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/ 28 November 2006
The heads of the United States’s big-three car manu-facturers were granted a long-awaited audience at the White House last week to plead the case for help in overcoming chronic financial problems that have decimated jobs and led to scores of factory closures.
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/ 30 October 2006
Leading lawyers have questioned the United States’s appetite for condemning white-collar fraudsters to decades behind bars, in a debate ignited by the sentencing of Enron’s former CE Jeffrey Skilling. Skilling was due to appear before a judge in Houston to hear his fate.
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/ 24 October 2006
The golden arches have regained their sparkle. McDonald’s has been battered by tell-all books, Hollywood movies and incandescent dietary experts — but the world’s largest fast-food chain has bounced back triumphantly. The 51-year-old Chicago-based restaurant behemoth this week announced that its sales had rocketed on both sides of the Atlantic.
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/ 18 September 2006
If anything gives the world’s second-richest man sleepless nights at his home in Omaha, Nebraska, it is the certainty that a nuclear holocaust will wipe out the planet. Warren Buffett is convinced the world will end in catastrophe — the only variable in the equation is when the big bang will happen.
The boardroom titans of Silicon Valley and Wall Street have met their match in a Norwegian-born finance lecturer from a hitherto obscure business school in America’s midwestern cornbelt. Erik Lie, a professor at the Henry B Tippie College of Business in Iowa City, is credited with triggering a scandal over share options that has so far snared more than 60 companies.
A tip-off from Virgin Atlantic led to the price-fixing inquiry into British Airways (BA), it has emerged, marking a return to the hostile relations that existed between the two airlines during the ”dirty tricks” campaign of the 1990s. BA was plunged into crisis after it said that the United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading and the Justice Department in the United States are conducting a joint investigation into allegations of price-fixing.
Environmentalists have accused Virgin Atlantic of double standards over an initiative to plant trees to compensate for the carbon dioxide emissions from limousines used to drive its customers to airports. Richard Branson’s airline this week said it was ”actively exploring” options such as Carbon Neutral — a controversial programme of planting trees to offset carbon emissions.
A new battle to corner the market in cheap, off-patent medicines began this week as the United States’s Mylan Laboratories bought its rival, King Pharmaceuticals, in a -billion deal that will create the second-biggest prescription drugs company in the US. The all-paper takeover of King will create a corporation with -billion in annual revenue and 6 000 staff — including 1 400 sales representatives.
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/ 5 December 2003
An extra 10-million passengers a year will be able to pass through London’s Heathrow airport thanks to a new generation of ”super-jumbos”. The Airbus A380 is in production at sites across Europe and is due to take off in three years.
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/ 13 September 1996
Larry Elliott reports on the economic effect of shackling British trade unions THOSE of us who dislike Manchester United winning everything in football all the time should take some lessons from the way the British government has handled the unions these past 18 years. The first thing to do is insist that United are not […]