The Chief executive of Hanson, the building materials giant, complained yesterday of the Government’s “lack of action” on road building. It said the lack of activity in the UK meant that it was reviewing its business here.Mr Murray said, out of the 100 major roads schemes announced three years ago, just 20 had been completed, 13 were in progress, while the rest were stuck at the planning stage. The level of public consultation required for major projects had to be reduced or the UK’s infrastructure would fall behind the rest of the developed world.”They [the Government] have committed themselves to put record amounts into transport. That is what is needed to relieve congestion and get the country moving,” he said.”There are 30 million people with driving licences in the UK. Surely they want to know whether they are going to be held up on the M25, or where-ever, for hours and hours.”Hanson said that it had started the full structural review of its UK business in response to the sluggish demand. The move would mean cost-cutting and job reductions, Mr Murray said, although he declined to identify their likely magnitude.

Hanson’s UK aggregates business employs 3,700.Hanson’s interim results showed pre-tax profits, before exceptionals, slip to £113.9m, from £120.6m previously. The company said it would have been ahead of last year were it not for a £4.8m increase in pension costs and a £7.1m hit from currency movements.”It’s all about pull-through in the second half. We have it all to do,” Mr Murray said, adding the UK was the only area of concern in the group’s operations.Hanson faces a barrage of claims related to the production of materials containing asbestos. In the first half, 11,700 new claimants arose, while 3,500 claims were resolved, with 70 per cent dismissed.The cost of settling in the period was $32.0m (£18m), $8.2m higher than the second half of 2003 Outstanding claims now total 132,400. Mr Murray said: “The vast majority of claims have no substance to them.”. A Company which promised to mass produce life-saving drugs from the eggs of genetically modified chickens is to shut down its operations after failing to raise rescue finance.

It is like having an ancestor who is a red-head and working out which of the siblings in the crowd is going to be a red-head.”TranXenoGen, founded by Kim Tan, joins PPL Therapeutics, the company which cloned Dolly the sheep, on a long list of failed ventures in transgenics, the genetic modification of animals to produce biological drugs or organs for use in humans.Keith Redpath, at the consultancy Wood Mackenzie, said: “When PPL and TranXenoGen were set up there were predictions flying around of a shortage of manufacturing capacity for biological drugs. Since then a lot of people have added capacity so the economics have shifted, while transgenics science has not advanced as fast as necessary.”TranXenoGen shares fell 63 per cent to 2.62p, as the company admitted it could not find the funds to continue its scientific work beyond August. There’s a real sense of dread about what will happen during the election campaign.”About 20,000 American troops are in Afghanistan. US Secretary of State Colin Powell and top Saudi officials held talks in Jeddah on forming a Muslim force to be deployed in Iraq as a supplement to the US-led coalition. The US Secretary of State Colin Powell and top Saudi officials held talks in Jeddah on forming a Muslim force to be deployed in Iraq as a supplement to the US-led coalition.
The Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal acknowledged at a news conference that preliminary discussions on the subject had been conducted but he gave no further details. Powell declined to comment.A senior US state department official said the US was interested in the idea. The Office of Fair Trading ruled in 2001 that rates should fall at 6 per cent below retail price inflation every year for four years.Yell’s online site in the UK is seeing strong growth, with turnover up 41 per cent to £7.9m.

The period last year contained nearly £50m of costs associated with the flotation.Group turnover was 7 per cent higher at £280.9m, with turnover in the UK up 4 per cent to £150m. Turnover in its printed directories rose 3 per cent, including the impact of a 4 per cent reduction in advertising rates. Mr Uveges said: “We were talking to people up to last Friday but we needed to pull the trigger to be able to save the funds to market the assets.”. Yell Group, the publisher of the Yellow Pages telephone directories, swung into profit for the first quarter of its financial year, as more advertisers came on board. Italy has always been sympathetic to the more experimental and avant-garde forms of music, and Tuxedomoon have a fairly substantial fanbase there, even after years of inactivity, and their audience tonight is from all strata of society, and all ages, from excitable teenage girls to white-haired sixtysomethings.”It’s a particularly fertile ground for us in Italy,” says Blaine Reininger, the band’s violinist and guitarist. This is the setting for the summer season of Roma Incontra il Mondo concerts at the Laghetto di Villa Ada, a small bulge of parkland surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped lake.