What the Sunday papers said
The Business
Scottish & Newcastle has stepped up negotiations with suitors hoping to buy its pubs and is working toward securing an agreement before 2003.
Hugh Osmond's opportunistic bid for Pizza Express is set to spark others into action. Osmond is reluctant to go higher than 350p-a-share, but the offer puts the business on a multiple of just five-and-a-half times earnings.
Orb Estates is thought to be considering a bid for Thistle Hotels.
The Sunday Telegraph
The government is poised to lift the ban on the sale of alcohol at motorway service areas by allowing it to be sold to overnight guests in hotels.
Two men, both 36, are in a critical condition after being stabbed in a fight at the fashionable Met Bar, in Mayfair, London. Two men were later arrested and are to be questioned.
The Sunday Times
The deal by Scottish & Newcastle to buy Finnish brewer Hartwall is already starting to look flat. The Russian market is sagging, brokers are cutting forecasts, and shareholders should avoid until the picture is clearer. PPM Ventures, the private equity group, is looking to launch a counter bid for Pizza Express, the chain that Hugh Osmond is trying to buy.
Riley Leisure, the supplier of snooker and pool equipment, has gone into administration. The company, which employs 113 staff, has appointed Deloitte & Touche as adminsitrator.
The Mail on Sunday
Pizza Express has denied that its pizzas are shrinking. A spokesman said they had remained the same size for years and years. The defence comes in the face of growing criticism from customers that the dishes are smaller.
Smoking cannabis is more likely to cause cancer than smoking tobacco, according to a report from the British Lung Foundation.
The world economy is about to slow to a halt, according to German bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.
The Independent on Sunday
A survey of the social lives of Britons in their thirties to forties by Australian winemaker Lindemans makes dull reading. It found we spend most of our spare time watching TV and usually go to bed by 11.30pm, but rarely have sex when we get there. The people most likely to socialise in the week, play sport and have active sex lives, were accountants.
McDonalds is to shut 175 stores in 10 countries and will pull out of three countries altogether - reversing its 20-year policy of global expansion. Six hundred jobs are also to go.
Britain is still failing to feminise the boardroom. Ony three per cent of executive directors in the FTSE 100 are female and that is a 50 per cent increase on last year.
Results out this week: Luminar (Tuesday), Glenmorangie, Young & Co's Brewery (both Thursday), Fuller, Smith & Turner (Friday).
The Observer
From next year Bradford University will offer a module studying the consumption of alcohol as part of a degree course in Local and Regional Studies.
The Big Food Group, which owns Booker, is considering closing down its Iceland supermarket chain despite publicly supporting the business last week.
