Patisserie Valerie ex-chairman in line for payout after auditor settles £200m lawsuit
Luke Johnson set to benefit as Grant Thornton settles over coffee chain’s collapse
Not because he was chairman, nor because he was an executive, nor even a shareholder. He put £10 million in at the start of the disaster. So, as a secured creditor he gets some back given the compo claim.
Secured creditor gets paid in an administration is hardly all that much of a surprise.
EY fined $100m after employees cheated on ethics exams
The Big Four accountant admitted that nearly 50 of its auditors cheated on the ethics portion of the CPA exam
An interesting little note for those who would plan everything, have rules for all parts of life. When rules become too onersous – are more than just a nudge in the right direction – then people will cheat. GOSPLAN being the grand example from the past century but we do keep getting more minor reminders as here.
The Duchess of Sussex has pledged to take her fight for equal rights to Washington DC, as she condemns the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
The Duchess has joined feminist campaigner Gloria Steinham to publicly criticise the decision as endangering women, warning of a “blueprint for reversing rights”.
Given the number of rather more famous and important Americans already doing that I’m not wholly certain that a B list cable TV actress is all that much of a catch for the campaign.
Electric cars face being fitted with tracking devices under proposals for a pay-per-mile road taxation system put forward by the Government’s own climate advisers.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) says the Government needs to find ways to cover the “significant hole” in the public finances left by the loss of fuel duty and other taxes when petrol and diesel cars are replaced by electric models.
An interesting thing here being that of course electric cars will no longer be cheaper to run….
Many claimed that Del Vecchio was motivated by preventing his six children wresting control or sullying his legacy. “I have never considered involving my children or even my grandchildren in the management of Luxottica,” he once said. “Your kids will always be your kids. You can fire an executive, but not one of your children.”
What’s shocking is the realization that we are living in a country that now boasts some of the world’s most misogynist and repressive laws.
You really do need to have a little look around the world at what abortion laws are elsewhere. That vile suppression of abortion in Dobbs was, in many ways, still more liberal access to abortion than France currently has. Given the ease – and illegality of trying to stop someone – of crossing state lines even the trigger law bans still leave the general situation more liberal than that of perhaps Poland.
Seriously, get a grip.
But what shocks me most is the fact that, according to surveys that keep surfacing and being reported, a substantial majority of Americans support abortion rights and oppose the outright ban.
And now the issue is part of politics again, so folk will vote for their state legislatures on the basis of what they want the law to be. The outcome will be – as it usually is with democractic decisions – that democratic balance of what the people want the law to be. It might be messy, time consuming and disruptive and yet this is why we actually have the system itself. Pretty crap in many ways but it is the only known method of sorting through these hugely divisive societal questions.
What’s noteworthy is not that high number so much as the discrepancy between that figure and the substance of supreme court ruling. What’s shocking is yet another fact that we have known or suspected for some time: that we are living under minority rule, that, in some of the most essential ways, the wishes of the majority no longer determine government policy, and that it has become a kind of joke to suggest that our government, at the highest level, is responding to “the will of the people”.
And that’s just being fuckwit stupid. The Supreme Court just announced that abortion is nothing to do with them, it’s a matter for the will of the people now.
Ten killed and 200 injured in Jordan toxic gas explosion
Footage on state TV shows cylinder plunging from crane on a moored ship at Aqaba, causing a violent release of a yellow gas
….
He called on residents of Aqaba to “stay in their homes and shut all windows as a precaution”, saying the chemical substance was very dangerous but not specifying what it was.
Be interesting to know. Industrial or arms?
NHS dementia care ‘was set up for white British people’
It uses a ‘totally inadequate’ system designed decades ago for a mostly white British population, an Alzheimer’s Society review says
Back at the 2011 census the British population over 80 years old was some 96% white.
There are two effects here. Mass immigration is a new thing. Plus, the immigrant – and therefore BAME – population trends younger than the white.
So, we had a dementia care system set up for the population we actually had with dementia. First time the British state has managed such a thing of course but we should celebrate where we can, no?
supported calls for “freedom of conscience” provisions to enable medical staff to object to providing legal abortion services.
Given that that’s what British law currently is, NHS employees can opt out, how evil can you be to support something like that?
From the Frank Williams obituary:
“There were one or two episodes where it’s clear it’s a serious business,” he said. “And the last episode [Never Too Old, broadcast on Remembrance Sunday, 1977] is quite moving. They all drink a toast to the Home Guard and you get this sense these funny old men would have died for their country if they had to.”
As someone once put in the comments here. Those tens of thousands of old men knew, absolutely, that if the invasion came they’d die as a result. Yet they all still turned up in church halls the country over.
In response, leaders of the G7 block of advanced economies meeting in southern Germany have been examining American proposals for what Janet Yellen, the US Treasury secretary, has termed “price caps or a price exception”. This could work via a mechanism that restricts insurance or financing of Russian oil shipments over a certain value.
So, Russia offers to insure itself, then sells on CIF terms, not FOB.
Ie, pay when it’s delivered, not when it sets sail. That solves – much of – the financing problem. This can also be done as the metals markets show. Some metals are habitually traded FOB. Others CIF. Shrug.
World is on ‘tipping point’ of permanently high prices
Inflation risks becoming embedded in leading economies and difficult to control
Sigh.
Inflation is a continued increase in prices, not a high level of them. Difference between speed and acceleration, level and changes in level.
Getting all the news written by the arts graduates might not be the bestest of ideas….
The US is a terrible place to be a poor woman: exceptional among nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in having zero national entitlement to maternity pay, it has no universal healthcare, the highest rates of maternal mortality of any wealthy nation and barely any support with the costs of childcare.
Which way does the migration flow go? Do people walk from Texas to Guatemala for a better life? Float on inner tubes to Cuba? Flee Manhattan for Mogadishu?
No, they don’t? Then the assertion is full of shit, isn’t it?
Accelerating political violence, like the attack in Buffalo, increasingly blurs the line between the mainstream political conservative movement and outright murderous insanity. The question is no longer whether there will be a civil conflict in the United States. The question is how the sides will divide, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how those strengths and weaknesses will determine the outcome.
Interesting that the violence by Antifa, BLM and so on isn’t a blurring of the lines between mainstream progressives and outright murderous insanity really, isn’t it?
According to a New York Times series, Tucker Carlson has articulated the theory of white replacement more than 400 times on his show.
And how many times has the NYT gleefully pointed out that the US is about to become a minority majority nation? Which is saying much the same thing but just using a different description of it.
David Lammy has called on Labour to “categorically” oppose a 10 per cent pay rise for airport workers, sparking a row with one of the UK’s largest unions and accusations of hypocrisy from the party’s Left wing.
The shadow foreign secretary moved to toughen Labour’s stance ahead of a “summer of discontent” over falling pay by saying he did not support strikes and “categorically” opposed strikes by BA staff, “because I’m serious about the business of being in Government”.
It’s difficult to understand the triangulation that gets him to that position….
Islamist gunman kills two at Oslo gay bar
Looking at the reporting on it. Waiting to see which way it went.
For it could have gone one way – right wing fascist gunman attacks Pride, Trump, end of civilisation etc.
Or Allahu Akhbar and that’s the reason.
The thing being, reading the varied pieces about it I could almost feel the breath being held. No one quite willing to commit either way. But definitely ready to start shouting if it did fall the one way.
For of course if it had been some Trumpian etc then the condemnation would have been immense and eternal. Now that it’s Islamist (a Norwegian of Iranian descent apparently) it’s rather more likely to get pigeonholed as one of those unfortunate things that happens.
Now all of that is simply me. That’s what I felt reading the coverage and what I was waiting for. But future coverage is going to be interesting, isn’t it? If it were some Brevik figure again then it would be a grand lesson about our civilisation. Running the way it is it isn’t going to be, is it?
Or at least there wasn’t.
Merry widows? How attitudes to bereaved women have changed
Societies around the world have always had a problem with a wife who no longer has a husband. But what does the W word mean in the modern era?
Widowhood – and widowerhood – were such common events that there was a routine and social structure for what happened next. Wait some decent enough period – 6 months to a year perhaps – then remarry. Job done.
There wasn’t a problem with this in the slightest. So it’s not actually a past problem at all, at least not in English society. It’s this past century and a bit that is the unusual part, where death tends to end marriages much later than it used to.
Labour should back proportional representation for Westminster elections to allow more cooperation between political parties on a programme of urgently needed social reform, says Andy Burnham.
1) There are too many people who would like to be a Minister for all to agree on which few should get to be ministers.
2) There’s not actually any one programme that you all agree upon.