It said there would be rationalisation and substantial savings but gave no indication of the extent of any lay-offs

It said there would be rationalisation and substantial savings, but gave no indication of the extent of any lay-offs. But insiders said that, unlike Swiss rivals UBS and SBC, Deutsche was unlikely to cut back on its investment banking division, which is still seen as a “build” area by company executives.UBS and SBC, which announced plans to merge last December, are expected to announce details of thousands of redundancies within the next few weeks.. Capital Radio yesterday hit out at the recent recommendation by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) to block its bid for Virgin Radio, saying it intended “to challenge the MMC conclusions to ensure they are not followed in future by any other regulatory body”. Ian Irvine, chairman of Capital, also said the station had reached agreement with the Radio Authority to transmit the majority of Capital Gold programmes across its other four AM licences, starting with Kent on 23 February.
Although the bid for Virgin lapsed after Virgin accepted an alternative offer from a group led by the DJ Chris Evans, the MMC had recommended the Capital bid should be blocked unless it sold off its medium-wave station. Mr Irvine said the recommendation was made “in spite of the fact that the majority of customers supported the acquisition”.Capital sees this as an unfair move against the radio industry, whose advertising take is minuscule compared with other media such as television. A spokesman for Capital also claimed that the station, with just 7 per cent of total advertising revenue in the London area, would be unable to exert any monopolistic pressures on advertisers.While the company discounted any calls for a judicial review, it said it would commission independent research from Case Associates to show where raising prices have driven advertisers from one media to another.At the company’s agm yesterday, the chairman’s upbeat statement on trading, with advertising revenue growth in the first quarter from its two London stations, spurred the shares up 15p to close at 532p.Anthony de Larrinaga of Panmure Gordon supported Capital’s claims that most advertisers had supported the Capital bid for Virgin.He suggested that two impending deals might give a better idea of the attitude of the President of the Board of Trade, Margaret Beckett.

You may have missed a section when you had the flu eight months ago, but you don’t want to find out on the eve of the exam.If you feel uneasy about your school’s revision programme, buy past papers and work on them in the Easter holidays before your A-levels. Good teachers will be happy to mark work you have done on your own initiative.Most of us have had nightmares of opening an exam paper only to find we have studied the wrong set of books. The honesty to admit, in, say, March, that a syllabus cannot be covered in the remaining lessons, is part of that professionalism. Sadly, this is a reality for a few unfortunate students each year. We teachers pride ourselves on our professionalism, but we need to be sure we merit that term.

Tick off the sections you have covered, and ask about bits you don’t recognise. Ask your teachers for copies of each syllabus, or at least for the exact syllabus title and number Buy your own copy if you need to. (Her parents did not wish to antagonise the school, as their younger daughter was then in her GCSE year.) I dislike the American habit of suing for damages, but perhaps a couple of judgments against school or colleges might avoid the recurrence of problems like Sammy’s.So, what lessons can we learn?Students, aided and abetted by their parents, need to be more “proactive” – a ghastly but fashionable word – about their courses. But we must not forget that her school let her down, which resulted, first, in a gap year before university, and, secondly, in extra tuition that cost her parents about pounds 600.I am no lawyer, but I wonder whether Sammy’s parents could have claimed the tuition expenses by resorting to the Small Claims’ Court. When we looked through the syllabus, we spotted one cause of Sammy’s poor grade: several topics had not been mentioned by her teachers.During her two-year chemistry course Sammy had been taught by four people, due to illness and the limited availability of supply teachers. This, in itself, is unfortunate, but the school’s head of science should have ensured that the chemistry staff co-ordinated their teaching properly.