UFO Info Week-End

However an experiment with softer balls at Wimbledon last year – intended to slow

However, an experiment with softer balls at Wimbledon last year – intended to slow serves down and hence promote rallies – had no discernible effect.The ITF’s latest proposal follows the introduction by manufacturers last year of “extra-long” racquets, some more than 29in long, which give players extra reach and – because of their greater leverage – up to 14 per cent more power than standard models.Professional players are already using them: Michael Chang of the United States, placed fourth in the world, has been using a 29in racquet since1994, and says it has been key in raising his ranking.Bob Johnson, United Kingsom sales director of Prince Rackets – the world’s second-largest brand, after Wilson – said yesterday: “The majority of professionals who use Prince intend to use longer ones when they renew their sponsorship contracts.”The ITF was considering the rule change at its annual meeting in Switzerland this week. Many professionals can now hit serves at up to140mph, rendering them virtually unreturnable.The ITF has already legislated on the maximum area of the racquet, which began expanding with the introduction of the large-headed Prince Classic in 1976.Tournament organisers have also tinkered with the characteristics of tennis balls to try to make matches more entertaining. In the latest round of a struggle that has lasted for years, racquet manufacturers are threatening to sue the game’s administrators if a new rule is introduced to limit the speed of play. The latest volley of angry words would do justice to John McEnroe on a hot day. They follow a proposal by the rulemaking International Tennis Federation (ITF), the game’s rulemaking body, to limit the length of any racquet to 29in, rather than the present 32in, because it considers that longer racquets “pose an unacceptable risk in increasing the speed of the game in general, and would further increase the potency of the serve within the game”.
A senior executive for one manufacturer says that the ITF is “making a decision based on emotions rather than facts”.However, the ITF’s true worries are more likely to be related to the shrinking popularity of professional tennis – which has seen audience interest flag as the speed of services has accelerated over the past 20 years, as wood racquets have been replaced by those made with space- age materials and enlarged hitting areas. The world of tennis is on the verge of a brutal, bruising contest – and not just on the grass courts of Wimbledon.

They knew exactly what they were and kept them because they loved them; their market would not be shaken by the scandal, he said.But speculators, he implied, only had themselves to blame.. “There’s always been an element of speculation, but in the Eighties it fuelled a massive boom with people buying not because they loved art but because they wanted to make a quick buck. They weren’t going to look too closely at the provenances, were they?”Many of his clients, he said, had owned their Nicholsons for up to 50 years or had inherited them. Fraud is a rude and unaesthetic interjection in a world that prides itself on its appreciation of the finer things – and the easiest answer appears to be to place the blame on those who don’t “belong”.”The speculators of the Seventies and Eighties made it easier to introduce fakes,” said one expert yesterday. There will always be people who will attempt these things,” said one.He cited a recent case – “a genuine mistake” – where a work by the Scottish artist James Pride that had featured in major exhibitions of Pride’s work was spotted by an elderly artist who identified it as his own work.And he said that in the case of sculpture, where new casts could be made from moulds that were believed to be destroyed, it was almost impossible without efficient archives to tell what was fraudulent and what was not.The art world appears to be holding its breath and waiting for the latest art fraud scandal to go away. It’s a small world and you don’t want to be seen to be putting things through that aren’t right,” said one expert.But speaking off the record, dealers were more frank “There will always be things that sneak through That will happen to museums and auction houses … for instance just within the four main London houses we’re probably seeing somewhere in the region of 8,000 modern British pictures coming up for sale in a year.

The whole thing becomes quite unimaginable, so everybody clams up,” he said. “In every case I know throughout my working lifetime the response of the art market has been to say `dearie me, it wasn’t me who had anything to do with it’.”The reluctance of auction houses to admit that they may have been duped may be partly due to the five-year guarantee offered by many in their terms and conditions, under which, with certain provisos, they will refund the price of a work of art sold through them if it is found to be a fraud.And just as important as the risk of a flood of claims is that of damage to a reputation in a world that relies on it.”I wouldn’t be happy to put a Nicholson in for sale unless I was 100 per cent happy that it was right because there’s the reputation of the auction house, the department and my own reputation. Like the money markets, it is built upon confidence, so a hiccup can easily start a swift downward spiral.According to Sewell, it is in no one’s interest to admit that an extensive fraud has taken place; not the owners themselves, nor the experts, who may have been duped, and certainly not the dealers and auction houses, who may lose money.”If works were sold to the US you may well end up with a lawsuit on your hands. One “couldn’t think of a single example where an artist’s association with fraud had affected their price at auction”.But privately some dealers were advising collectors of Ben Nicholson and sculptor Alberto Giacometti that the market would dip, and that it would be worth them holding on to their works until the “whole thing had been ironed out”.The London art market is a notoriously insular world, and as the art critic Brian Sewell noted last night, in an emergency it always closes ranks.

Following revelations in the Independent that fraudsters had tampered with archives at the Tate Gallery and British Council in order to authenticate forgeries produced for sale, police feared that corrupted records could have spread into auction house catalogues.
Despite the discovery of one of Britain’s biggest contemporary art frauds, auction houses and dealers maintained that not only could it not have affected them, but that the market wouldn’t feel a thing.Leading auction houses insisted yesterday that their built-in safeguards and extensive independent authentication process rendered them virtually impervious to fraud. Privately, dealers and auction houses are admitting that prices will fall. But, faced with a contemporary art scandal stretching back six years and involving top galleries and modern masters, the art world is maintaining a visage as serene as that of the Mona Lisa. The package includes commercial and industrial energy taxes, higher road-fuel duties, higher waste-disposal taxes and a quarrying tax.. Four other EU nations have already done so.t The left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research will next week propose a radical shift to “green taxes” which, it says, could create up to 700,000 new jobs. The Liberal Democrats have been the only mainstream British party in favour of such a tax since 1990.The party wants Britain to go it alone with a carbon tax if Europe-wide agreement cannot be reached.

Such studies have shown that a carbon tax would lift gas and electricity prices by about the same percentage, but have a smaller impact on vehicle fuel prices because these are already taxed more heavily.uclear power and renewable energy sources, such as wind turbines and hydroelectricity, would not be taxed because they produce no global warming carbon dioxide.As for the existing VAT on household gas and electricity, the Liberal Democrats could propose keeping it at the existing 8 per cent or cut it to 5 per cent – the minimum allowable under European Union rules.The European Commission has been proposing a carbon tax for the last five years but has made very little progress towards implementation – largely because of strong objections from the British government. There would be special measures to help low- income households.Any damage to the economy from higher fuel prices would be more than offset by the extra growth and employment resulting from cuts in VAT or employer’s national insurance payments Several computer models have backed this view. At the moment prices are falling, so the incentives to save energy and cut pollution are reducing too. We want to reverse that.”Eventually the carbon tax could raise more than the entire pounds 14bn a year from VAT on all goods, but the party says it would take more than the lifetime of one Parliament to reach that level. Matthew Taylor, the party’s environment spokesman, said: “Our aim is to create an expectation of rising prices rather than a price shock. The tax, which will be debated at the party’s autumn conference, would be introduced gradually.