Borrower Rentenbank Germany’s Agency forAgribusinessIssue Amount 200 million euroMaturity Date June 22, 2018Coupon 3-month Euribor + 17.5bpIssue price 100.367Payment Date October 25, 2011Lead Manager(s) BayernLB & DZ BankRatings Aaa (Moody’s), AAA (S&P),AAA (Fitch)Full fees UndisclosedNotes The issue size will total 500 millionEuro when fungibleISIN XS0641055230Security details and RIC, when available, will beonCustomers can right-click on the code forperformance analysis of this new issueFor ratings information, double click onFor all bonds data, double click onFor Top international bonds newsFor news about this issuer, double click on the issuer RIC,where assigned, and hit the newskey (F9 on Reuters terminals)Data supplied by International Insider.

UEFA’s plan to spread out fixtures during international weeks makes perfect sense and should bring an end to those strange weekends during the season with no top class soccer, when I find myself watching rubbish old B-movies and darts. The idea would see a national team play on Thursday for example and then Sunday, or Friday and Tuesday like now or Saturday and Tuesday. The “week of football” as UEFA dubs it will also mean the big soccer fans can watch lots of live international football day after day rather than trying to catch the highlights of 20 games all played one one evening. Clubs can’t moan either as they will still be getting their players back on a Wednesday before a club match as currently happens after the reasonably recent change to play second matches of international double headers on Tuesday. The only downside to the plan I can see is that national coaches will get less preparation time following weekend club matches if their first game is on a Thursday. UEFA also wants to harmonise kick off times for qualifiers which makes a lot of sense too. Everyone knows that Champions League games in the club sphere start at 1845 GMT but looking at Friday’s Euro 2012 games, they start at 1600, 1700, 1715, 1800, 1900, 1915, 1930, 1945, 2000, 2030 and yes the obligatory Portugal at 2100 (when do they ever get to sleep?) That programme is impossible to follow (as the UEFA Cup was a while back) but if they all kicked off at once, with a reduced fixture list anyway because the matches will spread across the week, no one can get confused. I might be able to sneak in another B-movie though. PHOTO: UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino

* Vodafone considering options* Providers will try to pass costs on to RIM-analysts* RIM, some users say service recoveringBy Tarmo Virki and Kate HoltonOct 13 (Reuters) - BlackBerry maker Research In Motion faced the prospect of a compensation bill from network providers on Thursday as the world’s dominant provider of mobile email struggled for a fourth day with service glitches.RIM said services were starting to improve in all affected regions, reducing disruption for the millions of users hit by delays and outages.But many in the telecoms industry believe significant damage has been done to a business that already has its share of trouble. They see a risk that this week’s disruption will tip already restless BlackBerry users into the arms of rivals like Apple.Meanwhile the company’s service provider partners were looking at how compensation might be handled.”We are reviewing our options in terms of compensation,” said a spokesman for Britain’s Vodafone , adding that “no decisions have been taken.”Spain’s Telefonica said on its web site it would compensate customers, in line with Spanish law. Spanish Consumer Association FACUA estimated that clients will receive 0.23-1.90 euros ($0.31-$2.62) for each 24 hours of service interruption.The Vodafone spokesman would not be drawn on whether such costs might be passed on to RIM, but analysts said there was little doubt operators would try.”In the past there have been outages but they’ve been limited to an hour here and an hour there and the operators have been tempted to let that go,” said Will Draper, analyst at Espirito Santo.”They haven’t been happy about it but it’s not the kind of thing you go to court over. But this is completely different. This is a three-day outage. This is 10 percent of your working month, so I’m pretty sure there will be compensation claims and I’m pretty sure they’ll try and pass it on to RIM, but my feeling is it will be very difficult to make it stick.”RIM is unique among handset makers in that it compresses and encrypts data before pushing it to BlackBerry devices via carrier networks. Apple and other rivals rely on the carrier networks to handle all routing and delivery of content. However other providers are breathing down RIM’s neck with smarter handsets and copycat service provision.Apple has started rolling out new version of its iOS software which includes BlackBerry-like iMessage service.One analyst said BlackBerry is a victim of its own success in that the huge increase in usage over recent years has made its centralised network architecture vulnerable.”This is the first major disruption to the BlackBerry service since 2009, during which time the number of BlackBerry users has doubled,” said Nick Dillon, analyst at technology specialist consultants Ovum in a note …”Despite the benefits the network brings in real-time delivery of email and data efficiency, it remains significant risk for the company.”SERVICES RECOVERRIM said there had been a significant improvement for services with users saying their services had started to work again, although there were still some delays.”Service levels are also progressing well in the U.S., Canada and Latin America and we are seeing increased traffic throughput on most services, although there are still some delays and services levels may still vary amongst customers,” RIM said in an update on its website.Singapore employees of global news and data provider Thomson Reuters were still having problems on Thursday but colleagues in London, Beijing, Tokyo, Jakarta and Bangkok said BlackBerry service was normal.The outages — and RIM’s sluggish communications with its customers — have fanned rising dissatisfaction with its co-chief executives, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.Critics have called for a shake-up, saying the top managers have let the company fall too far behind Apple and other rivals in a rapidly changing market.RIM’s shares have already tumbled more than 50 percent this year on a series of profit warnings and product missteps - a sharp reversal of fortune for a company that once dominated the smartphone market.Even before this week’s disruptions, many companies had started to balk at paying a premium to be locked into RIM’s service. Some are now allowing employees to use alternative smartphones, particularly Apple’s iPhone, for corporate mail, and the outage could accelerate the trend.

“A quarter of trips were inadequate and unacceptable,” Vienna tourism chief Norbert Kettner said Wednesday at the launch of the plan, according to remarks carried by the Austria Press Agency.Top complaints included messy and smelly taxis, mangled English and refusals by drivers to make certain trips. Taxi drivers which get very bad reports from the undercover customers could lose their licences, APA reported.Vienna officials did not say when the secret customers would start making their first trips but it said there was already a good chunk of funding set aside for the cause.

The request comes a day after an article in The New York Times about how Wall Street firms had established staffing services in an effort to attract and retain brokerage and trading business from the hedge funds.Firms might be offering the service only to select hedge funds, which could violate Massachusetts securities laws, Galvin was quoted by the Times as saying.Press officers for Goldman, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank declined to comment about the inquiry to the New York Times.None of the parties could immediately be reached for comment by Reuters.Hedge funds account for as much as 35 percent of all trading revenue on Wall Street, according to the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.