"Le Pretre Marie," by surrealist Rene Magritte, sold last month at Christie's auction house in London for about $10 million, far above the estimates.
For London's New Super-Rich, No Whim Need Go Unfulfilled
By Mary Jordan and Karla Adam
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 8, 2007; Page A01
LONDON -- They call themselves "the haves and the have yachts": rich London bankers and traders who drop tens of thousands of dollars for an evening of cocktails and hire "personal concierges" to get their girlfriends dresses like those worn by movie stars.
Long a hub for the world's ultra-rich, London has just welcomed an unprecedented number of newcomers into those ranks. Analysts here estimate that London's financial stars were paid a total of $17 billion in annual bonuses in recent weeks -- including more than 4,200 people who received bonuses of at least $2 million each, on top of salaries already sagging under the weight of zeros.
"There is a great deal of money sloshing about," said Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, noting that 15 years of uninterrupted growth in one of the world's most open economies has set London's financial sector swaggering.
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Quintessentially has handled requests for an elephant-shaped cake studded with rubies and emeralds, and a parachute trip over Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border in southern Africa. Simpson explained it this way: "The adrenaline rush you get from making a 10 million-pound bonus is the same as falling off a cliff at 3,000 feet."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/07/AR2007030702643.html?referrer=emailCities have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950, and are currently adding a million babies and migrants each week. Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos today are each approximately forty times larger than they were in 1950. According to the Financial Times, China in the 1980s alone added more city dwellers than did all of Europe (including Russia) during the entire nineteenth century.
In this process of rampant urbanization, the planet has become marked by the runaway growth of slums, characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure. UN researchers estimate that there were at least 921 million slum dwellers in 2001 and more than 1 billion in 2005, with slum populations growing by a staggering 25 million per year.
Today, new arrivals to the urban margin confront a condition that can only be described as marginality within marginality, or, in the more piquant phrase of a desperate Baghdad slum dweller quoted by The New York Times, a "semi-death." An International Labor Organization researcher has estimated that the formal housing markets in the Third World rarely supply more than 20 percent of new housing stock; out of necessity, people turn to self-built shanties, informal rentals, pirate subdivisions, or the sidewalks. These are moves of sheer survival. And because the geographic location of slums is becoming more and more marginal, the destructive power of natural elements leaves today's slum residents in an ever more vulnerable state.
http://www.orionsociety.org/pages/om/06-2om/Davis.html