Norris wins Incredible Monaco Grand Prix

McLaren’s Lando Norris won the Monaco Grand Prix for the time controlling the race from start to finish. Norris craftly navigated the potential pitfalls of a new rule requiring driver to us three sets of tyres during the race to lead throughout and beat Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc for the Briton’s second victory of the season.  McLaren’s Oscar Piastri took third , with Red Bull’s Max Verstappen  fourth and Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari in the fifth. Norris negotiated both pit-stop periods, starting on medium tyre followed by two stints on the hard, splitting the race more or less into thirds. Verstappen went into the … Continue reading Norris wins Incredible Monaco Grand Prix

Sebastião Salgado, photo-journalist dies at 81

Brazilian-born, Sebastião Salgado, one of the world’s greatest documentary photo-journalist has died at the age of 81. His amazing vivd black and white images of hardship, conflict and natural beauty, captured in 130 countries over 55 years, chronicling major global events such as the Rwanda genocide in 1994, burning oilfields at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, and the famine in Sahel region of Africa in 1984. Instituo Terra, the environmental organisation he founded with his wife Leila Wanick Salgado, said in a statement “ His lens revealed the world and its contradictions, his life, the power of transformative … Continue reading Sebastião Salgado, photo-journalist dies at 81

Britain hands Chago Islands to Mauritius to address historical grievances

UK signs  £101 million-a-year deal to hand over Chagos Island, a Joint UK-US military base in the archipelago , Diego Garcia, to Mauritius. The British government felt that without ceding sovereignty to Mauritius, the operation of the base would become unworkable which would pose a great threat to UK security. Defence Secretary John Healey told MPs that “without this deal, within weeks, we could face losing legal rulings and within a few years the base would become inoperable”. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said “following a comprehensive interagency review, the Trump Administration determined that this agreement secures the long-term, stable … Continue reading Britain hands Chago Islands to Mauritius to address historical grievances

Joy and alienation between generations and classes

Lydia Millet, with a masters degree in environmental policy, staff writer for non-profit Center for Biological Diversity since 1999, in Atavists: Stories, paint a fast-moving, heart breaking collection of linked stories that evokes the joy and alienation between generations and classes in the era of mass overwhelm. Atavists follows a group of families, couples and loners in their collisions, confessions and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big box stores, gastropubs, college campuses and medieval role-playing festivals. The various “-ists” who people these linked stories- from futurists to insurrectionists  to cosmetologists – … Continue reading Joy and alienation between generations and classes

Hope and despair

The emotional story of an intense friendship between the narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A Leopard-Skin Hat may be the French writer Anne Serre’s most moving novel. Anne Serre is a Prix Goncourt winner who has published 17 novels in French, as postmodern sensuous fairy tale. A feminist fantasy, where women satisfy their sexual needs free from society’s ignominy. The first to be translated into English by Mark Hutchinson, 1992’s The Governesses. Hailed in Le Point as a ‘masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance, with a series of short scenes painting the … Continue reading Hope and despair

Strange and Dangerous

Piranesi is a spectacular novel by Susanna Clarke, winner of the Women’s Prize 2021, set in parallel universe made up of hundreds of halls and vestibules lined with statues each on different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid: He understands the tides as he understands the pattern of labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. The vestibules which triggers gradual memory loss and identity in newcomers. The upper level of the house is filled with clouds lower … Continue reading Strange and Dangerous

Verstappen’s spectacular drive wins F1 in Imola

Max Verstappen’s spectacular move to take the lead from McLaren’s Oscar Piastri at the first corner, and then by the pace to win the F1 Grand Prix at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix in Imola. Verstappen never looked like losing the race once he was in the lead, true to Red Bull’s advert “Red Bull gives you wings”. McLaren were left to rue some of what Piastri described as “wrong calls” during the race. The decision to pit early for fresh tyres cost Piastri in the context of the way of the race unfolded, with first a virtual safety car … Continue reading Verstappen’s spectacular drive wins F1 in Imola

Apprenticeship dominated training and skill in early modern Europe

Apprenticeship dominated training and skill formation in early modern Europe. Years spent learning from a skilled master were a nearly universal experience for young workers in crafts and trade. In England, when apprenticeship reached its peak, as many as a third of all male teenagers would serve and learn as apprentices. In the Market for Skill, Patrick Wallis, professor of economic history at the London School of Economics, shows how apprenticeship helped reshape the English economy. He shows non-agricultural work in England was “anything but hereditary between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries”. Some historians see apprenticeship as a key ingredient … Continue reading Apprenticeship dominated training and skill in early modern Europe

The act of Atonement

Master storyteller, and author of more than 60 bestsellers, Stephen King’s rumours of retirement due to literary exhaustion, is unfounded as his shift of genre from horror to crime after recharging his creative batteries. Never Flinch is about a killer on a diabolical revenge mission, and another about a vigilante targeting a feminist celebrity speaker – featuring the beloved Holly Gibney. When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to “kill thirteen innocents and one guilty” in act of atonement of the needless death of an innocent man”. Detective Izzy Jaynes has no idea … Continue reading The act of Atonement

Updating modern corporate finance

“Stagflation” of the 1970s – the improbable combination of high unemployment and runaway inflation-  proved painful and protracted, but explains the U.S. stock market’s remarkable forty-year run of 12 per cent average annual returns since then. Why is Japan still mired in a decades-long recession- and the Chinese economy in a tailspin? What account for the resilience of U.S. stock and labour markets in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and in the face of the Fed’ record interest rate hikes? Donald H Chew, editor of the journal of Applied Corporate Finance, traces the revival moment of America’s corporate and stock … Continue reading Updating modern corporate finance