The Basel contemporary art fair this week defied forecasts of a market slowdown, with wealthy collectors buying works with seven or eight-figure price tags.. Some 284 galleries representing more than 4,000 artists are represented at the fair in the Swiss city, which for one week every year becomes the centre of the global contemporary art market.
"I need water", pleads farmer Lars Jonsson, casting a desperate eye over a parched field in eastern Denmark where the only shade is that cast by wind turbines.. I have to look at what I will be planting in my fields in the future," says Jonsson, who also grows rye and wheat in a region were grain irrigation is prohibited.
Italian haute couture house Valentino opened men's fashion week in Milan on Friday, abandoning its coed format of the past three years for men front and centre on the runway.. With the maison having long chosen Paris over Milan to show its women's and couture collections, Friday's men's show was a return to roots of the atelier founded by famed Roman couturier Valentino Garavani -- now 91 and retired -- who presented his very first men's fashion show in Milan in 1985.
France said Friday it would throw its weight behind an emissions tax on the heavily polluting shipping industry, adding momentum to a campaign long championed by Pacific island nations and environmental campaigners.. Two Pacific nations exposed to the risk of rising sea levels, the Marshall and Solomon islands, have been pushing over the last decade for a $100-per-tonne tax on maritime industry emissions which would create incentives for operators to cut their pollution.
Basketball legend Michael Jordan will sell his majority stake in the NBA's Charlotte Hornets to an investment consortium, the team announced Friday.. Jordan acquired a controlling investment in the Hornets in 2010.
World stock markets rose Friday and currencies gyrated as investors digested diverging interest-rate decisions by central banks on three continents this week.. - 'Divergence' - "This week has seen a divergence in global central bank policy," noted Victoria Scholar, head of investment at Interactive Investor.
After years of demonising billionaire investor George Soros as a sinister liberal bogeyman, the Hungarian government and its allied media are taking aim at a fresh target -- his son Alexander.. Monday's announcement that the elder Soros will hand over control of his philanthropic empire to 37-year-old Alexander, who goes by the name of Alex, prompted an object lesson in the workings of media loyal to nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
The small French island of Brehat, a popular north coast tourist destination, is restricting the number of visitors this summer after seeing as much as 15 times its population arrive at its rocky shores in a single day. . In the spring and summer, the number of visitors can peak to nearly 6,000 in a single day.
US chip giant Intel said Friday it will invest up to $4.6 billion to build a new site in Poland, creating around 2,000 jobs in the process.. Intel has said its European sites will help with cost efficiency in the EU's supply chain, and plans to produce 80 billion euros worth of chips in Europe over ten years.
France will pump hundreds of millions of euros into developing low-emission aircraft, engines and aviation fuel in the coming years, President Emmanuel Macron said Friday.. Paris would dedicate 300 million euros ($330 million) to aircraft and motor research, Macron said during a visit to jet engine maker Safran just outside the capital.
