The Irish Independent reports that the One51 and Doyle Group consortium, which is planning a bid for Irish Continental Group, revealed that it spent an additional €1.37m adding to its stake in the ferry operator just hours before signing a standstill agreement last Friday.

The Irish Independent also reports that sterling hit its highest since September 1992 versus the dollar yesterday, closing in on the key $2 level after strong British producer prices and housing data cemented expectations of an imminent interest rate hike.

The Irish Times reports that non-executive EBS director Ethna Tinney lost her attempt to be re-elected to the board yesterday, though by a relatively narrow margin.

Ms Tinney, a producer with Lyric FM who has been on the board of the EBS since 2000, was opposed by her fellow directors in her bid to be re-elected at the society's annual general meeting  in the Burlington Hotel, Dublin.

The start of the afternoon  meeting was delayed by a half hour as an unexpectedly large number of the society's members attended.

A three-hour meeting then ensued which was dominated by the issue of Ms Tinney and matters raised by her concerning the EBS and its board. Some 1,200 people attended the meeting and thousands more expressed their view by way of proxy votes. In the event Ms Tinney lost, with 9,417 votes for her re-election and 10,252 votes against. Chairman Mark Moran said afterwards the vote was a "clear mandate for the board and a clear outcome".

Ms Tinney said she was "not at all disappointed, and that's from the heart. I didn't think I had any chance whatsoever to win the proxy vote." Earlier Ms Tinney told the meeting her colleagues on the board "want me gone and want that vry badly".

However, she wanted to "continue to promote the interests of the members". Mr Moran told the meeting an effective board needed independent directors who "work well together to resolve their difficulties".

The decision not to support Ms Tinney had not been taken lightly. "All the directors ask you not to support Ethna Tinney".

Non-executive director Cathal Magee said he had urged the board to renominate Ms Tinney in the interests of the board's stability. But he added: "Given the damaging events of recent weeks, my view now is that Ethna Tinney's re-election is not tenable." He said he would like to acknowledge Ms Tinney's contribution over the years.

The meeting was addressed by journalist and Senator Shane Ross, who has campaigned for Ms Tinney in recent weeks.

Also speaking from the floor society member Mary Caffrey strongly criticised Mr Ross whom, she said, was a "self-serving, publicity-seeking individual, both as a journalist and a politician". Ms Caffrey is the wife of the EBS chief executive, Ted McGovern.

The Irish Times also reports that Ryanair will freeze expansion at Dublin airport if the Dublin Airport Authority's (DAA) plans for the second terminal get the go-ahead, according to Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary.

"If terminal two gets the go-ahead, I'm not sure we'll scale back services out of Dublin, but we'll end growth out of Dublin," he said.

Ryanair has objected to the new terminal, arguing that it is too expensive, is the wrong design and is in the wrong place.

An Bord Pleanála began an oral hearing into the plans yesterday.

Mr O'Leary has rejected comments from Minister for Transport Martin Cullen that Ryanair is delaying progress on a second terminal. "Ryanair supported the DAA's second terminal when it was first announced in 2005 at a cost of €200 million. What we object to is what the DAA has now developed, which is a second terminal costing €800 million and which the regulator has confirmed will double passenger charges at Dublin airport for the next 50 years," he said.

If the terminal was built at a cost of €200 million, Ryanair would double its capacity out of Dublin, increase its fleet at the airport from 20 to 40 aircraft and handle 16 million passengers, he said. He also said a second, competing terminal would have ended congestion, as well as leading to a reduction in charges at the airport.

"We think we could offer a competing second terminal at €4 per passenger," he said.

The hearing is expected to last two weeks. Ryanair, which is one of seven organisations that has lodged objections, will be making its presentation today.

The DAA said Ryanair was using inaccurate information. It said the only budgeted cost published by the DAA was €395 million and that airport charges would not double.

The Irish Examiner reports that the Dublin-headquartered international building materials group has bought a 50% stake in the Turkish-based cement and pre-mixed concrete business, called Denizli Cement. It bought the stake from the privately-owned industrial group, Eren Holdings — which still owns the other half of the business.

Under the new arrangement, CRH and Eren will have joint management control of the business, based in the Turkish city of Denizli.

The company operates a modern cement facility with a 1.8m tonne cement capacity and is a market leader in Turkey. It also operates a network of 13 ready-mixed concrete plants in the region.

Meanwhile, CRH has exercised its existing option of buying out the remaining 50% of the Florida-based company, Paver Systems.

The Irish group initially bought a 50% stake in Paver at the beginning of 2004. Paver Systems is a leading manufacturer of inter-locking concrete pavers and operates three facilities in West Palm Beach, Tampa and Orlando.

Between them, the Turkish and American companies had sales of $223m (€164.6m) last year and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of $79m.

According to CRH chief executive, Liam O’Mahony: “The two transactions are important steps in the further development of our Europe materials and Americas products activities.”

The Financial Times reports that Ségolène Royal, the French Socialist presidential candidate, was struggling to contain an acrimonious dispute within her party on Monday over whether to join forces with François Bayrou, the centrist candidate, to thwart Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right frontrunner.

The spat comes just days before the country votes in the first round of the election. It exposes deep anxiety in the Socialist party about Ms Royal’s chances and broader worries in the French left about its future if it suffers a repeat of its failure in the last election, when Lionel Jospin, the former prime minister, finished a humiliating third behind Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front.

Ms Royal, who trails Mr Sarkozy in opinion polls, on Monday left the door open to an “anti-Sarko” alliance with Mr Bayrou between Sunday’s first-round ballot and the second round run-off on May 6. She said on RMC radio: “Let us leave the voters free without confusing them today with bargaining, manipulation and deals behind their backs, and then we will see between the two rounds.”

However, Laurent Fabius, the former prime minister and leader of the traditional left wing of the Socialist party, said it was “totally excluded” to attempt any negotiation or alliance with Mr Bayrou’s UDF party.

Mr Bayrou dismissed the chances of any deal with another candidate before Sunday’s first round. “There is no alliance agreement imaginable in a presidential election before the vote,” he said.

The dispute between modernisers and traditionalists has added to the sense of disarray and division in the Socialist party campaign – a marked contrast with the streamlined, slick operation displayed by Mr Sarkozy. The infighting was triggered when Michel Rocard, the former Socialist prime minister and figurehead for the party’s moderate social-democratic wing, last week called on Ms Royal to seek an electoral pact with Mr Bayrou.

A person close to Mr Rocard said his controversial idea was an attempt to “dynamite the party”, forcing it mirror the modernisation of the left in Britain and Germany.

Mr Rocard has tried repeatedly during the past two decades to shift the Socialist party towards the centre, but failed to overcome former president François Mitterrand’s belief that the only way for the left to win power was by joining forces with the far left.

Ms Royal used her broad public appeal to impose her candidacy on a reluctant party, beating more experienced so-called “elephants” for the Socialist presidential nomination last year. But she has struggled to unite the party.

The “elephants”, including Mr Fabius, Mr Jospin and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister, have done little to help her campaign, even after they were added to her team.

Mr Jospin, who gave a speech in Avignon on Monday night in support of Ms Royal, said any attempt to join forces with Mr Bayrou would “doom the Socialist party to uncertain alliances and an internal crisis”.

One senior Socialist party advisor said the spat over whether to join Mr Bayrou “could destroy the party” if Ms Royal failed to make the second round, sparking a battle between moderates such as Mr Strauss-Kahn and hardliners such as Mr Fabius.

The latest poll by LH2 for RMC, BFM TV and 20 Minutes, showed Mr Sarkozy and Ms Royal both down 1 point at 27 and 23 per cent respectively, while Mr Bayrou gained 1 point to 19 per cent.

There are signs that France has shifted further to the right, as the combined score of Ms Royal and the six other leftwing candidates is only about 35 per cent in recent polls, well below the 43 per cent the

The FT also reports that the record-breaking success of the PlayStation 3 in Europe has rescued the games console from “the perception wars” that hit sales in Japan, says Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s chief executive.

Sir Howard said Sony was close to selling 800,000 units in Europe. “I think [in] the first two days in the UK, £100m ($199m) revenue changed hands and that’s probably the largest consumer electronics sale in history.”

The PlayStation 3 had come into the European market “with more games and, perhaps we lived up to the expectations in Europe in a way that perhaps we didn’t in Japan”.

Sony has yet to confirm whether it has hit its ambitious PS3 global shipment target of 6m units by the end of March.

“In the March quarter of 2008, Sony will start making money on the console,” said Yuji Fujimori, analyst at Goldman Sachs. “In the longer term, I see the PS3’s market share at 50 per cent within three years. In the shorter term, I see it at below 30 per cent.”

Sir Howard, who was in Tokyo for Monday's global launch of Spider-Man 3, said: “I see no reason why we can’t use content to drive the sales of hardware as the network connectivity becomes more sophisticated.”

The Welsh-born head of Sony, who has vowed to achieve group margins of 5 per cent by March 2008, admitted the turnround was not complete. “The silo walls are down – we’re staring across the walls at each other but we haven’t quite shaken hands all the way around,” he said.

The consumer electronics arm has been performing very well, driven by robust sales of Bravia liquid crystal display TVs, digital cameras and video cameras.

Sony has raised its full-year operating income forecast by Y10bn to Y60bn ($500m).

Mr Fujimori at Goldman Sachs sees a “strong possibility” that Sony’s fiscal 2007 full-year electronics division operating margin could reach a record high of 7 per cent or more, taking into account the weak yen and fixed-cost reductions.

Sir Howard said he was treading a fine line when it came to disposing of lossmaking units. “We are very reluctant to give up on unprofitable businesses.”

The New York Times reports that some of the casualties of America’s housing bust are easy to spot up and down California’s Central Valley.

From Fresno to Sacramento, big tangles of wire and PVC pipes clutter vacant lots in silent subdivisions, waiting for houses to be built — some day. Dozens of “For Sale” signs already dot the lawns across new residential communities. And right next to the ubiquitous billboards from builders are fresh signs offering homeowners help to avoid foreclosure.

But another set of losers is less visible: the immigrant workers, mostly illegal, who rode the construction boom while it lasted and now find jobs on building sites few and far between.

Offering more than $10 an hour as well as new skills and a shot at upward mobility, construction provided many illegal immigrants the best job they ever had, a step up from the backbreaking work reserved for those toiling without legal authorization, which in the Central Valley mostly meant pruning and picking in fruit and vegetable fields.

The growing presence of illegal immigrants in home building, mostly working for small labor contractors, might help explain why government statistics have recorded only a small decline in construction employment, despite the collapse in residential investment.

“Technically they don’t fire them,” said Myrna Martínez, coordinator for the Fresno office of the American Friends Service Committee, a nonprofit organization working on social assistance projects for immigrant workers. “They just tell them that there is no more work.”

As building jobs have grown scarce, many of the workers who left farm labor a few years ago are returning to where they came from. They can be seen once again hunched in clusters under the unremitting sun, cutting heads of lettuce or slicing off spears of asparagus for minimum wage, clinging to the hope that home building will resume again.

“If another construction job comes up, I’ll go there,” said Cresencio B., a former Mexico City policeman who arrived illegally in the United States in 1991.

Cresencio B. toiled on farms up and down the West Coast until he got a job cutting wood segments on a construction crew two years ago, making about $11 an hour. But building jobs dried up in October. In early April, he was in a tomato field nearby, brandishing his hoe for $7.50 an hour, clearing out the weeds and the leftover garlic sprouts from last year’s crop.

(The Times is using only the first name and last initial of the workers.)

“There are quite a few in this situation,” Ms. Martínez said. “This construction boom that started five or six years ago just suddenly started to fall apart.”

Illegal immigrants played a big if quiet part on the supply side of America’s housing boom. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, a research organization in Washington, immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries account for about one in five construction workers. Those who arrived since 2000 — who are likely to be unlawfully in the United States because they had virtually no way of immigrating legally — account for an estimated 7 percent of the construction work force.

They were mostly pulled in by the building frenzy of the first half of the decade. According to the analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center, based on census data, Hispanic immigrants took 60 percent of the million new construction jobs created from 2004 to 2006. Those recently arrived took nearly half.

While there are no equivalent statistics at the state or local level, a glance at a construction crew anywhere in the valley confirms the overwhelming immigrant share. “There are only Mexicans,” said Adrián L., an illegal immigrant from Oaxaca who does interior work on homes here. “Now not even the supervisors are American.”

Like no other job, construction allowed many immigrants a shot at the American dream. After more than five years in construction, Adrián L. was making $25 to $35 an hour leading a 15-strong team for a company building new tract homes in the Central Valley.

Farther north, construction work also allowed José Manuel J. to aspire to a better life. An illegal immigrant from Guanajuato State in Mexico, he left the fields to sweep construction sites eight years ago. By last year he was making $25 an hour running a small crew laying roofs. He got a mortgage and bought a home in the United States. He bought land and built a house in Mexico.

For Cresencio B. a construction job meant his wife, Marta M., could afford to stay home and care for their 2-year-old son, Ángel.

But when home builders stopped building, they stopped calling. Hoe in hand, Marta M. is back at work these days, hacking alongside her husband at the weeds in a tomato field from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. Ángel is left in the care of his 18-year-old sister.

Adrián L. and José Manuel J. have resisted going back into the fields, making do with piecemeal work: putting up a roof here, re-tiling a bathroom there. But they are near the end of the line. “If work doesn’t pick up,” José Manuel J. said, “in May I am going to have to go to pick in the cherry crop.”

The nation’s great housing bust has not shown up so far in official employment data. According to the Labor Department, employment in residential construction has declined by only 28,000 jobs — or some 3 percent — since its peak last fall.

“It is sort of surprising that construction employment numbers haven’t gone down more already,” said David F. Seiders, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. “I’m not sure about the quality of the data.”

The statistics seem to belie the debacle that has overwhelmed home building. In February, there were 15 percent fewer homes under construction and 27 percent fewer homes started than in the corresponding month of 2006. In California, 42 percent fewer building permits for new residential units were issued in February than a year earlier.

“Because we have fewer homes sold, we have slowed down the building of various phases in some communities,” said Joel H. Rassman, chief financial officer for the home builder Toll Brothers, which expects to deliver 6,000 to 7,000 homes in 2007, down from 8,600 in 2006. “We have delayed the start of some communities, and we are letting less work out to our contractors.”

Mr. Seiders suggested that reported employment might not be falling as starkly as other statistics because builders do not employ construction workers directly. Instead, they use subcontractors to build different parts of a development. These often use labor contractors, who may also turn to subcontractors to fill their crews.

José Carlos J., José Manuel’s nephew, has not formally lost his job as a roofer. But the contractor he works for has hardly called him in recent months. “Since November I’ve laid only four roofs,” he said.

Most of the workers disgorged back into the fields are in a similar situation. Milling about in a park near downtown Stockton after work on a recent afternoon, José Manuel’s brother, Raymundo J., who is the foreman of a crew picking asparagus near Stockton, pointed to several former construction workers from his hometown in Mexico who are now in the field.

There was his other nephew, Roberto, who used to tear roofs down for $15 an hour, and Manuel S., who used to spray stucco on houses in the San Francisco Bay Area. Antonio R. lost a $14-an-hour job cutting wood last October. Chuy R., who got a job wiring homes immediately after arriving in the United States in May 2006, lost it at the end of the year.

They all hang on to the hope that construction will rebound. Most fear, however, that times will never again be as good. Said José Manuel J., “I don’t think building houses will pick up for several years.”

The growing season is barely starting in the Central Valley. Demand for farm workers will peak in the summer, at around 450,000. But many growers are concerned that tight border controls will continue to cut deeply into their labor force and that, as happened last year, crops will be left to rot in the fields.

Still, as farm workers once lured into construction are returned to the fields, there are signs that the labor supply on some California farms is increasing.

Luawanna Hallstrom, chairwoman of the California Farm Bureau’s labor committee and general manager of Harry Singh & Sons, a large tomato grower north of San Diego, noted that more workers were showing up at greenhouse nurseries than last year.

She pointed out that the lull in construction, combined with the frosts this year that devastated the state’s citrus crop and part of the nut crop, are freeing workers for other farms.

“There’s an opportunity for some areas in agriculture to attract labor who would have been doing other agricultural jobs or tied up in construction,” Ms. Hallstrom said.

The immigrants agree. “There are too many people for too little field work,” José Manuel J. complained. “People are scattering up to Oregon and further north because there is little work here.”

The NYT also reports that until recently, Amgen was still considered one of the biggest success stories of the fast-growing biotechnology industry. Now some analysts are comparing it to a lumbering, stumbling pharmaceutical giant that leans too heavily on an aging product portfolio.

A series of setbacks, some unexpected and some perhaps self-inflicted, pose the greatest challenge in the company’s previously charmed 27-year history.

And some crucial events in coming weeks could make clearer whether Amgen, based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., has hit some “choppy water” — as its chief executive contends — or whether, as some analysts say, its best days may be behind it.

“The barrage of bad news that’s come out on Amgen in the past 60 days is absolutely unprecedented in the biotech sector,” said Mark Schoenebaum, a biotechnology stock analyst at Bear Stearns. Amgen’s shares are down about 20 percent since late January, knocking nearly $20 billion off the company’s market value.

But the stock has edged up a bit since its recent low of $55.13 on March 29, as some investors have been tempted by management’s view that it is too soon for a fire sale. Yesterday, the shares rose 62 cents, to $59.65, as details of a study were released suggesting that the risks of the company’s biggest drug were not as clear cut as recently thought.

“We are not in a crisis, that’s for sure,” Kevin W. Sharer, Amgen’s chairman and chief executive, said in an interview. In a crisis, “people don’t know what to do,” he said. “People’s hair is on fire. Confidence is challenged. We’re not there.”

At best, though, the company faces plenty of challenges. Several recent studies suggest that its blockbuster anemia drugs, Aranesp and Epogen, might be harming patients, particularly if overused. Those products accounted for $6.6 billion of Amgen’s $14.3 billion in revenue last year.

The Food and Drug Administration put new warnings on the drugs last month, citing studies suggesting that Aranesp and Epogen might cause heart problems or hasten the deaths of cancer patients.

Last Wednesday, the company said it would briefly delay the reporting of its first-quarter results, originally scheduled for this week, to allow it to include data from a clinical trial of Aranesp. The financial results are now expected next Monday.

The company also disclosed last week that its chief financial officer, Richard D. Nanula, was resigning to “pursue other opportunities,” but would stay on for three months to aid the transition to his successor, Robert Bradway.

Adding to its woes, Amgen recently reported that patients in a clinical trial combining its new colon cancer drug, Vectibix, with other treatments were more likely to die than patients who got only the other treatments. As a result, Vectibix is likely to remain only a niche drug for now.

Sizing up Amgen’s situation in a report titled “Looking More Like Large Pharma,” a Citigroup analyst, Yaron Werber, predicted that Amgen’s revenues would grow only 4 percent a year through 2010. That would be well below its 20 percent annual sales growth from 2003 to 2006.

Geoffrey C. Porges of Sanford C. Bernstein & Company has asked whether Amgen should start paying a dividend to attract shareholders, an inducement common among big drug companies.

And some are even starting to raise questions quietly about Amgen’s long-vaunted management. Michael Aberman, an analyst at Credit Suisse, said Mr. Sharer’s team may have tried to expand the use of its drugs too much, resulting in unsuccessful clinical trials and safety problems that could now endanger sales.

Amgen executives say that their strategies have been driven by science and sound medical considerations. And so far, Mr. Sharer said, Amgen has not changed its financial guidance for the year, which calls for 8 percent to 12 percent revenue growth, along with 10 percent to 15 percent growth in earnings per share.

The company has mainly reacted to the mounting uncertainty about future sales by taking cost-control steps, imposing a hiring slowdown and postponing the opening of a new factory in Ireland. If sales drop further, Amgen says, more cuts can be made.

“We certainly have enormous expense flexibility here,” Mr. Sharer said. “And we can deal with any conceivable revenue scenario I can imagine. It’ll either be more or less painful to deal with, but we can certainly deal with it.”

Just how painful should become clearer in the next few weeks. Next Monday, the company is expected to release the results of a crucial study testing Aranesp’s effect on the longevity of patients with small-cell lung cancer. Aranesp is approved to treat the anemia caused by cancer chemotherapy.

If the results from that study indicate that patients taking Aranesp are more likely to die sooner than they might otherwise, “the tide will turn” against the drugs, said Dr. John A. Glaspy, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“We will not be able to justify treating lots of patients” with Aranesp, said Dr. Glaspy, who has received consulting and research fees from Amgen.

An F.D.A. advisory committee plans to meet on May 10 to discuss the safety of the anemia drugs. And later that month another big drug maker, Roche, might win F.D.A. approval for an anemia drug that would compete with Amgen’s products.

Epogen and Aranesp are both genetically engineered versions of erythropoietin, or EPO, a protein made in the kidneys to stimulate production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. Johnson & Johnson sells a version of Epogen, marketed as Procrit, under a license from Amgen. The drugs have been shown to reduce the need for blood transfusions in patients with kidney disease and in cancer patients getting chemotherapy.

But in November, a study found that patients with kidney failure who were treated aggressively with EPO drugs had more deaths and heart problems than patients who took only enough of the drugs to raise their levels of red blood cells by modest amounts.

Then a number of studies came out suggesting that use of Aranesp by cancer patients could worsen their disease or hasten their deaths. Amgen did not immediately disclose the results of one of the trials, done by Danish researchers, prompting an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Amgen executives, and some outside scientists, say it is still far from clear if the drugs are truly dangerous.

Yesterday, new details were released about a clinical trial showing that Aranesp had increased the risk of death in cancer patients with anemia who were not getting chemotherapy. Some 48.5 percent of the patients who received Aranesp, in an off-label use of the drug, had died compared with 46 percent of those getting a placebo.

While Amgen had announced the negative outcome in January, the new details, presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Los Angeles, suggested that part of the explanation was that the patients who received Aranesp had been more at risk of death to begin with.

“I don’t think anyone regards this trial as having proven a negative impact on cancer,” Dr. Glaspy, who presented the results, said in an interview.

Nevertheless, given the uncertainties, doctors and insurers are already cutting back use of Aranesp and Epogen, particularly in cancer patients who are not getting chemotherapy. Analysts generally estimate the decrease in use will be 10 percent to 30 percent.

This month the big insurer UnitedHealthcare began denying reimbursement for EPO drugs if a patient’s red cell volume is above a certain level. Previously, United had never even asked doctors to document patients’ red cell levels.

Whatever happens with sales of its anemia drugs, if Amgen is to remain a fast-growing company it must develop new products. But it has yet to show a particular skill in that area, even though it does have many test drugs in its pipeline.

To this day, Amgen still largely lives off Epogen, first approved in 1989, and Neupogen, approved in 1991 to prevent infection in patients receiving chemotherapy.

Its biggest new products since then, Aranesp and Neulasta, were modifications of the original two. And its other big product, the rheumatoid arthritis drug Enbrel, was not homegrown but came as part of the company’s $10 billion acquisition of Immunex in 2002.

After being promoted to chief executive in 2000, Mr. Sharer recruited Roger M. Perlmutter from Merck to run research and development. The research effort has roughly tripled since 2002, to more than 6,000 people and $3.4 billion in spending, and the number of drug candidates under development has similarly soared.

Denosumab, a drug for osteoporosis and bone cancer, could be a blockbuster, and some investors say that it is now more important than ever to Amgen’s future. But it will be two or three years before it is known whether the drug is safe and effective enough to win approval.

Until then, Amgen’s fate might rest on the findings of that Aranesp study due out next Monday. Unlike many of the previous studies, that one was devised specifically to study survival.

Patients in the trial were treated to raise their red cells to levels somewhat higher than recommended in the drug’s label, which could increase the chances of safety problems.

One factor in Amgen’s favor is that a previous Aranesp trial, which raised red cells to even higher levels, showed a survival benefit in the subset of patients with small-cell lung cancer — the only type of patients in the current trial.

If the new study shows that Aranesp shortens lives, the company might still be able to argue that the drug is safe if used in the lower amounts recommended on the label. But it is unclear how persuasive that case would now be.

“Lots of people will argue that,” Dr. Glaspy said. “But they will argue as we fold up the chairs and turn off the lights.”