Planet Business

QUOTES OF THE WEEK"You can have all this North American Gordon Gekko-style speeches from the bonds' representatives, but they're gone."  - Denis O'Brien tells the Sunday Timesthat his investment and that of the bondholders in Independent News & Media is "gone" and "wiped".

"He is an interview waiting to happen." - Elsewhere in Independent News & Media, Simon Kelner, the chief of the London Independentnewspaper titles, rejects suggestions that Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev is in talks to buy the London Independentand Independent on Sunday.

GOOD WEEK

Warren Buffett- It's what every multi-billionaire secretly craves: to be immortalised in animated form. But unlike Bill Gates, who had prime-time fun on The Simpsons, Warren Buffett will star in a web-only AOL series called the Secret Millionaire's Club. In it the "sage of Omaha" will mentor a group of children who set up a sweet shop business and warn six- to 11-year-olds of the dangers of credit cards. "The most important message, really, is that the best investment you can make is in yourself," says Buffett - which sounds like a line from Sex and the Cityto me.

The London Bridge Experience- As employment opportunities go, professional "zombie" is a little left field. But a €35,000 salary for the joy of scaring 300,000 tourists a year in the catacombs of the London Bridge Experience was too good for out-of-work Cork actor Jeremiah O'Connor to pass up this week.

The tourist site, one of many new "scare industry" attractions, selected O'Connor (26) from a pool of 200 applicants, none of whom could pull off creepy and undead quite like he could.

BAD WEEK

Screenscrapers- Ryanair began its "crusade" against unauthorised screenscraping websites that resell its flights with an extra little mark-up by lodging proceedings in the High Court against a German company, Travelviva AG.

The airline is busy writing strongly worded letters of complaint to consumer protection agencies in seven European states about the breach of its copyright - a refreshing change for consumer protection staff used to being weighed down by complaints about Ryanair, not from it.

Pirate Bay - Thirteen Hollywood production companies have made another bid to get the filesharing website shut down, after the website's founders failed to be discouraged by the imposition of a year-long jail sentence or $4.5 million (€3.2 million) in damages.

After a fresh lawsuit this week by the likes of Disney, Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde remained relaxed, telling the BBC he was "on vacation, sleeping a lot and eating great vegan food".

THE NUMBERS

40- number of places on a BA in business studies programme that UCD is offering to unemployed people, assuring them that the degree will "improve their employment prospects".

229  - number of creditors meetings held in Ireland in the second quarter of 2009, with a quarter of them relating to construction companies, according to ICC Information.