IN “LITTLE BRITAIN”, a television comedy, Daffyd Thomas, who insists he is “the only gay in the village”, tries to expose the homophobia of his fellow Welsh villagers by wearing outrageous clothes (bright red rubber shorts are a favourite) and picketing the local library. But he is constantly frustrated: the inhabitants of Llanddewi Brefi are all either tolerant or gay themselves.The corporate world is not yet as gay-friendly as Llanddewi Brefi. But attitudes have changed dramatically. Some 86% of Fortune 500 firms now ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, up from 61% in 2002. Around 50% also ban discrimination against transsexuals, compared with 3% in 2002. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an American pressure group, measures corporate policies towards sexual minorities in its annual “equality index”. Of the 636 companies that responded to its survey this year, 64% offer the same medical benefits for same-sex partners as for heterosexual spouses. Some 30% scored a fabulous 100% on the group’s index.Progress has taken place in a wide range of industries. The 100% club…

But the picture in my attic is hideous

IN GEORGES ROMAN’S clinic in London, women queue to see a cosmetic dermatologist renowned for zapping wrinkles and smoothing brows. These days, alas, they have to share the waiting room with men. In the past few years Dr Roman has treated a succession of bankers and businessmen in London and Paris. They don’t want to look beautiful, he says, just “fresher and less worried”.Typically, a swift shot of Botox, a toxin which freezes muscles, targets the deep forehead cleft which can descend on men over 40, especially if they spend all day frowning at a screen. Other favoured treatments are lasers, which perk up skin-tone, and cosmetic fillers for those deep grooves between the nose and the mouth. Englishmen, says Dr Roman, are big spenders. This is just as well: Botox treatment starts at £300 ($477). Fiddlier procedures can cost twice as much. The French tag along with their wives; Britons sidle in alone.Botox was used 336,834 times by American men in 2010, up 9% from 2009, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. But women are…

ON FEBRUARY 17th London’s spring fashion week begins. Across the capital, young women in vertiginous shoes and skimpy dresses will be teetering along catwalks. And thousands of young doughnut-dodgers will be inspired to queue outside agents’ offices for the slim chance of becoming the next Kate Moss.Careers in modelling are typically short-lived, badly paid and less glamorous than pretty young dreamers imagine. Yet the business is changing. For one thing, educated models are in. This may sound improbable. In the film “Zoolander”, male models are portrayed as so dumb that they play-fight with petrol and then start smoking. But such stereotypes are so last year.Lily Cole, a redheaded model favoured by Chanel and Hermès, recently left Cambridge University with a first-class degree in history of art. Edie Campbell, a new British star, is studying for the same degree at the Courtauld Institute in London. And Jacquetta Wheeler, one of Britain’s established catwalkers, has taken time out from promoting Burberry and Vivienne Westwood to work for Reprieve, a charity which campaigns for prisoners’ rights.Natalie Hand of…

If the skies were clear, you’d see the planes

COULD a fresh row over airline emissions lead to a global trade war? That is the scariest prospect raised by China’s objections this week to the European Union’s new plan for controlling greenhouse-gas emissions from aeroplanes. The scheme, which came into effect on January 1st, forces airlines flying into the EU to buy tradable carbon credits as part of its broader emissions-trading system.Many countries are unhappy with the policy, but China’s proclamations this week—official news agencies report that China has “banned” its airlines from participation without specific government approval—appear to be an escalation. Not least because Chinese and European officials are expected to meet for high-level talks in Beijing next week. It also raises the temperature of the row in advance of a meeting of 26 dissenting countries, including India, China, Russia and America, in Moscow on February 21st.As an effort to make airlines pay for their pollution, the EU’s action is overdue. In global terms, their emissions are modest, about 3% of the total….

ANALYSTS have been poring over the mathematics of the proposed all-share merger between Glencore and Xstrata, announced on February 7th, trying to work out which side has the better of the deal. Is one share of Xstrata, a mining company based in Switzerland but listed in London, a fair swap for 2.8 of its Swiss neighbour, Glencore, a miner and by far the world’s biggest commodities trader? Mick Davis, Xstrata’s boss, proposed a different equation for investors to ponder. “One plus one…equals 11,” was his summary of the merger’s merits.Mr Davis, an accountant by training and a qualified cricket umpire, is generally given to more sober judgments. Perhaps he can be excused his excitement. A deal would forge the world’s fourth-largest mining company with a market capitalisation not far shy of $90 billion, and Mr Davis will be its chief executive.The return of the mining mega-merger was no surprise. Ivan Glasenberg, Glencore’s boss, has long talked as if a merger had already taken place. His company owns 34% of Xstrata, which was formed by a spin-off of Glencore’s coal mines in 2002. Part of the motivation for Glencore’s initial public offering last year was to put a value on the company and give it a currency with which to strike a deal.The alliance would extend Xstrata’s lead as the world’s biggest thermal-coal miner, giving it more than one-tenth of the market, and make it…

A chief executive’s pay should depend on the earnings growth and total shareholder returns of his company. That, at any rate, is what Hermann Stern, the boss of Obermatt, a financial-research firm, believes. Yet at big American firms (ie, those in the S&P 100), a typical boss’s pay is correlated neither with performance nor with market capitalisation. By measuring performance against a peer group, Obermatt calculates the “excess pay” companies gave their bosses between 2008 and 2010. Occidental Petroleum, an energy firm, was the worst offender. Its boss, Ray Irani, who earned over $200m in 2008 alone, received almost eight times his “deserved” pay. Some bosses, however, were dramatically underpaid. Apple should have given the late Steve Jobs another $85m, by Obermatt’s measure (though he owned a lot of shares in addition to his $1-a-year salary). Others who delivered value for money included Eric Schmidt of Google, Scott Davis of UPS and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway.

IN AN early episode of “Sergeant Bilko”, a 1950s TV comedy, the eponymous hero rents an empty store. His fellow soldiers, convinced that the army’s “smartest operator” sees a business opportunity, beg to be made partners. Not all do well out of the deal.Nat Rothschild also has a name that inspires confidence among investors. The scion of a European banking dynasty (some of whose members own stakes in The Economist), Mr Rothschild raised £707m ($1.08 billion) to create his own empty store, a London-listed “cash shell” named Vallar. He then used the cash to buy stakes in two coal-mining ventures in Indonesia associated with the Bakrie group, a family-owned conglomerate.Bumi PLC, the British-based company that emerged with Mr Rothschild as co-chairman, appealed to cautious punters who might otherwise have shied away from risky commodity bets in faraway places. But the marriage of British finance and Indonesian business is on the rocks, and investors are sore.On February 3rd the Bakrie family and Samin Tan, an Indonesian businessman, called on Bumi’s shareholders to unseat Mr Rothschild from the board. The move came after months of boardroom strife, which began when the Bakries sold half of their stake to Mr Tan, to pay off debts. It worsened last November when Mr Rothschild called for “a radical ‘cleaning up’” of the “balance-sheet and corporate culture…

AS SCANDALS go, it is a corker. It involves secret recordings of lobbyists talking to tycoons about ministers, fraudulent documents, unrelated firms that share the same e-mail address, clueless foreigners piling into a vast market, bank drafts with dates that make no sense, PR flacks taped schmoozing hacks with honking traffic in the background, front companies named after Russian rivers, an apparently helpless prime minister, people under arrest and something between $8 billion and $20 billion pinched from the public purse.India’s telecoms scandal has been rumbling since 2008, when 122 mobile licences covering a third of India’s 2G spectrum were awarded to eight companies. (India today has 14 mobile-phone firms in all.) A constant drip of disclosures since then has numbed the public’s outrage. But on February 2nd India’s Supreme Court cancelled all 122 licences. Its 94-page ruling is required reading for anyone interested in doing business in India.Politically, the scandal’s effects are not yet known. Andimuthu Raja, the telecoms minister at the time, is in jail. His trial could reveal all manner of dirt…

Careful where you tread

CAN you trust Chinese accounts? Many investors fear (and several short-sellers are betting) that the answer is “no”. Sino-Forest, a big forestry firm listed in Toronto, is a case in point. Last year Muddy Waters, a short-seller, accused it of running a Ponzi scheme, which it denies. On January 31st Sino-Forest released the final report of independent investigators into the charge. Insiders crow that the gumshoes found no smoking gun. The gumshoes grumbled that, lacking access to all the evidence, they were “not able to reach definitive conclusions”.America’s SEC is trying to force the Shanghai office of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, a big Western accountancy firm, to hand over papers related to Longtop, a Chinese software firm that was delisted by the New York Stock Exchange last year. Deloitte refuses, saying this would violate Chinese laws on “state secrets”. Deloitte may have a point. If it co-operates, its local staff could be jailed under Chinese law.Many accountancy problems spring from reverse takeovers, when a Chinese firm buys a foreign one to…

“WE’VE been waiting for this day for 30 years,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, on the news this week that India had gone into exclusive negotiations with Dassault Aviation, a French firm, to buy 126 of its Rafale warplanes for $15 billion-20 billion. France has not sold a single Rafale overseas, and until this week the plane’s future looked iffy. Shares in Dassault Aviation soared by 18.5%.The loser, ironically, was the Rafale’s cousin, the Eurofighter Typhoon, built by a consortium led by EADS, Europe’s defence and aerospace champion, which is jointly controlled by Germany and France. EADS itself owns a 46% stake in Dassault, a legacy of earlier French government meddling, so its own shares inched up on the news.Dassault won its exclusive-bidder status by offering the lower price. Both European jets had satisfied the technical requirements of the Indian Air Force, which wants zippier planes to guard against China’s Chengdu J-10 combat aircraft and Pakistan’s ageing American F-16s. In tests over the Himalayas and the Rajasthan desert, India had eliminated the F-16 and F/A-18, the Russian MiG-35 and Swedish JAS 39 Gripen from the process during 2009-10.The capabilities of both the Rafale and the Eurofighter were on display during the Libyan war. The Typhoon is the superior air-to-air interceptor. The Rafale switches more easily into a ground-attack mode.After…

AMERICANS spent $2.6 trillion on health care in 2010, a staggering 18% of GDP. Yet few of them have the faintest idea what any treatment costs or how it compares with any other treatment. Prices vary wildly and seemingly without reason (see chart). Insurance terms require a dictionary. For most Americans, buying a procedure is akin to choosing a house blindfolded, signing a mortgage in Aramaic, then discovering the price later. Slowly, however, this is changing.

The past decade has seen a shift in how people pay for medicine. Americans’ health spending is growing at a slower pace. This is partly because of the downturn, but not entirely. The rate of growth fell every year between 2002 and 2009, note David Knott and Rodney Zemmel of McKinsey & Company, a consultancy. There are many reasons for this—for example, many costly drugs have lost their…

Nice boat, but where can I park it?

EVEN superyacht-owners are feeling the pinch. Last year only 173 superyachts (vessels over 30 metres long) slipped into the briny, according to Superyacht Intelligence, a consultancy. That’s 27 fewer than in 2010 and far below the peak in 2008, when 260 floating pleasure palaces hit the waves. The number of vessels on order, too, slipped from 453 in 2011 to 423 this year. But cheer up: their combined length rose from 20km (12 miles) to 23km. The super-duper rich are surprisingly unimaginative when it comes to dreaming up new ways to outdo each other.The biggest yacht ever was launched in 2010. Roman Abramovich, a Russian billionaire, reputedly forked out €500m ($660m) for the 164-metre Eclipse (pictured). It includes such essentials as a mini-submarine, a hair salon and two helipads. (Owning a yacht with only one helipad would be embarrassing—a bit like owning a football club that is only fourth in England’s Premier League.)Quite sensibly, Mr Abramovich has hung on to his other superyachts. On the brokerage market (second-hand…

IN A futuristic art gallery which Carlos Slim opened last year in Mexico City, visitors can enjoy, among other things, a hall of rare coins and share certificates. Sometimes art speaks louder than words.Mr Slim is the richest man in the world. According to Forbes, he and his family have amassed a comfortable nest egg of $63 billion. (Bill Gates would be richer had he given away less of his stash, or Mr Slim more of his.) In Mexico Mr Slim is a giant: his companies account for more than a third of the stockmarket.The Slim fortune was made in telephony. After growing moderately rich from property, mining and other businesses, Mr Slim, the son of a Lebanese immigrant named Salim, bought Telmex, Mexico’s state-run telephone monopoly, in 1990. Telmex still has 80% of Mexico’s landlines, and about 75% of its broadband connections. Telcel, its sister company, has 70% of the mobile market. Both now belong to América Móvil, a Slim venture which has spread across 18 countries in the Americas and is the biggest or second-biggest player in all but three. With nearly 250m subscribers, it is the world’s…

SOME parents give their children cakes. A few give them cake shops. The hot topic in South Korea is the trend for daughters and grand-daughters of chaebol families to open bakeries and other small food outlets. The chaebol are the conglomerates that dominate the Korean economy, so these plutocratic pâtissières have deeper pockets than any of the little bakers they compete against.Their baking has provoked outrage. Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, calls it a “hobby” business for rich girls that threatens the livelihood of poor shopkeepers. Lee Ju-young, a member of the national assembly, likens it to Park Ji-sung (Manchester United’s Korean midfielder) lording it over amateurs in a backstreet game of football. A restaurateur in Seoul puts it more plaintively: “These families already control everything else in Korea. Why can’t they leave something for the rest of us?”The chaebol families have decided that this is not a battle worth picking. Scions of the Samsung, LG and Hyundai dynasties are all hanging up their aprons. Artisée, a chain of swanky pastry shops run by Lee Boo-jin, whose dad is the chairman of Samsung, is to close. So is the Hyundai-affiliated Ozen.Whether this will help small bakers much is open to question. Artisée has only 27 shops; Ozen a mere two. Both are…

A COUPLE of years ago the Obamas visited Paris. One Sunday morning Michelle and her daughters decided to sample the city’s famous shops. There was only one problem: the shops were all firmly fermés (French secularism is mysteriously suspended when it comes to observing the Sabbath). Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s ever-helpful president, had to call a few places personally and ask them to open.Europe’s greatest achievement is supposed to be its single market. But actually taking advantage of that market can be frustrating. Retailing is a mess of restrictive practices and cultural oddities. Continental Europe boasts plenty of charming boulangeries and confiterías. But charm costs time and money. You may have to visit six or seven shops to fill your shopping bag—and one or two will inevitably be closed. Parisian butchers close on Tuesday afternoons and Thursdays—and whenever else the proprietor decides to put a “fermeture exceptionelle” sign in the window.Europe has some mighty supermarkets, to be sure. But they are often…

Some day, all this will belong to the state

HE IS probably Bangladesh’s most celebrated citizen. Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel peace prize, founded Grameen Bank in 1983 to provide tiny loans to poor rural women. Grameen became a global model for microfinance. It also spawned 48 other firms in sectors that stretch from textiles to mobile phones. Yet the Bangladeshi government seems determined to take Mr Yunus down a peg.In May 2011 the government pushed him out of his job as boss of Grameen Bank, saying that he was past the retirement age for someone running a government bank. (Grameen Bank mostly belongs to its borrowers but the state owns a slice.) Mr Yunus says this is just a pretext for a power grab. The government now wants to assert more control over other firms in the Grameen network, which includes assets worth an estimated $1.6 billion.This is controversial, to put it mildly, not least because some Grameen firms have big foreign partners. Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s largest telecoms provider, was created with Norway’s Telenor and generates sales of nearly $1…

This year’s beach sumo contest was surprisingly one-sided

MOST people running a business that could end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit would keep a low profile. Not Kim Dotcom (pictured). The boss of Megaupload, a popular website that let users store and share music, films and other content, Mr Dotcom went out of his way to attract attention—and not just by changing his surname from Schmitz. He surrounded himself with glamorous women and fast cars bearing number plates such as “GUILTY”. He likened himself to Dr Evil, a movie villain, though he looks more like Dr Evil’s henchman, Fat Bastard.American investigators examining Megaupload’s business concluded that it was encouraging its users to share pirated content. They persuaded authorities in Britain, Hong Kong and other countries to seize the firm’s assets and to arrest its owners, including Mr Dotcom, who was nabbed by police in New Zealand on January 20th after being found with a shotgun in a “safe room” at his mega-mansion. The raid occurred just as Hollywood was howling after Congress gave up on a bill to crack down on piracy….

FOR months Research In Motion (RIM), the Canadian maker of BlackBerry smartphones, has seemed incapable of getting anything right. Its PlayBook tablet went on sale without e-mail (unless attached to a BlackBerry). Its network was blacked out for days with scarcely a word from the company. It has been slow to upgrade BlackBerry’s operating system. Investors squealed as the share price fell by 70% in ten months. Canadians are now worried they might lose a second technology champion within a few years.Ever louder calls for a change in leadership were answered on January 22nd, when RIM’s joint chief executives and chairmen, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, stepped down. Investors doubt the new chief executive, Thorsten Heins, a former chief operating officer, will stop the rot. On January 23rd the share price fell by 9%.Perhaps that is because RIM sees little rot to stop. Mr Heins was anointed by Messrs Balsillie and Laziridis, who are still on the board. “I don’t think there is some drastic change needed,” he told analysts this week—certainly not a break-up of RIM, an idea some disgruntled shareholders want to consider. His boldest step will be to find a new chief marketing officer.But rot there is. Fewer and fewer companies insist that their staff use BlackBerrys. ComScore, a research firm, says that last autumn only a sixth of American smartphone-users brandished RIM’s…

LAWYERS have long considered themselves a breed apart: highly educated professionals, not dim-witted businessmen who think a “whereas” is a man who turns into a small member of the horse family when the moon is full. Many countries bar business types from owning even a bit (much less all) of a law firm. But in Britain, that law changed in October.Companies are queuing up to form new “alternative business structures” (ABS). The Solicitors Regulation Authority, the biggest legal regulator, has received at least 65 applications. The first ABSs should be approved in February.The “alternative” possibilities are many. Irwin Mitchell, a big personal-injury firm, may float its shares. Slater & Gordon, which in 2007 became the first Australian firm to go public, has since bought some smaller firms and nearly tripled its revenues, to A$182m ($194m).Another new structure will be that of the Co-operative, a membership organisation best known for its supermarkets, but which also runs a bank and buries and cremates more people than any other entity in Britain. The Co-op already has a legal arm for its members. Approval as an ABS will let it sell the same services to the general public. In anticipation, it plans to add 150 people to its current legal staff of 400.Liberalisation will make lawyering cheaper, say its boosters. Tech-savvy entrepreneurs may buy or start law firms and offer…

THERE are not many businesses in which the next six years’ worth of customers form an orderly queue, putting down fat deposits and topping them up with further instalments as they wait in line. But that is Boeing’s fortunate position. On January 25th it announced a 21% rise in annual net profits, to $4 billion.Last September, after three years of delay, Boeing made the first deliveries of its newest model, the 787 Dreamliner. A revamped version of the trusty but ageing 747 jumbo has also arrived, two years late. A few airlines got fed up and cancelled, but most had little choice but to keep waiting. Boeing’s main rival, Airbus, has an even longer backlog—up to eight years at current production rates. And the delivery schedule for Airbus’s answer to the Dreamliner, the A350, has been slipping.Last year, straining to ramp up production to meet soaring demand, the two big planemakers turned out a record 1,011 airliners between them. But for every plane they delivered, they won more than two fresh orders (net of cancellations), so the queue got longer. On January 25th Boeing won its largest-ever order from Europe:…