Image of the week: Caffeine break
Rule number one of any conference, symposium or seminar convened to discuss the "future of" a particular sector is that without the line on the agenda that mentions "Coffee/Tea", everyone's ability to listen to speakers is reduced by 95 per cent.
This week it was the turn of Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways-owner International Consolidated Airlines (IAG), to attend the Future of Air Transport event in London, where he spoke about the importance of cost-control discipline. Even without the caffeine injection, Walsh is flying high at the moment, with IAG having just lifted its 2015 earnings target by 12.5 per cent. That's good enough to deserve a biscuit. Photograph: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
In numbers: Island recovery
€2.94 million
Sum that New Zealand businessman Michael Harte, a Commonwealth Bank of Australia executive, paid for the small island of Budelli, off the coast of Sardinia last month. The 420-acre island is famous for its pink sandy beaches.
90
Number of days that the Italian government has after the auction to decide whether it wants to claim Budelli back for the original asking price. On Monday, its Senate decided that yes, it did want the island and its colony of seabirds back.
85,000
Number of signatures that Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, a former Italian environment minister, had collected for a petition protesting the sale of the island, which was previously owned by a Milan property firm that went bust and needed to pay off its debts.
The lexicon: Red Thursday
Today is Black Friday, which as we know by now is when the world's media queue up to buy syndicated footage of a horde of US shoppers storming a Macy's and laugh at the perceived madness of it all. Black Friday was so named because it was when retailers historically moved from the red into the black and became profitable for the year, but in recent times it has become more synonymous with a frenzy of special offers.
This year, however, a string of US stores, including Macy's, decided to open yesterday, on Thanksgiving, to get a head start on the business of offering massive discounts, often at a loss, to turkey-stuffed consumers. This has prompted Gary Balter, an analyst at Credit Suisse, to say that retailers were effectively shifting Friday's losses to "Red Thursday".
Getting to know: Katie Couric
The presenter is one of the few US news anchors familiar to people on this side of the Atlantic, with stories such as her 2006 defection from NBC to CBS for a $15 million salary garnering headlines. Couric (56) has since left CBS for ABC where she presents daytime talk show Katie, but she's in the news again this week after becoming the most high-profile "face" to date of Yahoo! chief executive Marissa Mayer's content strategy.
Couric, regarded as a trailblazer for women in the US news media, will now become "Global Anchor" for Yahoo News. Mayer praised her for her "thoughtful, charismatic approach to journalism", her "dynamic, savvy" persona and her "unmatched" experience. Couric has devoted both screen time and spare time to raising awareness of cancer – her husband Jay Monahan died from colon cancer in 1998 and she lost her sister Emily to pancreatic cancer a few years later.
The list: new web suffixes
The number of generic top-level domains on the internet (.ie, .co.uk, .net, .org) is proliferating, thanks to the policy of the Internet Corporate for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which plans to release new names at a rate of 10 per week over the next few years. So which suffixes are the latest to be approved?
1 .guru: This top-level domain will be beloved of bores (who want your cash) the world over.
2 .bike: Where to redirect the gurus in your life: getonyour.bike. It's only a matter of time before .yoga gets the Icann nod.
3 .singles: One for the entire dating industry and makers of cheese slices.
4 .camera: Coming to a web browser near you, a site for bullies/practical jokers: candid.camera.
5 .ventures: Kudos to whichever company snags ad.ventures.
