Novak Djokovic didn’t have much time to rest after winning the Association of Tennis Professionals Tour World Finals in London on Nov. 16. The world’s number one, along with Roger Federer, Andy Murray, Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova and the other best players in the world are now in Manila playing in a glitzy brand-new exhibition tournament, International Premier Tennis League.
The numbers: Pinewood Shepperton, the British film studio where they make the James Bond movies, said revenues touched £38.5 million in the six months to the end of September, up from £36.2 million in the same period last year. The company said that revenues from its sound stages were up 15%—and that ”ongoing strong film demand has limited television occupancy opportunities in the period.” For a production company, that is a good problem to have.
Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled organism. All it consists of are microscopic batches of DNA, enzymes, and proteins. It joins up with other cells to form a giant single-celled mass, often found growing on sidewalks and by piles of decaying leaves—a sort of yellow goo. Its top speed is about 1mm an hour.
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Barcelona’s Lionel Messi is the best soccer player in the world right now, maybe the best of all time. Every year the Argentine adds another record or trophy to his name. Here are some of the records he has demolished.
A family’s status in society can persist for eight centuries or more, according to a new study by two economists using the educational status and surnames in England between 1170 and 2012. That’s 28 whole generations.
When you think of Paris, you do tend to think of 42-story glass pyramids, don’t you?
The numbers: The soccer club Manchester United said it made £8.9 million ($14 million) in net income in the three months through September, compared to a loss in the same period last year. Revenues fell 9.9% to £88.7 million as the club suffered from missing out on qualification for Europe’s elite Champion’s League competition last year for the first time since 1995-96. In particular, revenue from its TV rights deal fell 13% and revenue from attendance at matches fell 22% as a result of the lack of participation in the tournament. TV rights in soccer are big business.
The European Central Bank recently released a new version of the €10 banknote. (It’s nowhere near as nice as Norway’s new notes, but hey, what is?) The central bank for the 18 countries that use the euro decided to promote the release of the currency with a selfie competition:
Yesterday, Novak Djokovic was crowned the winner of the ATP World Tour Finals in London in anti-climatic fashion after his opponent, Roger Federer, pulled out of the tournament at the last minute with a back injury.
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The latest ”Assassin’s Creed: Unity” video game allows you, the player, to roam freely around an ancient city as part of its usual, incomprehensible plot about assassins, conspiracy, and revenge. But this time, the game is set in Paris during the French Revolution, and the game is ruffling a few feathers in France for its depiction of perhaps the defining event of modern European history.
London’s Piccadilly Circus is one of the most iconic spots in the world—almost 72 million people walk past it every year. Millions of them have their attention grabbed by Piccadilly Lights, an advertising display that has been showing off the names of some of the world’s biggest brands since Perrier illuminated the first sign in 1908. Now, the centerpiece of the lights is up for grabs for the first time in 24 years.
Earlier this week, ISIL announced it will begin issuing its own currency in the areas of Iraq and Syria that it controls, to “emancipate itself from the satanic global economic system.” The jihadists, also known as ISIS or the Islamic State, will create yet another dinar—this time, a version of the ancient Islamic dinar first introduced during the caliphate in seventh century.
French president Francois Hollande fell to a new low in the polls last week—and then, in trying to make it better, somehow made it worse. His popularity is now at a stunningly low 12% (link in French). Hollande has been under 20% consistently since last November. The economic malaise means that his tax-raising policies and his lack of dynamism are irritating the French.
In May of last year, David Moyes was appointed the manager of Manchester United, one of the world’s plum jobs in soccer. He was personally handpicked by his predecessor, Alex Ferguson, who became the most successful manager in British soccer history in his 27 years in the job. It should have been a crowning moment for Moyes, by all accounts a decent and hardworking man, but it instead became the start of a nightmare that saw him fired just 10 months later, after United’s worst home record since 1978 left the champions finishing seventh.
The 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was on Sunday. The partition between West and East Germany lasted from 1961 to 1989. Much has changed since then. But there still quite a few walls that separate people across the world standing. Many of the locals marked the end of the wall that divided Europe by going to the barriers that affect their own lives.
What to watch for today
After the end of World War II, the Allies took over the fallen city of Berlin—with the US, UK, and France administering control over what would become part of West Germany in 1949 and the USSR taking control of the East. That division was crystallized with the building of a wall dividing the former capital in 1961. In 1989, exactly 25 years ago today, the Berlin Wall finally fell.
Earlier this week, the rapper Jay Z, acquired the Armand de Brignac champagne brand for an undisclosed amount from Sovereign Brands. The champagne, made in the town of Chigny-les-Roses, comes in a gold bottle embossed with a logo from a deck of cards (hence its nickname of Ace of Spades) and sells for about $300 each.
A large bitcoin mining facility in Thailand went up in flames this week, destroying the five-megawatt operation and disrupting the crypto-currency’s entire network.
LONDON—Early in August, the Tower of London was transformed into a sea of red ceramic poppies to commemorate the centenary of World War I. The art installation is called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, and it has proven astoundingly popular: More than 4 million people are expected to visit it, and the installation has been extended through the end of the month before going on tour across the UK until 2018.
In 2012, the soccer club Borussia Dortmund won both the German championship and the DFB Cup. The next year, the team made it all the way to the final of the European Champion’s League, only to be narrowly beaten by its German rival, Bayern Munich. Munich, which has won the German title 24 times and the European Cup five times, did not take kindly to Dortmund challenging it for the right to rule German soccer—so it raided Dortmund’s cupboards and took their best fine china.
If a colleague ever asks you to cover the graveyard shift, think twice about doing them the favor.