Taobao, China's largest online retailer, is offering thousands of products made from the skins of domestic pets. One item on offer by a seller is a waistcoat made from cat skin.
He had only sold one of it and nothing else, according to Shanghai Daily.The China Small Animal Protection Association volunteers try to protect the animals, but the job is hard without government help.
Taobao insists the sale of products made from domestic pets and endangered species is banned. Enforcement of the rules is, ahem, spotty.
Angry? Punch a panda
The endangered species laws of most countries prohibit poaching and trapping for collection in a zoo. What about punching a panda?
Nate Hill, a performance artist in New York, thinks it's OK. Hill wears a bodysuit, white panda paw gloves and a panda-like head the side of a huge pumpkin on the streets of Manhattan and encourages people to strike him.
The Punch Me Panda act is a "community service", Hill says. "I knew people want to punch things because I want to punch things."
17 ridgebacks born in Berlin
We know of at least one Rhodesian ridgeback in Abu Dhabi, a wonderfully friendly dog named Ginger. She'll be happy to know that a cousin, several times removed, has given birth recently, to 17.
Ramona Wegemann, in the German town of Ebereschenhof, a 45-minute drive north-west of Berlin, says she was completely tired out trying to feed the 17 whelps.
Wegemann worked hard: all eight females and nine males survived. The pups are now 10 weeks old and presumably ready for a new owner.
We counted only 6,900
Perhaps it's not unusual that designers of the Philippines' most recent peso notes left off a few islands. There are so many!
But everyone's a critic these days, especially armchair cartographers. The president, Benigno Aquino, says the new notes are not being recalled and, frankly, if he wanted to find something in the Philippines he'd use a map. Besides, the artists had artistic licence.
But what kind of licence? The beak of the rare blue-naped parrot on the 500-peso bill is supposed to be red, not yellow.
The lost head of King Henri
Private collectors in France had, since the late 18th century, passed down an odd bit of French history: the head of King Henri IV.
The embalmed head had lain attached to the rest of the old king in its grave in a basilica near Paris since his assassination in 1610. But in 1793, the head was separated and went missing. (And you thought it was only Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette who'd lost their heads in the French Revolution.) Now scientists say identifying marks - a nose lesion, a healed stab wound and a pierced right ear - prove it's Henri's.
What's the buzz?
The results of a science project by eight-year-old pupils from an elementary school in England have been peer-reviewed and published in Biology Letters, published by the Royal Society. The children wanted to learn about insect colour and pattern vision, so they watched bumblebees in their local churchyard. Commentary on their results said the experiments were modest and lacked statistical analyses but held their own compared with those conducted by trained specialists.
rbeauchemin@thenational.ae
Europe’s rearming plan
- Suspend strict budget rules to allow member countries to step up defence spending
- Create new "instrument" providing €150 billion of loans to member countries for defence investment
- Use the existing EU budget to direct more funds towards defence-related investment
- Engage the bloc's European Investment Bank to drop limits on lending to defence firms
- Create a savings and investments union to help companies access capital
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
So what is Spicy Chickenjoy?
Just as McDonald’s has the Big Mac, Jollibee has Spicy Chickenjoy – a piece of fried chicken that’s crispy and spicy on the outside and comes with a side of spaghetti, all covered in tomato sauce and topped with sausage slices and ground beef. It sounds like a recipe that a child would come up with, but perhaps that’s the point – a flavourbomb combination of cheap comfort foods. Chickenjoy is Jollibee’s best-selling product in every country in which it has a presence.