Clannad – Harry's Game

Harry’s Game was an ITV drama about Captain Harry Brown – an SAS undercover agent – infiltrating the IRA. Harry was on a mission to find the assassin of a British Cabinet Minister in the Falls Road area of Belfast. Harry was alone: not even the army was told of his presence; his wife was fed up with him. A deadly game of cat and mouse ensued, in which many innocent lives were impacted and neither side could win. Harry befriended a local woman who fell for him, and in turn was consumed by Harry’s relentless search for the assassin. The IRA soon realised they had an informant in their midst and brought in the same assassin to hunt down Harry. The play’s ending was sad: the betrayed and by now dead Harry was lying on a dirty street as the locals just stepped over his body, ignoring it.

The series’ contained loose parallels with the real-life events of both Grenadier Guards/SAS Captain Robert Nairac, and his murder by the IRA in 1977, and the 1979 assassination of Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Airey Neave.

The series’ theme tune was performed by Clannad and was successfully released as a single, reaching the top five in both Ireland and the United Kingdom and bringing Clannad its first major international exposure.

The lyrics to the song were written to depict the story of The Troubles (Irish euphemism for a partial civil-war), among all sides in Northern Ireland, (Nationalist, Republican, Unionist and Loyalist). The lyrics, derive from an ancient Celt text, explaining how in war and in violence, no side wins – that all lose.

Enya – Shepherd Moons

Shepherd Moons is an album by Irish musician Enya, released on November 4, 1991. It won the Grammy Award for “Best New Age Album” of 1993. It was a #1 album in the UK and a Top 20 hit in the US, peaking at #17 on the Billboard 200.

A planetary ring is a ring of cosmic dust and other small particles orbiting around a planet in a flat disc-shaped region. The most notable planetary rings known in Earth’s solar system are those around Saturn, but the other three gas giants of the solar system (Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune) possess ring systems of their own.

Sometimes planetary rings will have shepherd moons, small moons that orbit near the outer edges of rings or within gaps in the rings. The gravity of shepherd moons serves to maintain a sharply defined edge to the ring; material that drifts closer to the shepherd moon’s orbit is either deflected back into the body of the ring, ejected from the system, or accreted onto the moon itself.

The Carrian Group

The Carrian Group was a Hong Kong conglomerate founded by George Tan, a Singaporean Civil Engineer working in Hong Kong as a project manager for a land development company. The Group’s principal holding company Carrian Holdings, Ltd. was founded in 1977.

In January 1980, the group, through a 75% owned subsidiary, purchased Gammon House (a commercial Office building, now Bank of America Tower) in Central District, Hong Kong for $998 million. It grabbed the limelight in April 1980 when it announced the sale of Gammon House for a staggering HK$1.68 billion, a price that surprised Hong Kong’s Property and Financial markets and developed public interest in Carrian.

In the same year, Carrian capitalized on its notoriety by acquiring a publicly listed Hong Kong company, renaming it Carrian Investments Ltd., and using it as a vehicle to raise funds from the financial markets.

The group grew rapidly in the early 1980s to include properties in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, and the United States. At its peak, the Carrian Group owned businesses in Real Estate, Finance, Shipping, Insurance (China Insurance Underwriters Ltd), Hotels, Catering and Transportation (A Taxi fleet that was the largest ever in Hong Kong).

Carrian Group became involved in a scandal with Bank Bumiputra Malaysia Berhad of Malaysia and Hong Kong-based Bumiputra Malaysia Finance. Following allegations of accounting fraud, a murder of a bank auditor, and the suicide of the firm’s adviser, the Carrian Group collapsed in 1983, the largest bankruptcy in Hong Kong.

Singapore ranked 4th most costly city

Singapore ranked 4th most costly city
PropertyGuru.com.sg – Fri, Sep 23, 2011

Singapore has been ranked as the fourth most costly destination in Savills’ World Cities Review report, with the average value of luxury homes in the country increasing 144 percent over the past five years.

“Singapore has the highest concentration of millionaire households in the world (16 percent with US$1 million plus), and the capacity to buy residential property is obviously high,” said Savills.

Home values of the super-rich in the top 10 cities worldwide climbed 10 percent in the first six months, according to the report, higher than the average price growth of six percent for ordinary properties in similar cities and lower than the 65 percent growth in ultra-prime properties over the past five years.

“We recently identified ten world class cities whose real estate markets have more in common with each other than the mainstream markets of the counties in which they operate, and they are all attracting billionaires’ dollars, whether generated at home or overseas,” said Yolande Barnes, Director of Residential Research at Savills.

In a league of its own for super prime prices, Hong Kong led the list at £6,700 psf, ahead of Tokyo and Paris at £5,190 psf and £3,290 psf respectively. In addition, prices of ultra-prime properties in Hong Kong are more than double London’s average luxury property prices and over 10 times that in Sydney, which has been ranked the cheapest location for billionaires.

“At the foot of the table, Sydney still offers great value and is extremely well located to take advantage of Asian wealth if and when its policies restricting international buying are relaxed,” said Savills, adding that the average price of Sydney’s ultra-high-value homes stood at £590 psf.

Since 2005, the price growth of ultra-high-value homes has been the highest in the emerging “new world” economies of Singapore at +144 percent, followed by Mumbai at +138 percent, Moscow at +110 percent and Hong Kong at +83 percent. This pattern reflects the geography of the new wealth generation, as well as the creation of new billionaires over that period.