Word: sparklies
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...sensible incubators have also had a tough time navigating the new landscape. "We made a number of absolutely terrible investments," says Michael Whitaker, ceo of Britain's NewMedia Spark, which last December wrote down the value of its investment portfolio by about $65 million. "We just got carried along by the general euphoria." The lesson? "Investment is about people," he says. "I think I knew that, but I just forgot it for a minute...
...immediate spark to the slaughter can be identified: a murder in Kereng Pangi, a small village near Sampit. A group of Madurese allegedly tortured and then killed a young Dayak in December after a gambling dispute. The murderers, Dayak community leaders say, bribed police and escaped to Madura...
...Muriel Spark weaves her 21st work of fiction, Aiding and Abetting (Doubleday; 166 pages; $21), around a matter of fact: the 1974 disappearance of the seventh Earl of Lucan, who was subsequently charged with bludgeoning his children's nanny to death in a botched attempt to murder his estranged wife. Questions about this scandal have echoed in the British press ever since. Was Lord Lucan guilty? Is he still alive? If so, who helped him escape, and who has been aiding and abetting the fugitive's life in hiding ever since...
Given such unsavory protagonists, Aiding and Abetting doesn't generate an abundance of rooting interest in its outcome. But Spark, 83, has lost none of her skill and verve in portraying flamboyantly wicked people behaving according to "a morality devoid of ethics or civil law." Like Evelyn Waugh, she employs her characters' untroubled consciences as an implicit sign of their irredeemable awfulness. And this engaging game of rat and louse concludes with a bit of poetic justice that is ghastly and richly appropriate. --By Paul Gray
...Presevo, but by taking their campaign to Macedonia, the nationalist guerrillas may have crossed a NATO red line. Macedonia was the only former Yugoslav republic to break away without bloodshed in the early 1990s, and Western observers have long been concerned that the conflicts in the surrounding republics could spark a disastrous showdown between Macedonia's 30 percent Albanian population and the Slavic majority - even more so since the Kosovo war increased tensions between the two communities. Still, Macedonia is not Kosovo: Albanians participate fully in political life and in the current government, and the insurgency inside Macedonia by Albanians...