Business news for Thu, 22 Nov 2007 & with word group. 49 news.

Kelda received a takeover approach from a consortium including a unit of Citigroup and HSBC valuing the owner of U.K. utility Yorkshire Water at $6.2 billion.

Rimini Street, a US-based provider of software support said it was interested in buying TomorrowNow, the SAP unit at the centre of a corporate spying scandal

Ten civil servants enjoyed a "mind-boggling" return of ?107m during the privatisation of the defence research group, according to a critical investigation into the 2003 deal

BHP Billiton Ltd has told Chinese steel makers, the biggest buyers of iron ore, it will refrain from using a potential US$125 billion takeover of Rio Tinto Group to control prices, according to a Chinese executive. Marius Kloppers, the chief executive officer of the world's largest mining company, on Wednesday met executives of Jiangsu Shagang Group Co, Wuhan Iron & Steel Group and Magang (Group) Holdings Co in Shanghai, said Shagang Chairman Shen Wenrong. "We told them we want to see reasonable iron ore prices after the merger," Shen said in an interview with Bloomberg News. "They said the prices will be decided by the market." Iron-ore prices have tripled in the past five years on increased demand and may rise by 50 percent next year, Macquarie Group Ltd said last month. Kloppers is touring Asian customers this week to win the support of steel makers, which want regulators to block Melbourne-based BHP's bid to create a company that would account for more

British water utility Kelda Group may agree to a ?3 billion takeover deal with a consortium of investment firms by as early as next week

SHARES have leapt in Yorkshire Water owner Kelda following a takeover approach valuing the group at £3 billion.

Kelda Group has become the latest leading UK water company to be approached by an infrastructure fund, as a consortium including units of Citigroup and HSBC has indicated it is ready to pay about ?3bn ($6.2bn) for control of the company

Kensington Group, the UK's first sub-prime lender, will tomorrow stop offering mortgages to borrowers with poor credit histories, blaming market conditions.

PASSENGER numbers at low-cost airline Jet2 have taken off, helping profits to rise at parent company the Dart Group.

Landmark deals to boost wages for Florida tomato pickers are in danger of collapsing under pressure from Burger King and a growers group.

A somewhat cagey ArcelorMittal has confirmed that it is in talks with China Oriental Group to increase its stake from the current 28 per cent, but it won't discuss the price tag

The country's largest gay right's group slams the country's largest retailer.

ACCOLADES for hearing device group Cochlear continue to roll in, with the company honoured last night as Exporter of the Year.

Middle-income blacks are downwardly mobile. Why? SOME black Americans are doing very well. Barack Obama is pulling ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Tiger Woods is the world's best-paid athlete. Stan O'Neal was given a $160m golden parachute as he was ejected from Merrill Lynch last month. But these exceptional folk are indeed exceptional. For members of the black middle class, the news is gloomier. New research suggests that their grip on affluence is precarious. The Economic Mobility Project, an arm of the impeccably non-partisan Pew Charitable Trusts, compares contemporary Americans' family income (based on surveys conducted between 1996 and 2003) with their parents' (between 1968 and 1972). Overall, the picture is cheerful. Two-thirds of Americans who were children in 1968 and are now in their 30s or 40s enjoy higher household income than their parents did then. The same is true for black Americans. But black upward mobility consists largely of people from poor families moving up. Blacks born halfway up the income ladder, by contrast, show an alarming tendency to fall down. Only 31% of blacks who were children in 1968 and whose parents were in the middle fifth of America's income distribution now earn more than their parents did. The average household income for this group has actually declined--from $53,700 (in 2006 dollars) to $44,900. Nearly half fell all the way into the bottom fifth. ...

Using its power to ostracise and exclude, the Commonwealth has had sporadic success as a promoter of democracy; other clubs find it harder THERE are some global clubs that do hard business, like waging war or regulating trade. And there is another sort of club, with a large, ill-defined membership, and sensible goals but little power to correct wrongs except through peer pressure. In a cold, unsentimental world, the second type of club might seem doomed. Given that the consequences of being suspended, or even expelled, from such a group are rarely disastrous--the equivalent, at worst, of being shunned by one's schoolmates--they will surely not deter the planet's worst rogues. ...

Politics, business and the French press are getting chummier still WHEN Nicolas Sarkozy met Erik Izraelewicz and a handful of journalists recently to discuss economic policy and the strikes in France, the editor-in-chief of Les Echos, France's most popular business daily, did not expect to end up discussing his own newspaper with the French president. But Mr Sarkozy said he could not understand why the paper's journalists had gone on strike several times to try to block the recent takeover of their publication by his friend Bernard Arnault, France's richest man. Mr Sarkozy insisted that Mr Arnault would respect the paper's editorial independence and would invest in its future. He then conspicuously wondered aloud whether Nicolas Beytout, another of his close friends, was happy as editor-in-chief of Le Figaro, one of France's leading national papers. Exactly what Mr Sarkozy was getting at became clear a few days later, on November 20th, when Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), the world's biggest luxury-goods conglomerate, which is headed by Mr Arnault, announced the appointment of Mr Beytout as chairman of Les Echos and of LVMH's media division, which owns a radio station and a handful of magazines. (Mr Izraelewicz will keep his job.) On the same day the Figaro group appointed Etienne Mougeotte as the new editor of Le Figaro. "No doubt Sarkozy approved Mougeotte's appointment, too," says a journalist at Le Figaro. ...

How to make human embryonic stem cells without destroying human embryos SCIENCE moves fast. On November 14th Nature, one of the world's leading scientific journals, published a paper about the creation of embryonic stem cells using a technique called somatic-cell nuclear transfer (basically, taking the nucleus from a body cell and putting it in an unfertilised egg). This made the news because the researchers had performed their trick in monkeys. The result was thus the first primate embryos to have been cloned, as earlier reports of human cloning turned out to have been fraudulent. There is, however, a second way of making an embryonic stem cell that has the genes of an existing individual. This is to take a body cell and order it to turn into a stem cell using a set of molecular instructions. A group of researchers at Kyoto University, led by Shinya Yamanaka, did this with mice last year. A commentary published alongside the Nature paper, by Ian Wilmut, the man who produced the first cloned sheep (using somatic-cell nuclear transfer to do so), referred to Dr Yamanaka's technique but said, "There is so far no sign that this approach could be effective in human cells." ...

The Chinese government has reversed its decision to bar a US carrier group from visiting Hong Kong, but the about-face came too late to save the Thanksgiving holiday for 8,000 American sailors, airmen and their families

CIRCLE OIL, the international oil and gas exploration and development company listed on London’s AIM, has reported a potential oil find in the first well drilled by the group in Tunisia.

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) - Some of the 8,000 sailors aboard the USS Kitty Hawk carrier group will be able to enjoy shore leave in Hong Kong during the Thanksgiving holiday after Chinese officials reversed an earlier decision to turn the warships away. China's Foreign Ministry announced late Thursday it was granting permission for the ships to dock in Hong Kong for the Thanksgiving holiday on humanitarian grounds. The warships, comprising the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk and its five support vessels, were originally scheduled to arrive in Hong Kong on Wednesday, as part of planned shore leave to coincide with the U.S. holiday. China did not provide an explanation for its earlier decision to bar the ships entry to Hong Kong, the former British territory which reverted to Chinese sovereign territory in 1997. "We have decided to allow the Kitty Hawk strike group to stay in Hong Kong during Thanksgiving, and it is a decision out of humanitarian consideration only," wire reports cited Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao as saying.