Cooking up an idyllic holiday January 10, 2010 THERE’S no getting away from the fact that it takes a long time to get to the Cook Islands. Located between Samoa, Fiji and Tahiti, they are as remote as it gets. The flight from London is over 20 hours. However, they are a perfect stop-over to stretch your legs on the way to Australasia [...]
Stars and spas in California’s flashy south January 10, 2010 THE Southern California sunshine danced on the ocean off Newport Beach as we stepped aboard the boat where we would be eating our lunch. We opened the champagne, tucked into the picnic, and took it in turns at the helm to guide the boat, silent as a whisper around the bay. This was a brilliant [...]
No frillers win fight of skies January 7, 2010 RYANAIR blew away the competition over Christmas, flying nearly five million passengers in December – 12 per cent more than last year. And total passengers for 2009 reached the dizzy heights of 65m, jetting past the 58m recorded the previous year. The budget airline’s biggest rival EasyJet notched up a 9.3 per cent year-on-year rise [...]
Love triumphs on the road to hell January 7, 2010 Film THE ROAD Cert: 18 IT’S hard to imagine a less happy future than the one conjured up by this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In last month’s disaster flick 2012, we had the ultimate Hollywood apocalypse, in all its vapid, digitally-created stupidity. Now we have the serious, literary version of the end [...]
Liverpool to begin their climb back up the table January 7, 2010 LIVERPOOL vs TOTTENHAM SUNDAY – 4.00PM SKY SPORTS LIVERPOOL put in another lacklustre display when they were outplayed by struggling Reading in the FA Cup last weekend and things are still not right at Anfield. However, they notched back-to-back Premier League successes for the first time since September when they won at Villa Park over [...]
Business as usual in City as Britain grinds to halt January 6, 2010 FREEZING weather, heavy snow and iced-up roads may have given many Londoners the perfect excuse to avoid work yesterday but thankfully the City of London continued to function as normal with the minimum of disruptions. Insurer RSA yesterday estimated that a single day of severe weather could cost the London economy more than £145m as [...]
Goldman to pay $1bn in bonus tax January 4, 2010 GOLDMAN Sachs is likely to pay out UK bonuses in full, a decision which would force it to hand around $1bn (£620m) in taxes to the Treasury. The bank looks set to increase the size of its bonus pool to compensate for Alistair Darling’s 50 per cent bonus levy rather than punish its workers by [...]
Swift entrance for Sky new boy January 4, 2010 CYCLING: Rising star Ben Swift has been unveiled as the new rider for Team Sky in the 2010 season. Swift, 22, who rode for Russian team Katusha last year, was part of the team’s launch yesterday and is in the squad for the Tour Down Under this month. “It feels like coming home because I [...]
Brown agrees to TV debates with rivals December 21, 2009 PRIME Minister Gordon Brown will go head-to-head with opposition leaders David Cameron and Nick Clegg in a groundbreaking series of US-style televised debates. The party leaders yesterday agreed to three live discussions before the 2010 general election that will hand each of them an unprecedented set of pitfalls and opportunities. After wrangling between Labour, the [...]
WHAT THE OTHER PAPERS SAY THIS MORNING December 21, 2009 FINANCIAL TIMES BONUSES FOR LEHMAN LONDON STAFF Lehman Brothers, the collapsed Wall Street investment bank, is hiring bankers and paying generous bonuses in London to stop employees defecting. Lehman’s European business is recruiting middle and back office staff to help administrators PwC wade through the millions of transactions that must be reconciled with clients and [...]