Standard Life delivered its first trading update as a public company yesterday, cheering investors with a solid rise in sales in the first six months of this year. Its index, based on a survey of about 600 companies, rose from 54.6 in June to 56.2, its highest since December 2004 and a sign that companies are succeeding in pushing through price increases.CIPS said this reflected a "sharp rise" in input costs and "robust demand that encouraged some manufacturers to increase their prices". Its overall index slowed between June and July as growth in output declined sharply. "With affordability under unrelenting strain, we continue to expect a cooler housing market by the end of the year," he said.Meanwhile, the price of goods leaving the factory gates rose to their highest level for two years, according to a snapshot survey of the manufacturing sector in July by the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply. Kelvin Davidson, a property economist at Capital Economics, said speculation about higher rates had already pushed mortgages higher, which in turn had aggravated affordability problems for new buyers. But I'm going on the man he is today and the remorse that he has today."For much of the trial, Redstall enjoyed the support of the judge, Michael Smith, to the point where she was authorised to take pictures in circumstances granted to no other reporter or photographer. She used one of the pictures of Ford in court as the screensaver on her mobile phone.Last week, however, Ford's lawyers asked for a hearing to reconsider Redstall's media credentials - a little late, since the trial is all but over - and argued that she had not conducted herself in an "honest and forthright" manner.
County officials, meanwhile, have launched an investigation into the number of visits Redstall has been granted at the county jail facility in Rancho Cucamonga.After the final sentencing hearing last week, Redstall drove her red convertible alongside the bus taking Ford back to his cell so he could see her blond hair and jewellery glinting in the sunlight."Wayne's pleasure of his day is having me visit him," she told the Times, "and we're going to get this documentary made together.". Meeting him last April, she said, was the culmination of a long fascination with serial killers - "the dream of a lifetime".Asked whether the extraordinary brutality of his crimes gave her pause, she said: "Everyone tells me, 'Be careful, he's a serial killer.' But they don't know Wayne like I do We've all got evil in us - all of us He took it to the extent of killing humans... He is so tuned in to me and I to him that sometimes words don't have to be said."She described how the two of them had talked about their childhoods and sung favourite country music songs together across the glass divide of the visiting room in the county jail. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, she explained her fascination "I trust Wayne with my life," she said "He's got such a kindness to him and such a conscience... Ford, meanwhile, not only fixated on the breasts of his victims, he also cut them off. When he walked into a police station in California to confess his crimes eight years ago, he had the severed breast of his last victim in a plastic bag in his pocket."It's hysterical," was Redstall's breezy comment on the matter to reporters at the San Bernardino County courthouse last week.
When he does learn his fate, he will have an unusual fan at his side. Officially, Victoria Redstall has been following Ford's trial as a documentary maker. Unofficially, though, the British-born actress and model has developed something of a fixation on the truck driver turned brutal killer, visiting him several times a week in jail, photographing him constantly both in the courtroom and outside, and speaking of their strong emotional bond. Redstall's devotion has made even Ford's lawyers nervous, as they hope to impress the jury with their argument that their client is a changed and genuinely remorseful man, not the monster beyond salvation portrayed by the prosecution.What makes the relationship particularly strange is that Redstall once worked as a model touting herbal breast enhancement pills. One of America's most notorious recent serial killers, Wayne Adam Ford, will find out in the next few days if he faces death or life imprisonment for the murders of four California women whom he picked up, assaulted, strangled and dismembered along some of the state's less-frequented stretches of highway a decade ago. The highlight of the trip was a speech to Rupert Murdoch's News Corps conference at the Pebble Beach resort, where he topped a bill that included Bono, from the band U2, and Shimon Peres, Israel's Deputy Prime Minister..
