Cath Kidston to slot �30m from sale of code twenty years after emporium partner combined important sentimental designs

Recession-bucking: Cath Kidston, pictured with Lakeland terrier Stanley

She began business in what she calls a "glorified junk shop", selling hand-embroidered tea-towels and brightly renovated furniture.

Seventeen years later and Cath Kidston"s modest dream has grown into a recession-bucking empire.

The designer - who spotted the trend for vintage when for many it was still just old tat - has seen her company valued at in the region of 75million.

Her stake - which she intends to hang on to - is now worth nearly 25 million.

Two thirds of her eponymous company specialising in nostalgic clothes and homeware, is up for sale with private equity firms lining up for a slice of the magic that has turned Kidston into a worldwide brand.

The designer - whose first product was an ironing board cover to brighten up her own small flat - has a stake of just under 30 per cent in the business.

Her empire already spans 28 shops and concessions in the UK, two shops in the Republic of Ireland and seven in Japan.

But ambitious Kidston, who has been called the new Laura Ashley, wants to expand and open up to 50 shops in Japan, along with further outlets in China, Hong Kong and South Korea.

Unlike many other retailers, Cath Kidston seems to have bucked the gloomy downward trend.

Accounts filed with Companies House show that the designer saw profits jump more than 60 per cent from 2.9million to 4.6million in the year to March 2009.

Sales rocketed to 31.3m during the period, compared with 19.3m the year before, although this was partly thanks to new store openings.

Miss Kidston, 50, has created an empire of chintzy homewares such as cherry covered ironing boards to gardenia-studded biscuit tins.

Her trademark patterns now adorn an ever-expanding range of not justhomewear and fabrics, but gadgets from a flower-covered Sky+ box andmobile phone cases to a vivid floral Roberts radio.

There was even a tent for High Street camping specialists Millets.

Glorified junk shop: The Cath Kidston empire spans 28 shops and concessions in the UK, two shops in the Republic of Ireland and seven in Japan

The designer, who suffers from dyslexia, has a country retreat in Gloucestershire and in a Thames-side home in West London, which she shares with her partner Hugh Padgham, who commissioned her to do up his bachelor pad when she was working for socialite Nicky Haslam.

She has a teenage step-daughter and a beloved Lakeland terrier called Stanley.

But she insists she is not a domestic goddess at home, saying: "My husband is lucky if he gets a takeaway, quite honestly, and I"m a complete slob at the weekend and never get out of my tracksuit."

The boarding school girl, brought up in a rambling house in Hampshire, arrived in London aged 18.

She landed her "first grown-up job" with Haslam and then went on toset up an interiors business with a friend before branching out on herown in 1993.

She invested 15,000 of her own savings in her first shop on a narrow street in West London.

Cath Kidston at her colourful showroom in London

At first she ran a decorating business downstairs to pay the bills,while upstairs she began by selling the vintage fabrics, wallpapers andbrightly-painted junk furniture she remembered fondly from herchildhood.

Speaking of her ideas she has said: "I wasraised in such a typically English background in the country - going toPony Club and wearing a Shetland jersey and a kilt until I was 15.

"That"s my experience of life so it makes sense that I would put it into my design and my home."

Cult success: Kidston has re-worked traditional English country house style

Her re-working of traditional English country house style meant that her shop soon became a cult success and she began to design her own prints and products.

She has, however, been haunted by family sadness, both her parents died of cancer, then at age 37 she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

"I had a lot of treatment and of course it was a very difficult time," she said in an interview in 2006. "

I had no idea what was going to happen, I had seen my mother die some years previously, so it was all grim.

"When I recovered, I realised that life is too short not to do something you really want to do. I felt absolutely that I could take a risk. I mean it was a huge risk to stop doing the interiors work and concentrate on the shop. If it crashed and burned I would have been left with nothing, but I felt I had survived death really and it gave me this energy and confidence to go off and start Cath Kidston."

She has worked with Marie Curie Cancer Care, and in 2008 she collaborated with Tesco to produce printed eco shopping bags made from plastic bottles to raise funds for the charity.

Hong Kong disappears in clouded cover of smog

Jane Macartney in Beijing & , : {}

Hong Kongs gleaming glass and steel skyscrapers and its verdant Peak disappeared into a cloud of smog and dust as a sandstorm blowing from northern China brought record levels of pollution to the territory.

One side of Hong Kong harbour was barely visible from the other as the Government was criticised for failing to warn residents that the cloud of noxious air was bearing down on the city.

Residents awoke on Monday to a pall of choking murk, borne by easterly winds along the coast, that caused already high pollution readings to jump six-fold to a record high.

Readings around the city were pushed over the top of the 500-point air pollution index and into previously uncharted territory. The previous highest recorded pollution level was 202, in July 2008.

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The Environmental Protection Department warns people with heart or respiratory conditions to stay indoors when the index exceeds 100. The concentration of the main pollutants tiny suspended particles that can penetrate deep into the lungs was at least 15 times the World Health Organisation"s recommended maximum.

Doctors said there was little people could do to protect themselves because ordinary surgical masks could not block the particles. Even staying indoors with the air conditioning on was no guarantee of safety.

The quality of the air in Hong Kong has become a controversial social issue in recent years, tarnishing the citys reputation as a financial hub compared with greener rivals such as Singapore. It has also affected the health of many citizens.

The Hong Kong authorities have tried to clean up emissions from vehicles and power stations, but they are unable to control pollution blowing in from China. Much of the smog in recent years has been blamed on pollutants emitted by the tens of thousands of factories in southern Chinas manufacturing hub.

The worst sandstorms have been reported around Beijing, where the air quality index reached the most serious level as the citys sky turned orange on Saturday. A mixture of sand and pollution blowing in from the Gobi Desert to the north dumped about 150,000 tonnes of yellow dust on the capital at the weekend.

Resident were warned to stay indoors.

China"s expanding deserts now cover one-third of the country because of overgrazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and drought. The shifting sands have led to a sharp increase in sandstorms the grit from which can travel as far as the western United States.

Vatican privacy let German propagandize abusers go unpunished

Allan Hall, Berlin & , : {}

Germany has blamed a wall of overpower combined by the Vatican for hampering investigations in to decades of abuse of schoolchildren by Catholic clergy.

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the Justice Minister, pronounced that Vatican privacy rules, together with a 2001 gauge requiring even the majority critical cases to be investigated initial by Church officials, were complicating efforts to strew light on claims of abuse at a little of Germanys majority rarely regarded schools.

Many of the purported cases tumble outward the 20-year government of limitations, so abusers are stable from prosecution. Annette Schavan, the Education Minister, pronounced that the extent on sex crimes involving young kids contingency be re-examined.

A fibre of sex-abuse claims have emerged given 7 former pupils of the Canisius-Kolleg basic propagandize in Berlin came brazen in Jan claiming to have been abused.

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Allegations were afterwards done by former pupils at alternative schools together with Aloisiuskolleg in Bonn, St Blasien, an additional Jesuit-run boarding propagandize in the Black Forest, and Catholic schools in Hamburg, Göttingen and Hildesheim. Allegations about kid seduction by Benedictine priests were done at the Ettal Monastery and St Ottilien boarding schools in Bavaria.

Reports emerged yesterday that up to 100 pupils at the non-Catholic Odenwald-schule, a in isolation boarding propagandize in Hesse, were continually intimately abused.

On Friday came the headlines that the hermit of Pope Benedict XVI might have to give justification since the important church church band he once led the Domspatzen, or Cathedral Sparrows, of Regensburg was being investigated over passionate abuse allegations.

I never knew anything, Bishop Georg Ratzinger, 86, told the Italian journal La Repubblica. The incidents that are being talked about go behind 50 or 60 years to the 1950s. It was an additional era than when I was there. He says that he spoke about the scandals on a outing to see his hermit in Rome.

The composer Franz Wittenbrink, an ex-pupil of the boarding propagandize trustworthy to the Domspatzen choir, told Der Spiegel repository that he could not assimilate how Bishop Ratzinger, master of the chapel from 1964, could not have been aware.

hair wig

Doctors miss precision in genetics to cope with healing revolution

Mark Henderson, Science Editor, San Diego & , : {}

Doctors contingency be taught some-more about genetics to hope for them for a series in personalised medicine, says one of Americas comparison scientists, who is a colonize of the Human Genome Project.

Francis Collins, executive of the US National Institutes of Health, who led the general group that initial sequenced the human genetic code, pronounced that far as well majority doctors in Britain and America lacked the precision they will need to make use of DNA-based medicine.

The descending costs of celebration of the mass DNA, and flourishing bargain of the links in in between genetic movement and usual disorders, were staid to have a outrageous stroke on the approach GPs and sanatorium doctors treated with colour patients, he said.

Individuals genetic profiles would shortly be used to allot drug that were majority expected to be protected and effective. Few doctors, however, accepted sufficient about the approach genetics contributed to drug responses and usual diseases to feat such advances, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science discussion in San Diego.

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Many doctors were additionally resistant to reforming healing propagandize syllabuses to embody some-more genetics. Some claimed genetics was insignificant to their clinical practice, notwithstanding the grant to disorders such as heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimers. Changing healing preparation is one of the majority severe aspects of what needs to happen, Dr Collins said. We are operative opposite great resistance, I am afraid. There are majority practising docs out there who will discuss it you that genetics is irrelevant. They competence have only seen dual patients with diabetes, one with heart disease, an additional with Alzheimers, but genetics, they would say, is not pertinent to their practice. I was on the expertise of the University of Michigan for ten years, perplexing to get a small some-more genetics in to the curriculum. You cant hold the red blood that got spilt over only one hour it was simpler to method the human genome than to shift one hour of healing curriculum.

The costs of celebration of the mass DNA have depressed so neatly that majority scientists envision it will be probable to method any people complete genetic formula for less than 1,000 inside of a year or two. Research has additionally suggested hundreds of genetic variations that affect an people risk of disease or reply to medicines. Companies such as 23andMe and Pathway Genomics are offered genome scans without delay to consumers for in in between 300 and 600.

A House of Lords inform pronounced last year that healing preparation should be revised to take comment of these developments, and The Times suggested that the National Genetics Education and Development Centre has started a examination of the healing curriculum.

Dr Collins likely that studious direct would accelerate change.

They will come in fluttering sheets of paper, saying, I have only had my DNA analysed by 23andMe and it says I am at risk for diabetes, and will you appreciate that?. Docs dont similar to to be embarrassed, so I think that will expostulate a small grade of urgency.

The great headlines is that genetics is flattering straightforward. You need to know a bit of the principles, and a small statistical risk prophecy information, and you can do this.

Mother begs Pakistan kidnappers: Hes only a small child greatfully dont harm him (includes video)

Russell Jenkins and Zahid Hussain, Islamabad , : {}

The mom of a five-year-old British kid abducted at gunpoint in Pakistan has done an ardent defence to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to save her son as the kidnappers overpower raises fears for his safety.

Akila Naqqash, 31, outlayed a excited night examination home movies of her son, Sahil, at the familys patio home in Shaw, Oldham, and the aria is commencement to show.

She said: I need the assistance of the Government in the UK. They have not responded to us about what theatre they are at, and how they are going to assistance us. I wish them to do something. He contingency be frightened now. I am pleading. Please only assistance us, please, please. He has never been but me before.

The Foreign Office pronounced that it was you do all in the energy and liaising with Pakistani authorities by consular officials. We are in hold with the family and on condition that each await we can, a orator said. It would not be obliged of me to contend as well most in open about what is function in the investigation.

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Pakistani police, who progressing referred to that the event would be over inside of twenty-four hours, right away crop up less confident. They contend that they were still creation poignant swell in tracking down the kidnappers, who struck as Raja Naqqash Saeed, 28, Sahils father, was loading suitcases in to a cab outward the family home in Jhelum, Punjab, ready for the moody home.

The raiders subjected the family to up to 6 hours of woe prior to snatching the youngster and perfectionist a 100,000 ransom.

Police have incarcerated multiform suspects, together with the cab motorist who took the kidnappers to the familys door. Officers are tracing calls done by the kidnappers on stolen mobile phones but their stability overpower is connected with officials.

Early in the day Raja Tahir Bashir, a comparison military central in Jehlum, said: We are shutting in on them. God willing, we will redeem the kid really soon.

But in the dusk Muhammad Aslam Tareen, Additional Inspector-General of Police for the Rawalpindi region, said: Maybe in a couple of days we are perplexing to get to fix up them. Still we have no idea about the kid and the culprits . . . The hype has combined most hitches in the investigations.

Yesterday radio vans outward the Oldham house, in a standard travel of stone-clad terraces, retreated to a some-more deferential distance.

At midday the men of the family attended the Mohammedia Masjid, their nearest mosque, where they listened the imam reject Sahils kidnap as a crime opposite God and direct his protected return.

Mrs Naqqash spoke about the outcome of the wait for on her daughters, Anisha, 4, and Hafsah, who is twenty-one months old. His small sisters are blank him so much, she said. They are asking, Where is Sahil?. They keep saying cinema of him on television. What can I insist to them? They contend Oh, there is Sahil, when is he entrance back, Mummy?.

The youngest one blows him kisses on the television. I discuss it them: He is on the plane. He is going to come behind shortly and move you a little sweets.

Sahils family is well well known in the town. Mrs Naqqash functions in an Iceland store and alternative family members run Poundbusters in the main selling street.

Abdul Rahim, 45, a Bangladeshi, pronounced that the total village was ancillary Sahils family either Christian, Muslim or Hindus. We are all human beings, he said.