Things that made the news this week
THE NUMBERS
£1 million
- the fine handed down to the UK's Nationwide Building
Society last year after a laptop containing confidential customer
data was stolen from an employee's home. Labour Party finance
spokeswoman Joan Burton called for similar sanctions against Bank
of Ireland, which has admitted the theft of four laptops.
55 per cent
- the proportion of final salary pension schemes that are
closed to new members, say benefits experts Mercer. Their closure
creates two-tier workplaces where younger/newer workers are paid
substantially less valuable pension benefits than their
older/longer-serving colleagues. And, as it is snooze-tastic
pensions, they probably don't even know it.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"It's a strange day for the Labour government when
it is advancing billions of pounds to the banks and at the same
time it is taking billions of pounds away from the lowest-paid
taxpayers."
- Liberal Democrat shadow finance spokesman Vincent Cable can't
square the Bank of England's £50 billion bailout for the banks
with the (now abandoned) scrapping of Britain's 10 per cent tax
rate.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK II
"We found that there was one design of shirt that
chafed. We had to get rid of it because we didn't want our boys' or
girls' nipples chafed."
- Fashion designer-to-the-stars Bruce Oldfield explains to BBC
Breakfast how his first attempt to create new uniforms for
McDonald's staff may have rubbed a few people up the wrong
way.
GOOD WEEK
Public service broadcasting
Channel 4 recorded its first operating loss last
year since 1992, while the overall Channel 4 group (including
digital channels E4 and More4) saw its pretax surplus shrink to
breakeven point. So that's subsidised bubbly all round then, as the
corporation's deliberate plan to "maximise creative investment"
(spend more cash making telly) and leave the coffers empty will
come in nice and handy as it enters negotiations for more public
funding.
Wiki books
Bertelsmann is publishing a paper edition of the
German-language Wikipedia website, transforming the user-edited
free encyclopedia (or die freie enzyklopädie) into a weighty
tome of the most popular search terms costing €19.95. The
German Wikipedia has a good reputation for accuracy, but how on the
money is it about Ireland? Well, the entry says this: "Vor allem in
den Midlands geschieht relativ wenig." (In particular, very little
happens in the Midlands.)
BAD WEEK
Fred the Shred
His chairman insists there won't be any "sacrificial
lambs" in the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) boardroom. But after its
£12 billion (€15 billion) cash call - the biggest in
corporate history - furious shareholders may yet demand that RBS
chief executive Fred Goodwin lies down on the altar of corporate
sacrifice. Goodwin would probably be best off siphoning some of the
money into his own golden goodbye fund before things get really
grim and he has to take a pay cut or something.
Rice prices
The international price of rice has jumped 70 per
cent since the start of the year, hitting new highs this week as
fears mounted that Thailand, the world's largest producer, would
follow India and Vietnam in placing curbs on exports to protect
domestic supply. Rice supply concerns are intensifying the global
food crisis, which the UN dubs a "silent tsunami".
