World

Paris, 1 May Between two rounds of a presidential election, the city seems untypically calm. But from my observatory, two floors above the campaign headquarters of Ségolène Royal, there is a clear view of the frantic efforts underway. I have been staying in this building, with my host, a celebrated surrealist sculptor, on occasional visits for over five years. Until now its chief claim to fame has been that it was here that French Military Intelligence brought the lovely Mata Hari to be questioned in 1917 before she was taken out to be shot on trumped-up charges of espionage. But Ségolène Royal — whose campaign has been founded on the

Our indefatigable political editor Fraser Nelson will be blogging the election results as they come in. He’s also one of the analysts on tonight’s BBC election special. So check back in through the night for Fraser’s thoughts and tips.

Singapore’s property market is roaring. I know that because our lease will soon expire and our landlady wants 70 per cent more rent than she did in 2004. No matter that our flat leaks like Blair’s Cabinet and that its 1970s-wired electricity trips at least once a week: these are details too far for our poco­curante proprietrix. But she has noticed that a private banker from Tokyo has signed, sight unseen, for a same-sized unimproved flat downstairs at 150 per cent more than the vacating lessee. It’s all very puzzling: there’s no textbook rationale to the real-estate boom. The economy is growing at an unremarkable-for-Asia 6 per cent, much the

Dame Eileen Atkins is adamant that she is a horrible person. ‘My mother looked at me as if she had hatched a snake, but then I could be vile to her and to my family,’ the actress says. ‘My parents were angry people, frustrated with their lot in life, and I inherited their anger. I’ve always put my career before everyone and I have been very selfish. I think it’s a good thing I never had any children as I would almost certainly have passed on my anger to them. I’d have been a terrible mother.’ Everybody seems to love and revere Dame Eileen except, alas, Dame Eileen herself. I

When China sneezed on 27 February, the whole world caught cold. Within a few hours the Shanghai composite index plunged 8.8 per cent, its biggest one-day fall since February 1997, causing Hong Kong’s markets to shiver. The contagion quickly spread to Japan, Korea, Australia and India. Before the day was out, leading stocks in Europe and then in the United States had joined the sick list. Shanghai’s unwelcome surprise was a new development in global markets more commonly shaken by American ailments — and it has served only to raise the level of unease many investors already felt about buying Chinese stocks directly. After all, the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets

The Shah is Dead. Long live the Shah — and I don’t mean Reza Pahlavi, the 45-year-old pretender to his late father’s Peacock Throne, whom many in Washington would like to install atop this most vexatious nation. The way things are going nuclear-wise, he may have a chance. But almost three decades after Khomeini’s revolution, the monarch who matters among Tehran’s business elite is the ‘Shah of Pistachios’, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Iran’s once and perhaps future president is widely believed to be the country’s richest man: his family’s writ runs to airlines, caviar, oil, mining, automobiles, property and agriculture, which pretty much covers the entire economy. There’s supposedly billions stashed

With the endless talk about private equity these days you could be forgiven for thinking it must be the only sensible investment out there. Not so. In fact some of private equity’s biggest players (think Guy Hands) have recently been putting their money into something much more prosaic — trees. Until a few years ago, British forestry was usually seen as just another way for the market to separate fools from their money: timber prices had been in freefall for years thanks to cheap imports from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe and a fall in domestic processing capacity. They have been recovering slowly (up 13 per cent in the last three

I’d been in Park City less than 24 hours when I spotted the man himself. I was standing on Main Street talking to one of American television’s most distinguished comedy directors when Mr Sundance happened to walk past. ‘Would you like to meet him?’ asked the director. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ ‘Follow me.’ Unfortunately, as soon as we’d taken a step towards this Hollywood legend, his mobile phone rang. I was ready to give up at this point, but the director insisted we follow him down the street. Provided we kept a discreet distance, he’d be none the wiser and when he ended his call we’d be in a position to

The best passage in President Bush’s penultimate State of the Union address on Tuesday was an admission of the transience of his own administration and of the newly composed Congress he was addressing. ‘The war on terror we fight today,’ he said, ‘is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others.’ The many disappointments of the Bush presidency have already been chronicled. But the conflict into which the West was driven on 9/11 will long survive him, as it will Tony Blair’s premiership. Confronted with a new and restless Congress, the President is the lamest of lame ducks. To say