Planet Business

Pay Day: Transocean, the company that operated the Gulf of Mexico oil rig which exploded and killed 11 people last year, has awarded executive bonuses on the grounds that 2010 was the "best year in safety performance in our company's history".

The bonuses – and their dubious justification – have been criticised by the Obama government and the presidential commission investigating the oil spill, which became the largest in US offshore history. The description of 2010 as a good year for safety appeared in Transocean’s SEC filing, which revealed that its senior executives received 45 per cent of their performance bonuses for the year. Transocean has since noted that “some of the wording” of the statement was “insensitive” – but not that the bonuses themselves are. In total, Transocean chief executive Steven Newman took home $6.4 million for his trouble.

Office Politics

Working long hours increases the risk of developing heart disease, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.Using a sample of 7,095 London civil service workers, researchers found that adults who worked 11 hours a day or more had a 67 per cent higher risk of developing heart disease than those who worked an eight-hour shift. University College London professor Mika Kivimaki, the lead researcher on the study, said its findings may have implications for doctors when it comes to advising patients. Kivimaki noted that people who work long hours should be particularly careful to exercise and follow healthy diets – a warning that doesn't bode well for people trapped in sedentary jobs with only the warm glow of the kitchen microwave for sustenance.

STATUS UPDATE:

Beery message:Having finally run out of twists on its "probably" slogan, Carlsberg is adopting a new advertising line – "that calls for a Carlsberg". Fear the imminent spoofs.

McJobs-for-all: In a publicity no-brainer, McDonald's has reinvented its usual seasonal recruitment drive in the US by announcing it is to hire 50,000 workers on a single day.

Fuselage fiasco:Cracks have been found in three aircraft owned by Southwest Airlines – the business inspiration for Ryanair – after a hole developed in another Southwest aircraft mid-flight.

THE QUESTION

C an you trademark a chocolate bunny? 

It may not have been a major part of their intellectual property textbooks, but some of the finest trademark lawyers in Europe have been grappling with this very issue over the last decade, with mixed results. The Swiss chocolate firm Lindt Sprüngli this week won a seven-year court battle to protect its golden Easter bunnies from an Austrian rival, Hauswirth, when a Vienna court told Hauswirth to stop making its own chocolate bunnies wrapped in gold foil.

However, a European court ruled last year that Lindt didn’t merit the coveted EU trademark protection for the shape and golden wrapping of both its rabbit and reindeer chocolates. It ruled the products were “typical shapes in which chocolate and chocolate goods are presented at certain times of the year” and that gold foil was not unique to Lindt – in other words, the bunnies were far too generic to be given an EU-wide 3D trademark. Hauswirth had earlier asked the European Court of Justice to consider whether the Swiss firm had acted in “bad faith” when it registered the trademark in 2000 and then sued Hauswirth soon after for making a “confusingly similar” product.

The Lindt bunny, which is decorated with a red ribbon and bell, first appeared in 1952, but has only been sold in Austria since the 1990s. Hauswirth, meanwhile, has been selling foil-wrapped bunnies, adorned with a red-and-white ribbon, since 1962.

Easter: it’s more complicated than you think.

$1.4 billion– annual sales of Pringles crisps last year. The snack brand was sold by Procter Gamble to Diamond Foods this week.

"Numerous black swans are now swimming in the global economic lake"

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, is talking about something even more sinister than the Natalie Portman film.