Floated with a market value of £11.9m, the shares rose 3p to 94p yesterday.Vistashares rose 4.5p to 100.5p yesterday. Initial public offerings on the junior market have raised £970m to date this year, compared with £436m in 2002. The peak year was 2000, when 265 companies joined AIM, raising £1.4bn.Fads, which has 53 stores, was declared insolvent 18 months ago and sold for £1 to Strategic Retail, a cash shell set up by the company’s administrator The group plans to buy other distressed retailers. Both shares moved to a modest premium to their opening prices.
With this year almost over, 140 new companies have joined AIM while 19 have signalled their intention to float in the near future In 2002, 147 companies joined AIM. The number of companies trading on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), the junior market run by the London Stock Exchange, reached a record 750 yesterday after two new flotations.

The arrival of Strategic Retail – which has bought the DIY retailer Fads – and Vista Group, a maker of PVC doors, capped a busy week and a much improved year for AIM. I think we will achieve that and end up with a smaller, stronger business.”RMC received a tentative offer for its German operations from rival HeidelbergCement in the autumn but it became quickly apparent that competition authorities would not accept the deal.There was better news at RMC’s other divisions in yesterday’s trading review, which sent the shares up more than 4 per cent to 663p.The company’s recently opened cement works in Warwickshire is now running at consistent capacity after a string of problems, boosting profitability in the UK.And in the US “the strength of the housing sector continues to compensate for the weakness of the non-residential sector, and there are signs that the economy is beginning to grow strongly,” Mr Auer said.. RMC has halved its German workforce to 4,000 employees over the past three years and another big redundancy programme will be detailed at the time of the company’s annual results in February. A car dealer was found guilty yesterday of selling a Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit for £8,500 after falsely claiming that it had belonged to Lord Snowdon and Lord Grade. It stained the work with something base and uncontrolled, and though we’re a good deal less fussy these days about word-play, puns still have a capacity to make us uncomfortably aware of class distinctions. What is it about a pun that is so pungent in literary terms – so exactly poised between a fragrance and a stink?

What is it about a pun that is so pungent in literary terms – so exactly poised between a fragrance and a stink? Samuel Johnson famously wrinkled his nose at their presence in Shakespeare, taking them as evidence of an impurity of talent. Naturally, there are limits; I don’t think we would want a chief political correspondent who openly supported one party or another.

Effectively, this prevents a writer from moving from a particular instance to a general conclusion, and would in practice reduce him to idle gossip.And where does this stop? If a BBC employee may not write about matters of public concern in the newspapers, why should he be permitted to do so between hard covers? Jeremy Paxman’s excellent and enjoyable books on a series of public issues have reached a wide audience, and they contain some very forcefully-argued convictions. The corporation considers that the practice is incompatible with its obligation to be politically neutral, and so from now on some of its best known journalists will be restricted to working for the BBC itself.
The boundaries of the ordinance are not very clear, and are going to lead to trouble. He was not a demon, nor a creature of such dazzling charisma that, like Steiner’s Hitler, his very words had to be blocked out. In fact, there were rather mundane rational explanations for almost all their evil acts: extreme experiences of childhood sexual abuse and so on.

They cannot examine or try to understand Hitler, because he is a demonic force beyond rationality. When I call something evil, it is the beginning of an exploration of how a horrific event occurred. When Bush and his fellow fundamentalists use it, they are closing down the argument: “Oh, the guy was evil, that’s why he did it”.Even post-religious thinkers, however, have been tempted to describe evil as something mysterious and incomprehensible. In human terms, a few centuries is a very quick time to revise such a basic intellectual concept.