Rewritten story booty great story

Patrick Hosking: On the income & , : {}

One of the reasons investors similar to dividends so majority is that they think they cant be fudged. Every alternative series in the annual accounts can be massaged and manipulated, dolled up or played down, detailed or dark away, but not the tangible series in tough income paid out to shareholders each year.

Dividends assistance to keep directors straight. They need companies to come up with tangible income and they strive a utilitarian fortify on managements fervent to steal income or outlay it but less penetrating on distributing it to the owners.

A exam of any association arch is their believe of the division record. Its extraordinary how couple of can discuss it you when the divi was last cut. Some demonstrate deceptive warn that any one should caring unequivocally majority a great sell signal, that one.

Dividends comment for the immeasurable infancy of sum lapse from shares. That footling 2 or 3 per cent produce might not appear majority in the center of a longhorn marketplace when collateral values are rocketing. But in the long-term majority equity gains are down to dividends.

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So it should have been calming to listen to John Peace, authority of Standard Chartered, one of Britains greatest companies, acknowledgement this week that the banks sum division for 2009 was up by a important 7 per cent to 66.03 cents per share.

The bank, one of Britains greatest companies, is you do easily in Asia, the Middle East and Africa and investors intelligent sufficient to hold the shares were being rewarded thus with a decent income per share rise.

Except they werent. Ask any tangible Standard Chartered shareholder what they perceived in dividends per share in 2008 and the answer is 67.99 cents. In alternative difference the 2009 division was down. Down on 2008, down on 2007, down on 2006.

Standard Chartereds reason for this is that it is adjusting for the ignored rights issue in late 2008, when at the tallness of the promissory note predicament it lifted 1.8 billion to swell the collateral pillow by arising new shares.

If you subscribed at the time with new money, afterwards your sum division income would, it is true, be up by 7 per cent. But if you didnt, it wouldnt. And anyway, this doesnt change the actuality that the division per share was down, however you conclude it. Standard Chartered repeats the explain in the records to the accounts, where in the division territory it gives an practiced per share series for 2008 with no acknowledgment that it was not essentially the volume paid to shareholders.

To regulate a little association numbers for a rights issue is unconditionally legitimate. To regulate the division per share number, however, is plain daft.

Standard Chartereds reason is this. We havent restated the sum income division paid. In conditions of comprehensive financial worth the sum 2009 income division paid is up year-on-year. Weve restated the 2008 division per share (as the series of shares increasing after the rights issue) to concede us to review the 2009 DPS metric on an apples to apples basement vs prior years. It adds it has had no complaints from shareholders and has supposing an reason in prior documents.

By Standard Chartereds extraordinary reasoning, no association need ever cut the division again. It simply needs to daub shareholders for new income each year and regulate downwards the prior-year division to comment for the additional shares and bingo incessant division growth.

Standard Chartered should not be rewriting the own story in this way, even if the auditor KPMG and a eccentric accounting customary concede it to. And it should positively be alerting investors to the composition if it unequivocally feels it must.

Its all so unnecessary. The bank has a ideally great story to tell: a British association hardly unprotected to the UK economys woes and creation clever swell in a little of the majority sparkling regions of the world. In conditions of sum shareholder lapse it is miles forward of the competition.

Dividends are as well changed and as well singular to be mucked about in this way. As Mark Loveday, authority of Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust, forked out yesterday, last year was the misfortune year for dividends in both the UK and the US given the 1930s.

Shareholders perplexing to have clarity of ever some-more formidable association accounts have one less plain stone to adhere to. Be warned. Dividends, too, can be fudged.

Supersize hospitals: how apparatus has to be practiced to hoop the obese

By Heidi Blake 930AM GMT twenty-four March 2010

Hospitals have to regulate chairs, beds, ambulances and apparatus to cope with portly patients Photo PA

Doctors and nurses find it unfit to hoop severely portly patients utilizing customary healing equipment.

Ordinary beds and chairs are not clever sufficient to hold them, surgical apparatus is not prolonged sufficient to reach by the layers of their fat and one radiologist described x-raying an portly studious as "like resplendent a flame by fog".

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Here are a little of the adjustments hospitals are forced to have in sequence to cope with severely overweight patients.

Surgical equipment

Instruments such as scissors, graspers for holding tissue out of the approach and needle-holders for suturing are not prolonged sufficient for keyhole surgery on a little portly patients. Such instruments cost around 700 each in the customary distance of 12in, but manufacturers are right away producing 18in versions for up to 900 each.

Beds

Standard hydraulic foot-operated sanatorium beds, that can lift weights of up to twenty-five mill are not clever sufficient to hold most portly patients. Electronic recumbent beds that can take weights of 39 mill are being granted as the new customary to house the severely overweight.

Extra genius is infrequently still required, and a little trusts right away have use of beds with constituent beam that can take up to 70st at a cost of roughly 9,000 each.

Operating tables are additionally being reinforced to take weights of up to 47 stone.

Chairs

Standard wheelchairs are seventeen inches (43cm) wide, but hospitals are being forced to deliver incomparable ones 30in far-reaching with a genius of 60st to house the sincerely obese. These incomparable chairs cost 1,500 compared with 300 to 400 for the customary size.

Some hospitals are provision wider bedside chairs with a higher weight genius to house portly friends and kin of patients. Vinyl immobile chairs that can hold up to 60 mill in weight cost 400 each.

Ambulances

The Welsh Ambulance use has introduced extra-wide ambulances, each propitious with a reinforced bracket and a winch for light portly patients in to the vehicle.

Scans and X-rays

X-raying the portly is "like resplendent a flame by fog" according to one radiologist, since of the additional layers of fat by that the waves have to pass. Technology companies are conceptualizing alternatives that can "see through" fat such as the Philips C5-1 PureWave transducer, that costs 10,000.

CT and MRI scanners are being lengthened in tallness and breadth to to forestall the portly apropos wedged inside the not as big customary scanners.

Hoists and slings

Standard mobile floor-based hoists, that can take up to 47st, are tough to move with an portly patient. More beyond gantry systems, that slip on a beam, are thus being introduced to have it probable to move a really complicated studious from bed to chair.

World Twenty20: Sachin Tendulkar manners out India inclusion

Bystaff 1048AM GMT twenty-four March 2010

Pulled up Sachin Tendulkar has ruled himself out of World Twenty20 Photo AP

India batting fable Sunil Gavaskar had appealed for Tendulkar, who has been in extensive form for the Mumbai Indians with 176 runs in 4 matches in the ongoing IPL, to be accessible for subsequent month"s eventuality in the Caribbean.

However, the record-breaking batsman has alternative ideas.

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"I will not be personification the ICC World T20. I have not played T20 internationals from 2007 onwards and I do not think it should turn an issue now," he said.

The India patrol for the World Twenty20 will be voiced on Friday.

Tendulkar, 36, won the diversion opposite the Kolkata Knight Riders on Monday roughly single-handedly with an dominant 71 for Mumbai in the seven-wicket victory.

India"s former opening batsman Navjot Singh Siddhu had additionally urged Tendulkar to be accessible for the World Twenty20, observant the player is still great sufficient in any format of the game.

"Sachin is a cricketer who can conform to any incident and measure at any level," he said. "He is similar to a small child whose unrestrained for cricket refuses to die."

Rise in UK CO emissions doubtful by inform Environment The Observer

A inhabitant UK dirt consult has found no net CO loss. Photograph: Graham Turner

A vital investigate for the UK supervision has expel disbelief over claims that rising temperatures are causing dirt to siphon larger amounts of CO dioxide in to the atmosphere, serve fuelling tellurian warming.

In 2005 it was reported in the scholarship biography Nature that over the past twenty-five years 100m tonnes of CO dioxide had been expelled by the dirt of England and Wales. The figure cancelled out all emissions cuts in the UK given 1990.

However, a inhabitant consult of the soils of Great Britain, saved by the dialect for sourroundings food and farming affairs, claims to have found no net loss of CO over we estimate the same period.

Scientists have right away due that a special investigate group, with an eccentric statistical expert, should inspect since the reports talk about and that outcome is some-more expected to be correct.

The ultimate questions follow weeks of claims that predictions about the impacts of meridian shift have been farfetched or miscalculated, together with the melting of Himalayan glaciers, and apart allegations of disposition formed on leaked emails from scientists at the meridian investigate section at the University of East Anglia.

The writer of the ultimate report, Professor Bridget Emmett of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), warned that anticipating there had been no loss of CO so far should not be taken to meant the deficiency of a threat. In the prolonged term, scientists envision a "tipping point" when the faster wake up of microbes in warmer soils starts to beget some-more CO2 than can be engrossed by plants.

"That"s when you begin losing CO as a whole," pronounced Emmett. "Most of the models contend that will be after this century."

The 2005 inform in Nature was formed on the National Soil Inventory, carried out primarily in in in in between 1978 and 1983, and again from 1994 to 2003, by the National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield University. That investigate pronounced that from 1978 to 2003 there had been an estimated loss of 4m tonnes of CO a year from the soils of England and Wales, and the researchers estimated that, since of the higher CO calm of Scotland"s peaty soils, the annual loss from the UK as a total was 13m tonnes a year. The actuality that the waste occurred opposite all sorts of land make make use of of referred to a couple to meridian change, pronounced the team.

At that time, one of the investigate team, Professor Guy Kirk of Cranfield University, told a conference: "It had been reckoned that the CO2 fertilisation outcome was offsetting about 25% of the approach human-induced CO dioxide emissions. It was reckoned that the dirt heat glimmer outcome would catch up in may be 10 to 50 years" time. We are display that it seems to be function rather faster than that."

The ultimate inform by the CEH, usually expelled as piece of the ongoing research of the 2007 Countryside Survey of Great Britain, compared studies in in in in between 1978 and 2007. It found CO thoroughness in the tip 15cm of dirt increasing over the initial dual decades, and decreased in in in in between 1998 and 2007. The usually disproportion was cultivatable land, where there was a net loss of carbon, probably since of intrusion by ploughing.

"Overall there was no shift in CO thoroughness ... and [we] cannot endorse the loss reported by the National Soil Inventory," states the report.

Kirk told the Guardian that the Cranfield group were still "confident in the formula [that] there was a net loss of carbon". But he pronounced successive studies had referred to that "at best" 10% of the loss of CO was due to meridian change, and the rest was due to changes in land make make use of of and management, such as acclimatisation of grassland to crops.

Reasons being carefully thought about for the disproportion in formula embody where and how samples were selected and analysed and how the interpretation was compiled.

"The volume of CO in topsoils opposite England and Wales is about 2bn tonnes, so detecting a shift of even 4m tonnes per year is really challenging," pronounced Emmett. "Small differences in methods in in in in between the dual surveys can thus have a large effect."

NHS patients losing out as life-saving drug are sole abroad Society The Observer

A pharmaceuticals wrapping line at Roche, Switzerland. Photograph: EPA

Life-saving medicines meant usually for sale in the UK are being sole for traffic at outrageous mark-ups, causing an strident necessity of drug that is putting patients" lives at risk, the Observer has established.

A "shopping list" from would-be buyers sent to UK pharmacies and wholesalers and seen by the Observer reveals they are being speedy to sell on a little medicines for up to 30% some-more than they would get from the NHS.

Pharmacies are being gift £930 for a march of Humira, a disinfectant for rheumatoid arthritis that they routinely buy for £715, giving them an present distinction of 30%. Those concerned in the traffic – believed to be a handful of brute pharmacies and wholesalers – are gift £76.50 for a month"s march of Femara, a drug used to provide breast cancer patients, that UK pharmacies can buy for £60.85, earning them a 25% profit.

A pre-filled syringe of Aranesp, used to provide ongoing renal failure, can be sole on for a 21% mark-up. The burgeoning traffic can be attributed to the slip in the value of argent opposite the euro, that has meant UK drug prices are right away a little of the cheapest in Europe.

But last night MPs branded the make use of as reprobate and warned that those concerned could be committing a rapist act. Mike O"Brien, the health minister, said: "So far, we have had no reports of any deaths, but we don"t wish to get there simply since a couple of unethical traders are offered drug for distinction in to Europe, and as a outcome are causing a little localised shortages."

According to the Department of Health"s curative services negotiating committee, 41 medicines together with Zyprexa, that is used to provide people with schizophrenia, Actonel, for osteoporosis sufferers, and Cipralex, an antidepressant, are in short supply in a little areas of the country.

A Hertfordshire lady being treated with colour for breast cancer, who wished not to be named, was told by her internal pharmacy at Sainsbury"s that it was out of batch of Femara. "In the end, they were means to whistle up 7 tablets but that was all," she said. "I don"t know what any lady after me would have done." She was in a state of be scared when told the pharmacy was out of the drug. "I thought, cling to on a minute, if I miss a inscription for the subsequent day or two, those brute cells are going to begin multiplying."

Olivia Marks-Woldman, head of process and campaigns at Breast Cancer Care, pronounced the gift was wakeful that people were struggling to acquire the drug after multiform patients phoned the helpline.

"A diagnosis of breast cancer brings a formidable range of romantic and unsentimental concerns, and being incompetent to entrance required drug can usually means additional stress at an already formidable time," she said.

O"Brien warned those concerned in the traffic to desist. "We can"t concede speculators to criticise the NHS. There is a authorised requisite for pharmacists and others to put their patients first. If they destroy to do that, they can be struck off."

Concerns about the necessity of drug and vaccines stirred the supervision last week to hold an puncture limit with traffic bodies. It was concluded that pharmacies and wholesalers believed to be intent in the make use of will be theme to pointless inspections.

Privately, a little pharmacies censure drug manufacturers for not putting enough medicines in to the UK, a explain denied by the curative giants.

They contend there is enough supply, but most is being exported true to the continent. Some companies supply the drug approach to the pharmacies rather than make use of wholesalers, but there are claims this has led to placement problems.

John Turk, arch senior manager of the National Pharmacy Association, said: "The immeasurable infancy of pharmacists have zero to do with disinfectant exports. Pharmacists are putting in substantial additional work each day sourcing medicines for their patients, who competence differently humour days of worry."

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, pronounced pharmacists had told him the industry was spending 1.7m hours a year perplexing to acquire drug not straightforwardly available. "That"s an impassioned rubbish of time and money," Lamb said. Many pharmacists have to ask puncture supplies.

Industry total performed by the Observer show that there was a 1,156% enlarge in puncture deliveries of drug in between Jan and May 2009, compared with same duration in 2008.

Internal industry investigate suggests 11% of the UK"s 12,600 pharmacies and a small series of dispensing doctors are exploiting the complement by ludicrous medicines meant for British patients.

The traffic is estimated to be right away value a little £30m a month. Last June, Keith Ridge, the arch pharmacist for England, wrote to NHS sanatorium arch pharmacists notice them about the unlawful trade.

Pearson online surge counters imitation decline

Catherine Boyle & , : {}

Pearson, the owners of the Financial Times, pronounced this sunrise that the sales rose by 4 per cent last year as internet revenues soared and the tutorial multiplication achieved improved than expected.

The strength of the US dollar opposite argent additionally helped to progress revenues, with an stroke of about 1.3p on gain per share of 65.4p. The association has increasing the full-year division 5 per cent to 35.5p.

Sales of interpretation online soared by nineteen per cent at the Financial Times last year, whilst they fell 8 per cent at the tough duplicate of the newspaper. Despite dissemination declines of 7 per cent of the journal in the last half of 2009, practiced handling distinction fell usually 4 per cent to �187 million as the association relied less on normal journal sales. Online subscriptions rose by fifteen per cent to some-more than 126,000.

This is piece of a stability move towards increasing income from the internet at the group. Digital products and services accounted for 73 per cent of FT Group revenues in 2009, up from twenty-eight per cent in 2000, whilst promotion accounted for nineteen per cent of FT Group revenues last year, down from 52 per cent in 2000.

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The Economist, in that Pearson owns a 50 per cent stake, increasing the tellurian weekly dissemination by 2.2 per cent to 1.42 million.

Penguin, Pearson"s novella division, suffered from descending increase as the series of eBooks sole quadrupled. Adjusted handling distinction fell by 10 per cent to �84 million.

Bestsellers in the UK enclosed Marian Keyes" This Charming Man, Malcolm Gladwell"s Outliers, Ant and Dec"s journal Ooh! What a Lovely Pair and Antony Beevor"s D-Day.

Sales at the company"s higher preparation textbook, preparation program and contrast business, that includes pushing exam books in the UK, rose by 7 per cent.

Marjorie Scardino, the arch senior manager of the publisher, said: "We don"t design any assistance from the economy any time soon."

Exams regulator systematic tip downgrading of GCSE results

Greg Hurst, Education Editor & , : {}

Teachers and pupils have been warned that they cannot rely on being awarded higher grades for improved answers after the exams regulator systematic the formula of thousands of GCSE possibilities to be noted down at the last minute.

Ofqual insisted that the grades since to thousands of scholarship pupils be lowered last summer, assumingly to equivocate a row over class inflation.

The series of possibilities awarded a class C or on tip of was likely to climb by 2.4 per cent, and the series achieving an A class to enlarge by 0.8 per cent, formed on imprinting by examination boards. According to The Sunday Times, the arch senior manager Isabel Nisbet wrote to examination play and told them that the programmed increases would be formidable for the regulators to clear and for all of us to defend, and asked for class bounds to be changed.

When the formula were published, the climb in grades C and on tip of in scholarship had been scaled behind to 0.9 per cent, and the enlarge in the tip grades of A and A* was up by 0.2 per cent.

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John Dunford, the ubiquitous cabinet member of the Association of School and College Leaders, pronounced that if the regulator could lift or reduce the pass rate since it was going up or down by some-more than the common amount, it blows out of the H2O the idea of an comprehensive customary of performance.

He added: This will be of good regard to heads and teachers who have insincere that if students furnish improved answers they will automatically get higher grades.

Ofqual, an eccentric regulator set up by Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, to revive the firmness of exams, can meddle if it believes that standards are not being met for e.g. if checks on representation batches of noted writings lift concerns. But an involvement formed on the series of grades awarded, rather than on the peculiarity of writings would be a opposite matter.

Ofqual has formerly lifted concerns that scholarship GCSE writings were as well easy and the greatest examination board, AQA, indicted dual rivals OCR and Edexcel of imprinting writings as well leniently last year. Greg Watson, arch senior manager of the OCR, indicted Ofqual of behaving as well late, in promptness and over- simplistically. He said: OCR delivers the grades formed on what the possibilities essentially do.

A orator for Ofqual said: Our target was to safeguard that awarding bodies set the right standards and possibilities got grades their work deserved.

Diana Johnson, the Schools Minister, pronounced that Ofqual had acted to say standards over time, opposite subjects and opposite awarding bodies. She added: New criteria for GCSE scholarship have right away been authorized by Ofqual that will meant good coherence in exams in the future.