World Briefs

A fire which swept through a 19th century ship which has long been one of London's most popular tourist attractions was sparked by a vacuum cleaner, police said yesterday.

The Cutty Sark, which is docked on the River Thames at Greenwich in south-east London, suffered around £10 million worth of damage in the blaze in May 2007.

Announcing the results of a major investigation into the blaze, police said the fire was ignited by an industrial vacuum cleaner being used in a renovation programme which was accidentally left on for two days over a weekend.

There was no evidence of arson, they added.

The 963-ton Cutty Sark was launched in 1869 and initially sailed from Britain to China in the tea trade. The ship is currently closed to the public following the fire and revamp but should reopen to the public in early 2010.

Bankers turn Philanthropists in search of a job

A wave of job cuts in the wake of the financial markets meltdown is causing hundreds of City bankers to turn to UK charities in search of work.

Charities are keen to hire the former star bankers to help them raise funds and are able to pay better salaries than in the past, said forum3, a recruitment agency.

"Charities need good quality skills, the right attitude... it is an increasingly professional sector," Deborah Hockham, a director at forum3, said.

Nearly 500 bankers looking for a job in the sector had approached the group over the past few weeks, a 30 per cent increase from the year-ago period, forum3 said.

Depending on the size of the organisation, financial directors could expect to be paid anything between £48,000 and £90,000 per year in a charity.

"You're not going to get the million pound bonuses that used to exist," Mr Hockham said. "But you're going to be relatively well-paid in an interesting environment and everything you do is going to a social end rather than to shareholder pockets."

'Mickey Mouse' Venice idea

A proposal to turn the lagoon city of Venice into a Disney-style theme park has won a prize from a famed Venetian academy, even though it rejected the idea.

The venerable Istituto Veneto described the scheme by British economist John Kay as a thought-provoking critique of the Italian city's unwieldy tourist economy.

Mr Kay won €5,000 from the nearly 200-year-old institute for writing that Venice would be better off as a theme park, complete with a €50 entrance fee.

"Only one man can save Venice: Mickey Mouse," read the headline for his article explaining the concept, published in March in British newspaper The Times. "The city is already a theme park and should be handed over to Disney - they would do a better job of running it."

Luxury homes for Moscow super-rich

The world outside may be in the thralls of crisis, with house prices plunging, markets slumping and banks collapsing; but Russia's cocooned super-rich can still spare 2.5 billion roubles (€70 million) for a Moscow townhouse apartment within strolling distance of the Kremlin.

Spurred by petrodollars and booming consumer confidence, Moscow's real estate - where sky high prices can outpace Manhattan and London - has so far avoided following the local stock market's downward spiral, which continued yesterday.

Property agency Agent 002 said an unnamed buyer had splashed out on the seven-storey 1,300-square-metre apartment near the Kursk railway station. "For Moscow, it's an absolute record," said Agent 002's spokesman Ruslan Barabash.

Mr Barabash declined to identify the purchaser, but said he was an "active businessman" aged around 40 and not one of Russia's most well-known tycoons.

Odd film vies for art prize

A messy supermarket checkout flanked by a mannequin doll on a toilet will vie with a video of a teacup and saucer smashing on the floor for Britain's Turner Prize, one of the contemporary art world's top awards.

The annual event traditionally sparks debate about what art is, and 2008 is to be no exception with one critic calling works by the four nominees "a very inscrutable bunch".

Grabbing most attention at the press preview yesterday of a Tate Britain exhibition featuring the four shortlisted artists was Belfast-born Cathy Wilkes's I Give You All My Money. The installation features two supermarket checkouts covered in dirty dishes and surrounded by a ladder, tiles, a mannequin sitting on a toilet and another with its head in a bird cage.

The Turner Prize exhibition runs from today to January 18, 2009. The winner is announced on December 1 and is awarded a £25,000 (€31,170) cheque.