Private caterers to be banned in Scottish hospitals – For more hospitality stories, see what the weekend papers say

A round-up of the weekend's news affecting the hospitality industry…

Private caterers and cleaners to be banned in Scottish hospitals
Read the full article in the Observer >>

De Vere plans £50m resort in Scottish Borders Hotel operator De Vere has teamed up with property developer Manor Kingdom Estates to create a five-star resort in the Scottish Borders. If they get the go-ahead from the council, they plan to invest £50m in the Rutherford Castle hotel resort in West Linton, which will include a spa, a business conference centre and, they hope, a PGA-standard golf course. The project would create 300 new jobs. A spokesman for Manor Kingdom said South-east Scotland lacked a luxury resort hotel on a par with Cameron House, Turnberry and St Andrews Bay Hotel. "Rutherford Castle offers easy access to the city of Edinburgh and the airport," he said. "It will attract international visitors to the Scottish Borders and retain them for a longer stay." - 19 October, Read the full article in the Scotsman on Sunday >>

Overfishing brings bluefin tuna to brink of extinction
The bluefin tuna is facing extinction through overfishing by French and Spanish fleets, the Madrid-based International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) has warned. Its research, revealed ahead of a critical meeting next month to set new quotas, found that European fisherman were landing about 60,000 tons of bluefin tuna a year, more than double the European quota of 28,000 tons set in 2006 which ICCAT believes was set twice as high as it should have been. The Mediterranean is the main spawning ground for bluefin tuna throughout the Atlantic and the International Union for Conservation of Nature recently voted for the fishery to be shut down. Other fish in trouble include the great sharks, marlin and swordfish (where numbers are down by 90% or more for some species), the Alaskan pollock population (the world's largest fishery, which is down by 50%) and blue whiting, whose populations are also face collapse. - 19 October, Read the full article in the Sunday Times >>

Tory admits bill for London Olympics will continue to soar
Steve Norris, the former Tory transport minister who sits on the boards of both the London Development Agency and Transport for London, has admitted that the London 2012 Olympic Games could cost nearly £20bn. "The Olympics don't really cost £9.3bn. That £9.3bn is for a massive regeneration project in east London, and over the course of the decade following the games it will probably consume another £9.3bn of public money," commented Norris. There are already fears that the budget, which is already nearly four times the amount forecast when London bid for the games in 2004, will soar as contractors hike their prices as 2012 approaches. - 19 October, Read the full article in the Independent on Sunday >>

Government to rethink immigration policy
New immigration minister Phil Woolas said the Government would set a limit on immigration figures as new unemployment statistics showed that the number of British born adults in work had fallen by 365,000 in the past two years, while the number of foreign-born adults working in Britain grew by 865,000. Unemployment, which is currently running at its fastest rate in 17 years, soared by 164,000 in the three months to August and is predicted to reach two million by Christmas and up to three million by December 2009. "If people are being made unemployed, the question of immigration becomes extremely thorny," Woolas said in an interview yesterday. "It's been too easy to get into this country in the past and it's going to get harder."
19 October, Read the full article in the Sunday Express >>

Crowd gobbles up the world's biggest ostrich sandwich Iran's bid to make the world's largest ostrich sandwich failed to make the Guinness Book of Records on Friday after spectators rushed in to eat the giant snack before it was measured. It took 1,500 cooks two days to stuff more than 2,000lb of ostrich meat into the 5,000-foot-long sandwich - but just a few minutes for the crowd to consume it. The organisers are hoping their video evidence will be enough to get the sandwich into the Guinness book. - 18 October, Read the full article in the Daily Telegraph >>

By Angela Frewin

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