Premiere hopes for €1.2bn valuation on float
The News Review:
- Premiere hopes for €1.2bn valuation on float
- Health: Modest funds doled out
- Royal season in Australia
- The florist’s tale
- Online NewsHour: A New Russia Emerges Under President Vladimir Putin …
Premiere hopes for €1.2bn valuation on float
Guardian Unlimited – Feb 23, 2005
Meanwhile ProSiebenSat1, Germany’s biggest home-grown commercial channel, indicated that media group Axel Springer would raise its 12% stake, and in another development, RTL, the country’s market leader, said it planned to enter the pay-TV market. Premiere, which is majority-owned by British private equity group Permira, has 3m subscribers and ranks third in German commercial broadcasting after RTL and ProSieben. It is the only German broadcaster with the rights to show all matches in the 2006 World Cup. It has been turned around since racking up losses of €1bn in three years and suffering the collapse of its former own ers, the Kirch media group. It said it would offer 42m shares at between €24 and €28.
Health: Modest funds doled out
Globe and Mail – Feb 23, 2005
The CMA wants more spaces created in Canadian medical schools to train the home-grown doctors they say will be required to meet the country’s medical needs. Wednesday’s budget also targeted an additional $15 million over five years to help reduce the long wait times for treatment that have become a persistent complaint across the country. And there will be $110 million given over the same period to the Canadian Institute for Health Information to help it collect and evaluate the data that the provinces promised to supply on health-system performance — including that for wait-time reductions. The newly created Public Health Agency of Canada will be given $300 million over five years to promote healthy living as well as the control of chronic illnesses like diabetes, heart disease an cancer. A share of that money will go to aboriginal communities where life expectancies are far below the national norm because of the pervasiveness of those diseases.
Royal season in Australia
The Age – Feb 23, 2005
The Danish royals will also share Melbourne with theirScandinavian neighbour, Crown Princess Victoria, on March 10. While the Danes’ next king and queen are meeting Victorianpremier Steve Bracks, the 25-year-old heir to Sweden’s throne willattend the Swedish Style Gala at the National Gallery ofVictoria. Australia’s home grown princess and her husband open theirthree-week official tour on Sunday with the prince seeking revengein a yacht race on Sydney Harbour against America’s Cup winningskipper John Bertrand. Bertrand and the crown princess combined to beat Frederik’s crewin a race on Copenhagen Harbour during pre-wedding celebrations inMay last year. The Glucksborgs will spend a week in Sydney where they willattend charity dinners for the Red Cross, the Victor Chang CardiacInstitute and the Australian Cancer Council. But Danish officials said the couple would not pay a nostalgicvisit to the Slip Inn, the pub where they met during the 2000Olympics. Their trip is the biggest tour undertaken by a Danish royal inmodern times and is considered of the utmost political importancein Denmark, as well as personally for the former MaryDonaldson.
The florist’s tale
Al-Ahram Weekly – Feb 23, 2005
Most florists agree that the tendency to celebrate Valentine’s took off a little more than a decade ago. "It started in the early 1990s," Mustafa Sayed, assistant manager at one shop, pointed out, "but in the last five years people began to celebrate Valentine’s on a much larger scale. " Neither florists nor anyone else, however, could explain how the day became so popular, far more popular, in fact, than its home-grown equivalent — the "day of love" instigated in 4 November 1977, by Mustafa Amin. Even more puzzling is the fact that many Egyptians have taken to expressing their love for parents, friends and even school teachers as well as significant others on Valentine’s. Embracing Western traditions, prominent economist and political writer Galal Amin points out in his book Whatever Happened to the Egyptians, has been an integral aspect of the development of post-revolutionary society since the 1952 Revolution, often as a means to upward mobility. Westernisation, a recurrent motif in the social history of the last two centuries, "has always been an instrument of.
Online NewsHour: A New Russia Emerges Under President Vladimir Putin …
NewsHour – Feb 23, 2005
Aged 63, she’s spending the winter selling home-grown pickles and potatoes on the road outside her home. The changes in social benefits mean that vouchers she was once given for free public transport and access to social services have been replaced by cash handouts. But she says the cash doesn’t come close to compensating her for the value of the benefits that were taken away.