Score one for Carl Icahn. The 72-year-old billionaire investor was granted his biggest demand from Motorola on Wednesday when the company agreed to split into two companies.

Icahn, the corporate raider turned shareholder activist, has been putting pressure on the troubled mobile phone maker to split out its handset unit for a while. As Observer pointed out this week, he also wants to install four directors on the board – and the company seems OK with three of them.

Icahn has a lot riding on a rebound at Motorola – he has spent $2bn on the company’s shares, giving him a stake of roughly 6.5 per cent.

Despite the victory, though, Icahn is likely to continue pressing the company.

The stock rose on Wednesday but Icahn bought Motorola shares while they were in a steep decline – and it still has a way to climb back before he is making big money.

Icahn has proved successful recently at getting the top brass at big US companies to listen to him. His sometimes bitter rhetoric about Time Warner and Dick Parsons, then chief executive, resulted in a change or two. But his campaign didn’t exactly set the media group’s shares on fire, either.

Icahn will want a clearer victory from Motorola. Observer doesn’t expect him to let up too much on the company, even though he has just won a decisive victory in round one.

Main attraction

Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit to Westminster on Wednesday drew a large crowd of MPs and Lords, some of whom had come to see the president. Most, however, seemed to have come to see the latest Mrs Sarkozy, singer Carla Bruni, whose days as a nude model were fondly recaptured in the British press on Wednesday.

Ms Bruni listened demurely as Sarko ladelled litres of French syrup over his British audience, until they rolled over in submission.

But there was a moment of humour as Michael Martin, the Commons Speaker, welcomed his French guests to the Royal Gallery in the House of Lords, innocently announcing that its decor had a very strong French connection.

Queue laughter - the most obvious features of the Royal Gallery are the two enormous friezes depicting Britain’s victory over France at Waterloo and Trafalgar. Martin seemed bemused. He simply meant that Westminster’s famous interior designer, Augustus Pugin, was the son of a French émigré.

Slave to work

Michael O’Leary, the motormouth boss of Ryanair, is famous for dressing up at press conferences. His most notorious guise was as the Pope but on Wednesday he donned (not literally, unfortunately) a hair shirt.

O’Leary announced that he and 35 other senior executives would forgo a pay increase this year as profits are set to dive because of high oil prices.

Not that he will starve on €565,000 a year, excluding bonus and pension.

Still, he is working harder for it. “I am married with two young children under the age of two-and-a-half and have discovered for the first time in my life that many of the joys of fatherhood [lead you] to spend more time at the office,” he said. “The office is more attractive than changing nappies or getting up in the night.”

And in spite of saying he will only stick around for another two or three years, it is too early to talk of retirement plans.

“Remember, Ryanair is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

Perhaps not if you are jammed in the back row on the 6.30am to Dublin.

More to come

The primary contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is beginning to look a bit like trench warfare. Clinton is leading in Pennsylvania, while Obama is leading in North Carolina. It appears that the fighting will continue until early summer without a clear result.

But there is damage being done, and it is not to John McCain, who has had a good run in the polls this month. And a fascinating poll this week by Rasmussen Reports showed that 22 per cent of Democratic voters across the US said Clinton should drop out of the race. An identical number say Obama should quit.

Not surprisingly, Clinton thinks her continued presence in the race is not harming the chance of a Democrat being elected in November. “Millions of people still remain to vote and to have their votes counted, so I think it’s exciting and I find it very positive for our party,” she told Time magazine’s Mark Helprin this week. “We’re going to have a unified Democratic party and we’ll go into the fall in a strong position to defeat John McCain.”

Clinton, while trailing Obama in the delegate count, went on to suggest that history was on her side.

“I remind a lot of people that my husband didn’t formally wrap up the nomination until June and when he did he was behind both President Bush and Ross Perot.”

Wrong address

The revelation that the US military mistakenly shipped fuses for nuclear missiles to Taiwan – it had meant to send helicopter batteries instead – has left many wondering how a blunder involving sensitive arms technology could happen. But looking at the Pentagon’s attempts at explaining the mix-up, one could come to the conclusion that it could actually have been much worse.

Anyone reading the transcript of the press conference that the Pentagon held to explain the situation could be forgiven for worrying the problems go even deeper than a mistaken shipment. The text shows Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary, speaking about China – not Taiwan – having received the shipment.

“Yeah, I would say – and these are just initial gathering of information – it appears from the – fairly early on the Chinese indicated to us that they did not have in receipt what they had asked for,” Henry said, according to the official transcript.

Surely just a slip-up on his part. After all, if you can confuse Taiwan, an island the US is committed to help defend, with China, the country this defence is directed against, then there is not really such a big difference between missile fuses and helicopter batteries either.

Fed up

Naples’ trash problems are reaching all corners of the globe. South Korea has banned Italian buffalo mozzarella from being sold on its territory, after reports that the dioxins in the cheese were above the acceptable level.

Italian police have been looking into allegations that huge piles of rubbish blighting the Neapolitan region have tainted herd feed. Korean fans of mozzarella di bufala will be in despair.

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