the terminal our driver bypassed the anti-capitalist demonstrators in Wall Street, so named for the barrier the Dutch built in the [...]
City cheers U-turn on charity tax May 31, 2012 CITY leaders yesterday welcomed the government’s decision to scrap the proposed charity tax, a policy that philanthropists say would have undermined giving at a time when charities are in desperate need of new funds. Announcing the Treasury’s third budget U-turn of the past week, chancellor George Osborne said the debate over capping tax relief from [...]
The movies to look out for this Jubilee weekend May 31, 2012 FILM PROMETHEUS Cert 15 | By Steve Dinneen *** So Alien prequel Prometheus has finally landed, 30 years after Ridley Scott first directed the universe’s most terrifying life-form. That’s a lot of time to gestate, especially in a world where alien offspring take just a couple of hours to burst from your chest in a [...]