The volcanic ash cloud that grounded planes across Europe last month has cost Thomas Cook around £70m.
The travel firm reported this morning that the disruption will have a significant impact on its financial results this year. But on an optimistic note, it believes that the public have not been deterred from booking a foreign holiday.
Thomas Cook estimates that it lost up to £20m of revenue from customers who chose not to rebook their holiday after they were unable to fly. The rest of the £70m cost relates to the cost of supporting customers who were stranded, and bringing them home.
Chief executive Manny Fontenla-Novoa said this morning that while customers had been reluctant to book holidays during the days whenflights were cancelled, booking patterns quickly recovered once airspace was reopened.
“We are pleased with the development of our summer bookings programme, particularly given the disruption caused by the volcanic ash cloud. If we exclude the estimated impact of the volcanic ash cloud, then the group remains confident of meeting board expectations for the year,” Fontenla-Novoa said.
The volcanic ash cloud has caused significant economic damage, withthe EU estimating that European businesses lost up to €2.5bn (£2.1bn), Airlines are thought to have lost at least $1.7bn (£1.15bn).
Within the travel sector, TUI reported a £90m hit earlier this week.
Fontenla-Novoa still believes that the authorities overreacted by closing down airspace for so many days.
“The group is working with the government and relevant national and international bodies to put in place measures to ensure such a blanket ban is not needlessly imposed again and to seek some compensation for the exceptional costs and lost contribution,” he said.
Thomas Cook also reported this morning that it made a smaller pretax loss in the six months to the end of March, at £252m compared with £309m the year before.
source: guardian.co.uk
Thomas Cook is close to striking a £1.2bn refinancing deal that will give the troubled travel group two more years’ breathing space to turn round its business.
A consortium of 17 banks including Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays is expected to approve an extension of loans until 2015. Although the conditions are likely to be stringent, with higher interest rates and the lenders taking a significant stake in the company, the deal is regarded as good news by Thomas Cook.
Without the backing of the banks, it would have had to repay the bulk of its debt by April 2013.
Britain’s oldest and best-known tour operator appeared to be on the brink of collapse before Christmas after a disastrous year that featured three profit warnings and the departure of its long-serving chief executive. Despite £100m of short-term funding having been secured in autumn 2011, an emergency loan of £200m was needed by late November to keep the firm afloat. Bookings slumped in subsequent months as reports of its financial woes deterred customers.
The new arrangement negotiated by the interim chief executive, Sam Weihagen, is likely to be followed by further asset sales to help pay off the debt of the 170-year-old firm, which has an annual turnover of £9bn and 30,000 employees.
Last year it sold off its Spanish hotel chain to Iberostar and it is looking to sell its Indian division entirely, although Weihagen has said he would take only a “compelling offer” for the growing Indian holiday business. Its fleet of planes may also be sold and leased back.
Another asset that could be sold is its stake in Nats, the air traffic controller. The shareholding is part-owned with six other airlines in the Airlines Group, which is considering whether to sell its investment.
The firm is also axing 200 of its 1,300 UK high-street stores. Thomas Cook shares tumbled by more than 75% to less than 10p on one tumultuous day in November last year, but have since recovered to 20.5p. It recently announced a 2% fall in summer bookings in Britain, but said a new “Wonderful World” advertising campaign had brought in new business, while improvements to its websites had meant a 19% increase in online bookings in recent weeks.
In a statement last month, Weihagen said trading across the group was “stable” and in line with expectations.
He said the outlook for the business remained challenging, with a major factor being lower consumer demand, and the French market in particular slumping. However, he said bookings across much of Europe had improved and summer trading was “encouraging”.
The company says it is now seeing British holidaymakers return to Tunisia after a drop in bookings since the Arab spring – although its German clientele have largely boycotted Greece since the Euro crisis and bailouts.
source: guardian.co.uk
The so-called underemployment rate, which counts jobless people looking for work, part-time workers who need full-time jobs and discouraged job seekers, fell to a three-year low of 14.5% from 14.9% in February.
When that rate falls, it’s a sign not only of less economic pain, but also that the economy is operating closer to full capacity, said Heidi Shierholz, labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
“When that rate is lower, it is better, better both for workers and the economy,” she said.
The underemployment rate reached a record high of 17.2% in November 2009.
Then two years of slow, uneven improvement followed, as the economy slowly mended. But in October of 2011 things began to rapidly improve.
March’s underemployment rate is the best reading since just beforePresident Obama took office in January 2009.
Fewer frustrated baristas: Much of the improvement came because the number of workers who want full-time jobs but who are stuck working part time fell by 447,000 to 7.6 million. It’s the sixth-biggest monthly drop on record.
“That’s a big drop and that’s unambiguous good news,” said Shierholz.
In addition, the number of unemployed, as well as the number of discouraged workers, also both declined.
There are 12.7 million unemployed job seekers, and about 2.4 million more who say they want to work but are no longer counted in the labor force since they’ve stopped looking. Those readings fell by a combined 389,000 in March, another sign of less economic desperation.
The more widely followed unemployment rate showed only modest improvement in March to 8.2% from 8.3%. But that was discounted by many, since it was driven by 333,000 people dropping out of the labor
source: money.cnn.com
At first glance, hard-boiled eggs seem easy to make — just throw them in water and boil. While that sounds good in theory, chances are you won’t get that perfectly cooked egg and easy-to-peel shell. We’ve nailed down the steps you need to take to have egg-cellent hard boiled eggs in no time.
1. Use older eggs. Yup, you heard that right. In Harold McGee’s book,”On Food and Cooking,” he says that the shells peel easily after several days of refrigeration due to the pH level of the albumen. If all you have are fresh eggs, McGee suggests adding 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda to the cooking water.
2. Start with cold water. Place eggs in a single layer at the bottom of a pan. Starting with cold water keeps the eggs from cracking; make sure that the water is about 1 inch above the eggs. Add a pinch of salt to the water to help make them easier to peel.
3. Bring to a boil for a few seconds, then cover for 12 minutes. Once the water has boiled on medium heat, turn off the heat and cover the eggs. They should be done after 12 minutes. To test the eggs, open one to make sure you have the desired consistency. Another test is to spin the egg on a table. Cooked eggs with spin quickly while uncooked eggs will spin slowly due to their liquid contents.
4. Place the eggs in ice water. Shocking the eggs in ice water stops them from continuing to cook. Once they are cool, remove them from the pan.
5. Peel them under cool running water. This makes the shelling easier if you’re not decorating the eggs.
source: www.abcnews.go.com
Chocolate bunnies, jelly beans, Peeps and Cadbury eggs will surely fill children’s Easter baskets this weekend.
Easter is a candy retailer’s dream. More than 120 million pounds of candy are purchased for the holiday every year. Whatever candy you decide to indulge in this weekend, we’ve collected some of our favorite Easter candy facts that are sure to have you sugar shocked.
16 Billion…that’s the number of jelly beans that are made for Easter each year
70 percent…of Easter candy purchased is chocolate
8,968…pounds: the weight of Guinness World Records’ largest egg ever made
5 million…marshmallow chicks and bunnies are made daily in preparation for the holiday
Red…jelly beans are the favorite color kids pick
90 Million…chocolate bunnies are made for Easter each year
76 percent…of Americans say people should eat the ears first on a chocolate bunny
2nd…biggest candy holiday, after Halloween
2.1 Billion…dollars spent on Easter candy annually
28.11…dollars: the amount the average American spends on Easter candy
source: www.abcnews.go.com
If you make a list of all the things you’re repeatedly told over a typical lifetime – all those injunctions to exercise, floss, budget, look both ways when crossing the street, try anything once except incest and folk dancing – there is one piece of advice you’re given more than all the rest: eat more vegetables. You’re told this as a kid and you keep being told it. You used to be told it for health reasons and now you’re also told it for eco-political planetary reasons: eat more veg.
In restaurants, though, it’s quite difficult to eat more veg. It’s strange. In lots of ways, restaurants have been ahead of the political curve: many banned smoking long before other businesses caught up, and in the area of responsible sourcing, they have been right on the ball. But that isn’t true with vegetarian food. There is a vegetarian option at pretty much all restaurants, but it’s often a half-hearted, tokenist affair. Vegans have it even worse. You can argue that that’s because to be vegan is to make a declaration that you don’t like restaurants – which at the moment is true, but is also self-fulfilling. The whole discourse around food is increasingly about ethics, and the ethics of food increasingly concerns the avoidance of meat; which means vegetarian cookery is an area where restaurants have to sharpen their focus and up their game.
In the UK, the problem is compounded by the fact that we have no strong tradition of vegetarian cookery. If we’re relying on boiled veg to save the planet, the planet has a problem. Big props, therefore, to the team behind Vanilla Black, a restaurant in Chancery Lane that successfully makes complicated, ambitious, technically skilled, veg-only food with a British bias. They now have a new place, Orchard, on Sicilian Avenue, a wonderful Edwardian arcade just off Holborn, opened in 1910 as one of the first places in London you could sit outside and have a coffee. It’s core sandwich bar territory, and that’s what Orchard looks like – indeed, you can go there for your soup-and-sarnie and leave it at that. The decor is understated, in a pleasant way, with stuff that doesn’t match, baskets of veg, old cards and posters. The signifiers are very different from Vanilla Black, which is pricier and more restaurant-like. This is more a place to grab a bite in the course of a working day.
You’ll rapidly notice, however, if you pay attention to that bowl of soup, that there’s a lot more cooking going on than you might expect. The ingredients are listed as potato and parsley, but that makes it sound plainer than it is, with the potato tasting rich and creamy, and the wonderfully lavish parsley playing a leading role – more dishes should use parsley as their star. On the side was the daily selection of three salads: red onion with sultanas and a sweet vinaigrette; pickled heritage potatoes; and cool, crunchy batonettes of kohlrabi and celery. The potato was genuinely interesting, not least because “heritage”, a silly word, turns out here to mean “a weird shade of blue”. The spuds were tangy and cooked to just the right degree of yielding resistance (I mention that because restaurant potatoes are often overboiled). A main course dish of savoy cabbage came wrapped around a savoury filling of milk-soaked bread and cheddar, with blue spuds on the side, a red wine reduction and a celeriac purée. This was a very happy plateful, the cheese and potato and celeriac both hearty and subtly various – a meat-eater’s idea of veggie food, maybe, but that was part of the reason I liked it.
You can tell just by looking at the list of puddings that they are a speciality. Stewed fruit looked plain but had been carefully cooked, avoiding gloopiness, and was set off with a brilliantly light cinnamon ice-cream. A chocolate bourbon had two textures of chocolate and was served with “iced condensed milk” and spiked with Earl Grey tea – which, of course, tastes of the citrus bergamot, like a funky variety of orange. Again, there was a lot of cooking going on. I don’t want to mislead you: the feel of Orchard is closer to a caff or sandwich bar than to a restaurant. But what a sandwich bar!
• Orchard, 11 Sicilian Avenue, London WC1, 020-7831 2715. Open Mon-Fri, 8am-8pm. About £30 for two with drinks and service.
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They used the equipment during an operation on John Green, 62, from Openshaw, to remove his prostate.The team wore special glasses in order to view the procedure in 3D.Doctors said the combination of robotic and 3D technologies allows for greater surgical mobility with keyhole techniques. During the operation, a high definition screen carried a 3D image of a hand-held robotic arm developed to carry out intricate surgical techniques. The arm was used for the first time at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport last month.
Manchester Royal Infirmary said it hoped the advancement would provide better results at a fraction of the cost of current robotic and imaging techniques. A spokeswoman for the hospital said 3D projection allowed the surgeon to have greater accuracy, “therefore reducing the risks of muscle and nerve damage.” She added it would help reduce surgeon fatigue, meaning they would be able to carry out “more operations with even better outcomes.”
The technology is to be used on a small number of patients before being offered more widely.’Already excited’ Dan Burke, who led the surgery, said he hoped the technology would become available to many more patients.
“We are already excited at the potential this technology has, not just for us but for our many colleagues in the trust performing keyhole surgery.
“Ultimately we are aiming for a better patient outcome at a cost that will benefit the NHS.” Last month, a patient at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport became the first in the UK to have his prostate removed using the same robotic hand-held device used in Mr Green’s operation. The technology offers a more precise and quicker surgical procedure, as it provides more flexibility than the human wrist.
source: www.bbc.co.uk
Joggers from the Good Gym, a group of runners who also do good deeds for their local community. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Every Thursday evening, whatever the weather, Harriet Cawley runs two-and-a-half miles from Shoreditch, east London, to the home of her coach, Michael Mulcahy. Cawley regularly undertakes half-marathons but this is no ordinary training session. Mulcahy is a house-bound widower who enjoys receiving a London Evening Standard from Cawley and having a chat for half-an-hour. After which, Cawley runs home again.
Cawley is a member of the Good Gym, a not-for-profit organisation that encourages people to combine their exercise regime with a spot of social care, matching busy workers with elderly “coaches”, who receive a daily paper or other modest delivery and, in turn, provide an incentive for their weekly visitors to keep on running. Set up two-and-a-half years ago, the Good Gym is this year expanding across all Olympic boroughs, part-funded by the Olympic Park Legacy Company.
The Good Gym was the brainchild of Ivo Gormley, 29, who discovered that combining a weekly run with a visit to a housebound friend of the family was just the motivation he needed to keep him exercising; it helped that his elderly friend was a former boxer who could offer training tips. As Gormley did his prescribed situps, he thought about how best to link up a series of very modern disconnects: how few people have the time or energy to volunteer and yet use gyms to burn off excess energy; and how little dialogue there is between working people and the elderly, particularly in densely populated urban communities.
“Gyms are this ridiculous invention,” says Gormley. “People have got too much energy and go to these weird places where they get purged of it by machines. I thought we could channel the energy from people’s exercise into something more productive.”
Through working with the NHS, charities and local community centres, including The Sundial Centre in Bethnal Green and Toynbee Hall, the Good Gym matches runners with an individual coach – a housebound elderly person who would like a regular visitor. They are encouraged to take a newspaper or a modest gift to the value of £1.
There are also monthly group runs around east London, to perform useful activities along the way. So far Good Gym members have distributed flyers for a local hospice, tidied up community gardens and hauled compost on to a school roof. Two runners are now being sought for a somewhat unusual task: taking donkeys from Stepney City Farm for a trot. (The donkeys need the exercise to keep their hooves down; donkey handling training will be provided.)
Cawley, 38, a costume stylist, heard about the Good Gym throughTwitter. “It seemed such a brilliant idea,” she says. It took four months for her to be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau (the Good Gym now uses a company to speed up this process and claims it takes just a couple of weeks), then she was assigned Mulcahy to run to, based on the distance she requested.
Having a break in her running works well from a training point of view: she does a speed run to Mulcahy’s house, rests there, then a does a more gentle, warm-down jog on the way home. Cawley is from Stockport and has no grandparents in London, so enjoys chatting to her elderly coach – “someone I would never have met,” she says. While the Good Gym advises runners to stay for about 10 minutes, Cawley sometimes chats to Mulcahy for an hour. Although he has family, and regular visits from professional carers, Cawley thinks he enjoys a visit from someone who does not worry like relatives and is not there out of professional duty. She didn’t really know what he made of “this random person turning up and chatting to him” until she told him she was going away on holiday. “He said: ‘I’ll really miss you.'”
Terry Duncan, 67, a retired printer from Stepney, uses an electric wheelchair after a stroke. He is regularly visited by Sally, another Good Gym member. “It’s lovely. I look forward to her coming,” he says. He played football when he was younger, but is not sure how much use he is as a coach. “I don’t coach her,” he says. What about a mid-run cup of tea? “She normally has a glass of water. She’s a bit hot and sweaty but sits down and has a chat. We’ve become good friends.”
Duncan has recommended the Good Gym to several immobile neighbours, but says they are “a bit dubious about strangers coming into their house”. Despite these fears, the Good Gym is expanding, with interest in Edinburgh and a Good Gym run in Chicago. Most significant this year will be its Olympics expansion. As organisers hope the Games will leave a more enduring legacy in east London, Gormley wants his enterprise to become a social norm for the young professionals moving into the new housing around the Olympic Park. “It’s an amazing opportunity to shape the culture of a new area,” he says. “And link it to the existing community.”
source: www.guardian.co.uk