A three-day music festival held in Fife in May was targeted to raise more than £100,000 for charities Help For Heroes and Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association Rorces Help but only attracted less than a quarter of its expected audience of 12,000 (Live UK)
The organisers of the festival, Big Stooshie Productions have declared insolvency and the charities will get nothing.
The Coeliac Society has revealed that 1 in 100 people in the UK, or more than 500,000, have coeliac disease.
This is an autoimmune condition caused by intolerance to the gluten protein found in wheat, barley and rye and therefore present in breads, cakes, biscuits, flours, cereals and pastas and often used as an ingredient in such common foods as fish fingers, sausages, gravies and sauces, including soy sauce. Damage to the lining of the gut is caused by eating gluten and there is no cure or medication available – the only treatment is a gluten-free diet for life.
The charity currently has 3,000 members with the condition and campaigns for more gluten-free foods and more caterers, restaurants and event organisers providing suitable options.
The National Trust have released a free mobile phone app called Soho Stories and aimed at those who like strolling through the rural landscapes of London WC2.
Narrated by Barry Cryer it features references to places where Soho celeb Geoffrey Barnard was jolly tired and emotional, where Courtney Love reportedly discovered some Sapphic tastes and the bar at the Grouco Club where Damien Hirst, apparently, in the interests of art of course, would artfully show everyone his membership, one item he did not cut in half and mount in formaldehyde.
Unmissable, we’d say………
The clear winners of our upcoming Olympic Games are the corporate sponsors, many inappropriate for the stated mission of the event, which is to promote world peace and understanding and celebrate the best and brightest of human achievements.
This is the view of Ethical Consumer magazine which devoted much of its July /August issue to pointing out that sponsors such as BP, Rio Tinto and Dow seem to be in it for the greenwash PR opportunities to clean up their tarnished image in respect of the environment. Others are known to be enjoying some lucrative tax avoidance, courtesy of a pathetic British government terrified that the business might have gone elsewhere, and paid for by all their long-suffering and ordinary taxpayers. Continue reading
Bankers continue to slide down the popularity pole with the revelations that Barclays massaged the Libor interest rate, at which banks lend to each other, in their favour, which earned them a £290 million fine, and a considerably larger sum in reputation damage, at home and abroad.
In the wake of the scandal Barclay’s chairman Marcus Aguis, its chief operating officer Jerry del Missier and its chief executive Bob Diamond, for some reason called Bob the Rob in some quarters, have all resigned. They are tipped to be the first of many. One Barclays fan however is colourful London mayor Boris Johnson who has pointed out Barclays charitable donations to his causes as “money we’re not going to turn up our noses at”, though some will now claim it is dirty money that smells of fraud. Continue reading
Fraud, using telemarketing has flourished as the number of marketing calls and text calls has climbed to more than16 million a day, according to a recent Panorama documentary.
Frauds include land banking scams whereby plots of land worth £75 are aggressively sold to the vulnerable for £20,000 and up as “investment”, and computer scams where callers claim to be working on behalf of Microsoft and that there is something wrong with the victim’s computer, that they can fix for a fee. Continue reading
A potato buyer at Sainsbury’s has been jailed for four years for taking £2.5 million in bribes from a potato supply firm.
John Maylam admitted enjoying lavish hospitality and gifts to the value of £1 million, and £1.5 million in cash paid in to an account in Luxembourg, for agreeing to his employer being overcharged by potato supplier Greenvale, an arrangement that cost Sainsbury’s £8.7 million.
Andrew Behagg, the former finance director of Greenvale who approved the payments was given three years, and another former director, David Baxter was given two and a half years.
The current recession, caused by bankers, is a silver-lined cloud for German discount stores Lidl and Aldi as more middle-class Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose customers discover how much extra they have been paying on basic items and branded goods.
Market analysts IGD have found that nearly 40% of ABC1 households will use the stores this year compared with 30% of those from C2DE households. On this basis the UK still has some catching up to do since in Germany the figures are 80% and 95%. Continue reading
Readers are reminded that an ever-popular scam is still being pumped out to anybody selling anything.
This works on the basis of asking the victim to bank a cheque, or charge a credit card for more than the amount wanted and to send the balance on to pay a third party, who the scammer says will be handling some aspect of the transaction. Those doing this subsequently find out that the cheque or credit card has been stolen, and that the third party is the scammer, who has disappeared with the money. Continue reading
One new 2013 possibility for some top hospitality in the London Bridge area is the planned Shangri-La Hotel at the 1016 – foot (310 metres) 70-storey Shard building, for which the inauguration of its outside shell was this month.
The five-star luxury hotel is the 72-property Asia-Pacific group’s first in the UK and is likely to open May/June 2013 on floors 34-52 with 202 large guestrooms of around 452 sq feet (42 sq. metres), one conference and banqueting room for up to 200, (divisible into two) two meetings rooms for up to 20, a luxury spa, fitness centre, indoor pool, restaurants, a champagne bar at floor 52 and London views for forty miles on a clear day.
Those with £24.95 to spend can book advance tickets from the Shard’s owners to enjoy the views from February 1st 2013.