Britain's super-rich get even richer!

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Britain's richest people got collectively wealthier by 18 percent as the rest of the country weathered harsh government cuts, according to an annual list published Sunday.

Indian-born steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal retained the top spot in The Sunday Times Rich List for a seventh straight year, despite seeing about £5 billion ($8 billion, 5.7 billion euros) wiped off his fortune.

The 1,000 richest people in Britain saw their wealth continue to bounce back from the recession and increase to a collective fortune of £395.8 billion.



The number of billionaires in Britain now stands at 73 -- up from 53 last year and almost matching the record of 75 set in the list of 2008 before the financial crisis. Forty are British-born.

Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov moved from sixth position to second spot in the list after adding £7.7 billion to his fortune, which is now worth £12.4 billion.

Usmanov owns a large stake in Russian iron and steel firm Metalloinvest and recently courted controversy in Britain by trying to build up a controlling stake in English football giants Arsenal.

His bid was thwarted last month when US sports tycoon Stan Kroenke took control of the Premier League side.
Meanwhile the fortune of Mittal, the London-based head of ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel maker, fell by around 22 percent to £17.5 billion in the past 12 months, the biggest drop on this year's list.

The huge fall in the 60-year-old's wealth was driven by a plunge in the share price of ArcelorMittal as the global steel industry struggled to cope with costly raw materials and slow demand.

The highest new female entry is Chinese businesswoman Xiuli Hawken, 48, who made her fortune converting underground military shelters in China into underground shopping malls. She was ranked 61st, with a fortune of £1.06 billion. She lives in London.

Another new female entry is Mary Perkins, who founded the chain of glasses shops, Specsavers, with her husband Douglas. Their wealth has increased 42 percent since last year and stands at £1.15 billion.

The increased wealth comes as most of the country faces harsh austerity measures introduced by the coalition government to cut Britain's record deficit.

The list, which is for those who have Britain as their home or main base of operations, is based on identifiable wealth such as land, property or significant shares in publicly quoted companies, and excludes bank accounts.

- Britain's top 10 billionaires in The Sunday Times Rich List 2011 (last year's rank in brackets):

1. Lakshmi Mittal -- steel -- £17.514 billion (1st)

2. Alisher Usmanov -- steel -- £12.4 billion (6th)
3. Roman Abramovich -- oil, industry -- £10.3 billion (2nd)
4. The Duke of Westminster -- property -- £7 billion (3rd)
5. Ernesto and Kirsty Bertarelli -- pharmaceuticals -- £6.87 billion (4th)
6. Leonard Blavatnik -- industry -- £6.237 billion (15th)
7. John Fredriksen and family -- shipping -- £6.2 billion (16th)
8. David and Simon Reuben -- property, Internet -- £6.176 billion (5th)
9. Gopi and Sri Hinduja -- industry, finance -- £6 billion (new)
9. Galen and George Weston -- retailing -- £6 billion (7th)

© 2011 AFP
This story is sourced direct from an overseas news agency as an additional service to readers. Spelling follows North American usage, along with foreign currency and measurement units.
 

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Golf legend Seve Ballesteros dies, Fierce commitment and uncharted brilliance!

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Seve Ballesteros, the legendary five-time major winning golfer, has died at the age of 54 after losing his fight against cancer.

The news was confirmed by a statement on the golfer's official website which said: "Today, at 2.10am Spanish time, Seve Ballesteros passed away peacefully surrounded by his family at his home in Pedrena.

"The Ballesteros family is very grateful for all the support and gestures of love that have been received since Seve was diagnosed with a brain tumour on 5th October 2008 at Madrid Hospital la Paz.

" Ballesteros' brother Baldomero told reporters the funeral will be held on Wednesday in Pedrena, while Miguel Angel Revilla, head of the local Cantabria government, said the region would observe three days of official mourning.

Ballesteros had been recuperating at his home in northern Spain after a series of operations since being diagnosed with two malignant brain tumours in 2008.

His condition worsened on Wednesday, at which point he was admitted to hospital; rumours had swept Spain last week that Ballesteros's situation had taken a rapid downturn. On Friday, Ballesteros was under heavy sedation and his family released a statement confirming his situation had deteriorated.

In an unfortunate coincidence, the Spanish Open – the last competition Ballesteros won as a professional in 1995 – is currently taking place in Barcelona. José María Olazábal, the golfer closest to Ballesteros and inspired by him since childhood, was too emotional to speak to the media in the aftermath of his Friday round in Barcelona. "I can't talk," Olazábal said. "I can only wait, and cry."

Another Spanish golfer and Olazábal's playing partner, Miguel Angel Jiménez, was in tears upon completion of his second round. Olazábal, Europe's Ryder Cup captain, recently stated his dream that Ballesteros could be alongside him for the meeting with the United States in Chicago next autumn. The pair met a fortnight ago, at which point Ballesteros was in a wheelchair.

Olazábal's manager, Sergio Gómez, reported that Ballesteros's daughter had passed on details of her father's condition on Thursday. "Seve's physical condition was not good when José María went to see him, but they talked about golf and everything," Gómez said. "Then came the call yesterday to tell him that Seve was in a critical condition."

Ballesteros's illness initially came to light after he collapsed at Madrid airport in October 2008; during the intervening period, he has rarely been seen in public. Since his first surgery, which lasted 12 hours, he has undergone almost continuous chemotherapy and radiotherapy. In 2009, after his fourth chemotherapy course, Ballesteros labelled it "a miracle" he was still alive.

In 2010, during his last television interview with the BBC, Ballesteros spoke of fighting cancer. "You can't have it all in life," he said. "One day you feel fantastic, the next you never know what is going to happen. You just take a look at how many days of glory I had before. It has been a fantastic life and this, what has happened to me, is what I will call destiny; one test that God is putting on me."

Ballesteros, who retired from professional golf in 2007, was earlier regarded as a pioneer for the European game overseas. He had turned professional at the age of 16, in 1974, finishing second to Jack Nicklaus in the Open at Birkdale only two years later.

He was the first from this continent to claim a Masters title, in 1980, a feat he repeated at Augusta three years later. Ballesteros was the winner of the Open in 1979, 1984 and 1988. Besides winning a total of 87 titles in his career, Ballesteros played in eight Ryder Cups, claiming 20 points from 37 matches. He also captained a successful European team, fittingly on his home soil in Valderrama, 14 years ago.

Ballesteros had not been deemed well enough to make a planned trip to St Andrews to say a farewell to British fans at the time of last year's Open. At the Masters last month, Phil Mickelson dedicated a Spanish-themed champions' dinner to the absent Ballesteros, the man he credits with his own decision to start playing golf.

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Fierce commitment and uncharted brilliance

By James Lawton - The Independent

Ballesteros's death was more than the end of a great sports career

Seve Ballesteros, pictured in 1976

The great matador Manuel Benitez announced to his young sister that he would dress her in the finest clothes – or in mourning. His compatriot Seve Ballesteros never made such a declaration. It wouldn't have been appropriate on the lips of a golfer, because when Seve was young the game he embraced as if it was life itself made no great call on Spanish emotions.

Last night, though, we could measure the extent of his achievement because much of his country, and the wide world of sport, were indeed in the deepest mourning.

There were times when the golf of Ballesteros was almost incidental. The passion and the grace and the burning eyes and the windswept hair and the noble head and the wild, fist-pumping self-belief were what commanded the attention of his people as much as the superb anarchy of his play, and they sent a great charge through a game that had never known such fierce commitment and uncharted brilliance.

Ballesteros's death, which came after a typically brave and stoic reaction to the crushing news of a cancerous brain tumour, was more than the end of a great sports career. It was the last sigh of a man who brought a flamenco snap to everything he did, whose life of 54 years was perhaps not so cruelly compressed as it might have seemed at the first news that he had gone. Not, at least, for anyone who had seen the poignant truth that when Ballesteros could no longer play golf as masterfully as a god and, sometimes, as impishly as a street urchin, a central part of his existence had disappeared.

Ballesteros at times hinted as much. His obsession with golf, a game far from the heart of most young Spaniards, was nurtured by the evidence that it could provide a boy of humble stock with a good living, something far above the expectations of his father, who worked on the land around the Real Golf Club of Pedrena on the Gulf of Santander.

Severiano's uncle Ramon Sota was professional champion of Spain four times and once finished sixth at the US Masters, a title his nephew would win twice in a blaze of virtuosity. The boy could see the most desirable of lives and he pursued the ambition as single-mindedly as the torero Benitez, better known as El Cordobes. But there was a price, one he acknowledged in the wake of his failed marriage to Carmen, the mother of his three children, and later the death in a car crash of his girlfriend.

Ballesteros saw more clearly than ever before that when he embraced golf, playing in the moonlight on a course banned to caddies but for one day of the year, he had immersed himself in a game which had brought him unimagined fame and wealth but one that also, when it withdrew its favours, and was no longer susceptible to his fierce will, had left him with a hollow place in the pit of his stomach – and a sometimes almost unbearable pain in his back.

El Cordobes had played with the bulls in the Andalucian breeding fields in the night, a gypsy boy, impertinent and impatient, and Ballesteros fashioned his game, almost completely self-taught, on the forbidden course and then on the neighbouring beach. The bullfighter risked his life; the golfer placed his in a tunnel from which in the end there was really no escape.

That was the truth which, at least in the view of so many of his warmest admirers, haunted the corridors of the La Paz hospital in Madrid, before he died surrounded by his family at his home in Pedrena.

Life isn't a game, of course, but the tragedy behind the glory of Seve Ballesteros was that sometimes he plainly found it hard to distinguish between the two. He wept unashamedly in defeat and was distraught when he finished second as a 19-year-old at the Open at Royal Birkdale in 1976. Ballesteros always lived in the moment, and if such anguish was hard to understand after he had been beaten only by the superstar American Johnny Miller, and tied with Jack Nicklaus, it was soon enough widely understood that the thin, intense youth played only to win. It wasn't considered an ambition; it was a birthright.

He won three Opens along with his Masters titles, and each time he won a major he seemed to journey a little deeper into the improbable, even the surreal.

When he won his first Open, the American Hale Irwin sneered that the Claret Jug had gone to the "car-park" champion, a wild hitter who had had to retrieve his ball from under a car. Ballesteros smouldered and went on to dazzle the world.

Before the range of his genius began to ebb, irretrievably, he was able to produce one last great expression of it. It was in his final major triumph at Lytham in 1988. He overwhelmed the tough and gifted pro Nick Price with golf that was filled with all of his nerve and invention and a touch that was rarely less than exquisite. For his last round he wore a blue sweater, and the banner headline was inevitable: Rhapsody in Blue.

But then if Seve Ballesteros was in some ways a rhapsody that turned into a lament, his meaning was never threatened, not even when his life rushed away these last few days.
When he received the grim diagnosis, he thanked all his admirers for their messages of support and said he would fight with as much courage and serenity as it was possible to muster. Serenity was something that had been denied him for some time, even to the extent that reports of an attempted suicide were not lightly dismissed.

But then if it was true that in his last days Seve Ballesteros found a degree of that elusive serenity, it may have had something to do with the fact that finally he understood quite how he was valued by the galleries he had fought so hard, and sometimes so desperately, to please. There was a time when he seemed to believe that everything he had achieved was finely balanced on the brilliance of his next shot. Of course it wasn't. Few sportsmen on earth had less reason to worry about the meaning of what they had done – and how much they would always be loved.

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• Seve Ballesteros, who brought a flamenco snap to all he did
• 'Seve made you love him. Made you wish you could be him'
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Give, you should receive!

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Are you a giver or receiver?

SCIENCE OF BUILDING LEADERS By ROSHAN THIRAN

 “Great leaders are great givers” - John Maxwell

I have often been told that money cannot buy us happiness. But now scientists beg to differ. They say it can make us happy as long as we spend it on someone else!

According to three scientific studies done by University of British Columbia Professor Elizabeth Dunn and her team, “regardless of income, those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not.”

In tests, those giving money away were far happier than others spending it on luxuries for themselves. Giving away as little as a couple of ringgit daily is enough to significantly boost happiness levels, according to Harvard professor Michael Norton.

The same can be said of countries. According to a global study by Arwin and Lew, “the statistical evidence from this study therefore suggests that as far as happiness is concerned, it is better to give than to receive aid.” Leveraging the World Database of Happiness, this study found that countries that gave more aid had a direct correlation with happiness whilst receiving aid did not impact happiness.

A large banner displaying the image of Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India. Mother Teresa, who died at age 87 in 1997 in Calcutta where she is buried, says “a life not lived for others is not a life.” — AP 

Interestingly, it seems the same for businesses. Businesses that are primarily focused on enhancing shareholder value (i.e. receiving profits), have unhappier people compared with start-ups and social enterprises (companies that give to its communities).

In fact, in a recent UK poll, people in large companies have a far higher disposable income than their grandparents, yet are not happier. Unhappy people mean lower productivity and higher healthcare costs.

Most people forget that inspired leadership is more about people and not products or profit. And people are inspired by organisations and leaders that give rather in addition to receiving.

History is awash with the value of giving. Christopher Chapman's 1680 grave in Westminster Abbey reads: “What I gave, I have. What I spent, I had. What I left, I lost by not giving it.” Longfellow wrote, “Give what you have. Notable author John Bunyan reminds us, “There was a man, though some did count him mad; the more he cast away the more he had.”

Of course there are some who believe they have little to give, and that their gift will make little difference. Mother Teresa confounds that by saying, “A life not lived for others is not a life.” If anyone truly lived a life of giving, it was Mother Teresa.

Leaders sometimes give at great personal cost to themselves. Gandhi lost his life to his cause. So did Martin Luther King. But their leadership legacies live forever.

Today, we see a different form of leadership. A leadership of wanting to receive more and more. The Wall Street Journal suggested that a culture of greed' was to blame for the recent financial crisis with billionaire investor Stephen Jarislowsky echoing that extreme greed' was to blame. Even when organisations were falling apart, we read of its leaders receiving more and more. In the movie Wall Street Gordon Gekko, in his greed is good' speech, crystallised why receiving is the new leadership mantra.

But yet when we explore new research on legendary leaders', the following are the top three leadership traits identified:

• Legendary leaders seek significance (people) rather than success (profits). They value people - their families, employees, and customers. They make decisions based on the impact to key stakeholders.

•  Serve a purpose rather than achieve results. Legendary leaders resist the pressure for immediate gratification and focus on long term purpose. They evaluate new products and services on the needs of the marketplace and how it improves the lives of its users.

•  Legendary leaders focus on “what can I give?” rather than “what can I get?” They follow a philosophy of abundance. Instead of fighting to get a bigger piece of the pie, they work to make the pie larger.

Reading through the top three traits of legendary leaders, it paints a picture of a giving leader. The opposite of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. They focus on people, not only on profits, have long term purpose and bring benefit to society. Interestingly, social enterprises are organisations that focus on significance, ensuring impact to the community and these organisations end up creating new markets in the process.

I recently was invited to be one of the main judges at the latest reality show from TV3, Sejuta Impian (to be aired Sunday weekly from May 15th). The show centres on enabling Malaysians to be able to fulfil their dreams', as long as these dreams' benefit the community in some way or form.

As I watched the 92 finalists come and present their cases for funding, I was inspired by how Malaysians want to impact the community. More interestingly was the mushrooming of social enterprises with a clear social mission and a solid plan of sustainability through profits.

More and more organisations today are transforming from profit-driven' only into social-driven' missions. GE is moving into green territory with its eco-imagination' mission. Google “does no evil” whilst AirAsia's social mission is to ensure “everyone can fly.” Everywhere organisations realise that giving ensures a bigger return and are altering their focus from profit singularly to a more community-based mission.

Social enterprises and giving' companies don't just donate cash and gifts. They give back to society by making the world a better place, engaging with stakeholders and the community around them. They give back to their employees with great workplace practices.

Companies who consistently try to take into account its stakeholders and community outperformed the S&P 500 by more than twice the average over the past 15 years. (Schmidt, 2000). This result was confirmed by Harvard University, who found community-based' companies showed four times the growth rate and eight times the employment growth when compared with companies that are shareholder-only focused (Harvard University, 2000).

How is it that giving' companies outperform the traditional maximising shareholder value' organisations? In C.K. Prahalad's book Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, he challenges big companies by showcasing that we could make bigger profit and margins by focusing on people who earn less than US$2 per day.

His book showcased how social enterprises that championed the poor and other social causes reaped significant bigger margins than the big boys. Grameen Bank in Bangladesh outperformed all other banks but their core mission was to serve the poor, not to enhance shareholder value.

Traditional businesses compete either on price, quality level or service as their competitive advantage. NGOs often use value of service or societal benefit to generate their competitive advantage.

Social enterprises tap on both these competitive advantages but additionally tap into further social advantages that can be used for competitive purposes, such as community support, superior brand identity, customer commitment to the cause, and employee engagement.

Nothing unites people more (especially your employee base) than to work together towards the greater good of mankind and the community. Giving' truly excites your employees and gets them committed to your cause, ensuring higher margins and profitability.

We often hear of stories of leaders who jump out of their big CEO roles and gravitate towards new roles which have more meaning. It is a strange phenomenon that they all reach a stage in their careers when leaders feel compelled to suddenly give back'.

Peter Lynch was at the peak of his career, having grown the Fidelity Magellan fund, when he decided to leave to set up a philanthropic fund. So did Bill Gates, Carnegie and Rockefeller.

Why does it have to be so late in one's career that giving happens? Giving is simple. Giving is not only providing financial support. The best leaders believe that “you get the best out of others when you give the best of yourself” and they start giving early in life.



So, how do leaders in business give throughout their careers? Below are three simple ways that each of us can begin the process of giving back.

• Listening - The greatest courtesy a leader can give is to listen. Everyone wants to be listened to. The problem is most leaders have no time to listen and be an empathetic ear to colleagues, subordinates, suppliers, and customers. You will be surprised by the information and ideas you may receive in exchange for listening.

•  Giving feedback to employees - Courageous leaders know that giving and receiving feedback are needed for inspiring relationships. 70% of employees feel they hear too little feedback and have too little interaction with their direct manager, with limited positive feedback and constructive feedback offered. Most view the annual performance appraisal as being a broken process for delivering feedback. I personally struggle with this as it is extremely time-consuming, but the more feedback you give, the better your team performs.

•  Developing others - Leadership is not a platform to use people but to develop them. The legacy of a leader is not one who achieves the most, but one who builds up other great leaders who will accomplish more. If you want to succeed as a leader, focus more on what you can do for others rather than what you expect others to do for you. Teach, coach and mentor your employees. In return, they will outperform for you.

Give always

I am going to end this article with a short story on why giving sometimes even gets you out of trouble, especially poor drivers. A few years ago, an accident took place with a woman's car crashing into a man's car. Both cars were wrecked. But amazingly, neither got injured.

As they crawled out of their demolished cars, they both counted their blessings with the man shocked by this miracle. “Even more amazing,” said the woman, “my wine did not even break. Here, have my bottle to celebrate our survival,” as she gives the new bottle to the man.

The man smiled and with his manly grip opened the bottle, drank half and handed it back to the lady, who simply put the cork back in and handed it back. Flustered, the man asked, “Aren't you having any?” To which the woman replied, “No. I think I'll just wait for the police.”

Final thoughts

Giving is limited when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give and reap the rewards. As Albert Einstein said: “The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving.” Be a generous leader keep giving to your people.

l Roshan Thiran is CEO of Leaderonomics, a social enterprise passionate about transforming the nation through giving. If you are interested in giving back to the community or being part of supporting leadership development for under-privileged kids, call +60176362047or login to www.diodecamp.com

China's First Space Station

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How China's First Space Station Will Work (Infographic)

Karl Tate, SPACE.com Infographics Artist

Date: 06 May 2011 Time: 01:26 AM ET

Photos: China's First Space Station

Sneak a peek at China's plans for its first orbital space station and the milestones to build it.

 

Source:
SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
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Bank Negara raises key interest rate

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By FINTAN NG  fintan@thestar.com.my




PETALING JAYA: Bank Negara raised the overnight policy rate (OPR) by 25 basis points to 3% and increased the statutory reserve requirement (SRR) by 1 percentage point to 3%, a move that took most by surprise.

The OPR, the benchmark interest rate commercial banks use to calculate their base lending rates for loans, was last raised in July last year.

The central bank hiked the SRR by 100 basis points to 3% effective May 16 as a pre-emptive measure following the build-up of liquidity in the financial system.

“With the economy firmly on a steady growth path, the monetary policy committee decided to adjust the degree of monetary accommodation,” said the central bank in a statement yesterday.

“At the current OPR level, the stance of monetary policy remains supportive of growth. The future stance of monetary policy will depend on the assessment of the risk to growth and inflation prospects.”

Bank Negara acknowledged inflation, which has increased globally on account of higher energy and food prices, has inched up too in Malaysia and has now hit 3% in March to average 2.8% for the first quarter of 2011.

“Global commodity and energy prices are projected to remain elevated during the year, with inflation in major trading partners also expected to rise further. There are also some signs that domestic demand factors could exert upward pressure on prices in the second half of the year,” the central bank said.

However, it noted that despite higher inflationary pressure, latest indicators pointed towards continued strengthening of private investment and sustained private consumption expenditure in the first quarter.

“Growth will be underpinned by the firm expansion of domestic demand. Sustained employment conditions and income growth is expected to provide support to private consumption, while private investment is projected to strengthen amid the improved investment environment,” it added.

In a separate statement, the central bank said the decision to raise the SRR was undertaken as a pre-emptive measure to manage the significant build-up of liquidity, which could result in financial imbalances and create risks to financial stability.


Economists, who were divided over whether the OPR would be raised, told StarBiz that the central bank was sending out a message that inflation was now the concern instead of growth.

AmResearch Sdn Bhd senior economist Manokaran Mottain said policymakers were sending out the message that they were vigilant.

“They're acknowledging that inflation is putting pressure on the economy,” he said, adding that market consensus was for the OPR to remain unchanged with a Bloomberg survey showing that seven out of 16 economists expected the hike, with the rest expecting the OPR to remain the same.

Nevertheless, economists agreed with the central bank that the rate hikes were still supportive of growth with domestic demand now the focus.

CIMB Investment Bank Bhd head of economics Lee Heng Guie said there was likely to be another 25-basis point hike in the OPR in July but this, judging from the language of the Monetary Policy Committee statement, “will depend on risks to growth and inflationary prospects”.

Meanwhile Affin Investment Bank Bhd economist Alan Tan said the decision to raise the OPR was “a close call” as a lot of brokers expected interest rates to remain unchanged due to the strengthening ringgit.

“Going forward, the central bank is signalling that rising inflation will be of concern and that growth will come from domestic demand as external demand weakens,” he said.

Tan expects another 25-basis point hike before year-end as the central bank moved in tandem with regional peers in normalising interest rates and managing capital flows.

“The normalisation of the rates is important because the US Federal Reserve has indicated that there may be a hike in rates next year and if policymakers here keep rates low for a prolonged period, there's a risk of a capital outflow,” he said.

For Bank Negara statements click here