JUST 80 affordable homes have been built in the Capital in the last six years as part of a flagship council initiative - despite more than 4000 of them being promised.

The authority brought in tough rules six years ago to force builders to turn a proportion of most new private sector developments over to affordable housing.

This figure was put up to 25 per cent last year yet “shocking” new figures have revealed that only two per cent of more than 4000 cheap homes given planning consent since 2001 have actually been built.

Protracted negotiations between the council and developers have been blamed for the lack of progress, as well as firms dragging their heels releasing the land set aside for first-time buyers and other target groups.

Presently there are no deadlines on when work on affordable housing must start - it is up to developers when they release land.

City leaders also blame a lack of money to build the new housing, with Edinburgh receiving less than half of the funding per capita that Glasgow gets, despite the chronic housing shortage here.

Housing associations are building around 500 affordable homes in Edinburgh every year but this rate of investment falls well short of the 12,000 needed in the next ten years to cope with the city’s growing population.

City leader Jenny Dawe has called for more Scottish Executive investment but said she wants officials to look at ways of tightening up the rules for developers and making sure that planning conditions are adhered to.

She said: “I found the figures quite shocking. We have only seen a fraction of what has been committed to being built and this gap needs to be rectified.

“Firstly, we need to make sure that the 25 per cent of land is actually being delivered, and that may be through building in targets into planning conditions.

“But possibly more importantly we need to address the fact Edinburgh is chronically underfunded for housing.

“We need at least two to three times the amount of affordable housing currently being built so something needs to change.

“We are committed to looking into the feasibility of upping the 25 per cent figure but we don’t want to scare off developers from the city. Getting the 25 per cent working first must be the priority.”

Developers have to either build the affordable housing themselves or, more commonly, gift the land to a housing association which then builds the homes.

Edinburgh receives significantly less cash for affordable housing from the Scottish Executive than other areas of Scotland. Figures for 2007/08 shows that Edinburgh will get 77.88 per capita but Glasgow will receive 142.93 per capita.

Councillor Paul Edie, the city’s housing leader, today said he will seek an urgent meeting with the Scottish Executive to discuss the problem.

He said: “Tackling the need for homes that people can afford is a major priority for me. More than 4566 families on the council’s housing register in Edinburgh are living in cramped, over-crowded accommodation. This is simply not acceptable. Over the next 15 years, Edinburgh’s population is set to grow faster than any other part of the country.

“I am calling for immediate action to investigate what options are open to us in resolving the acute shortage of affordable housing in Edinburgh.”

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NEW YORK: In early May, a little more than a month before she became president of Yahoo, Susan Decker found herself dining at Gorats Steak House in Omaha along with her husband and two of the restaurants most famous regulars: Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

She was in town to join the board of Buffetts holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, and had come to the legendary investors attention through recommendations from Charles Munger, his longtime associate; Donald Graham, the chairman of The Washington Post Co.; and David Gottesman, a fellow Berkshire board member.

“She passed some pretty tough tests when she got A-pluses from all three,” Buffett recalls. He describes Decker as a “home run” for a Berkshire board seat, because of her independence, interest in the company, dedication to shareholders and business savvy. “Sue is 100 percent on all four of those,” Buffett said, making him just one of Deckers many fans in corporate boardrooms.

In her ascent from financial analyst to head of research at a major Wall Street brokerage firm to chief financial officer and now president of Yahoo, Deckers smarts and acumen have drawn praise from other well-known business leaders - including Steven Jobs and Craig Barrett, who named her to the boards of Pixar Animation Studios and Intel, respectively, and Hamilton James, president of Blackstone Group.

Now Deckers abilities will be tested as never before. Along with the Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, 38, who stepped in as chief executive last month in a management shakeup, Decker, 44, faces the daunting challenge of pulling Yahoo from under the shadow of Google, rebuilding morale inside the company, attracting new top-notch recruits and, maybe hardest of all, delivering far better results for Yahoos long-suffering investors. The companys shares are trading at around $27, down 37 percent from a high of more than $43 in January 2006.

By many measures, Yahoo remains one of the most successful companies on the Internet. It attracts nearly 500 million visitors around the world every month to its Web sites, where it offers a plethora of content and services, from news, sports, financial information and entertainment to e-mail, photo-sharing and online communities. And it is one of the largest sellers of Internet advertising, which it places both on its Web portal and on other high-traffic online destinations like eBay, Comcast.com and hundreds of newspaper Web sites. Last year, it earned $751 million in profit, on sales of $6.4 billion.

Yet over the last 18 months, Yahoo has suffered its biggest slump since the collapse of the dot-com bubble. It has been eclipsed by the phenomenal rise of Google, which handily beat Yahoo in the most lucrative business on the Internet: search and search advertising.

As a result, Google now makes far more money in one quarter than Yahoo does in a year, and Googles market value of $162.8 billion is more than four times that of Yahoo, which stands at $36.5 billion. As Yahoo races to close that gap, its bread-and-butter business - the sale of banners and other graphical ads - is showing signs of weakness amid growing competition from MySpace, Facebook and countless other sites.

Analysts, meanwhile, say that Yahoo, a company with 12,000 employees, has grown bureaucratic and slow, causing it to miss out on some of the hottest Internet trends, like social networking. They say it has also missed out on some of the smartest potential acquisitions, including YouTube, which was bought by Google, and Facebook, which Yahoo once considered buying. Now Facebook says it is not for sale, and even if it were, the price would likely be far higher than the $900 million or so that Yahoo offered last summer.

During the last several months, Terry Semel, the former Warner Brothers executive who ran Yahoo until two weeks ago, started a number of initiatives, including a reorganization of management ranks, to revive the companys fortunes and spirits. When those steps proved not enough to stop an exodus of senior executives or to placate increasingly restless shareholders, Semel stepped aside.

Now, some analysts question whether Yang and Decker are the right team to lead the company. Neither has extensive operational experience, and both are intimately linked to the strategy that has landed Yahoo in its current malaise. Yet both have said recently that Yahoo does not need a new strategy, but rather, must do a better job of executing its existing plan. Many people on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, as well as some inside the company, doubt that better execution alone will be enough. The suggestions for more dramatic changes range from a merger or sale, to Yahoos exit of the search business.

LONDON: An article about the ex-girlfriends of Fred Thompson, the former U.S. senator and likely Republican presidential candidate, last Monday drew 200,000 visitors to the Web site of the Times newspapers of London. Three-quarters of them were in the United States.

The Times and The Sunday Times are not alone in attracting large American readerships to their Web sites. The Guardian has seen a similar phenomenon. The Web sites of The Independent and The Daily Mail have more readers in America than at home in Britain, according to ComScore, which tracks Web traffic.

With Americans seemingly developing a taste for news with a Fleet Street twist, British papers are stepping up their efforts to court American readers and advertisers, expanding their coverage of U.S. politics and culture. And the biggest British media organization, the BBC, with a long-established international presence, is making a renewed push to crack the U.S. market, with the Internet playing a key role.

“They got all these readers without even trying,” said Jeff Jarvis, a media blogger and journalism professor at the City University of New York who writes a column in The Guardian. “Now theres this huge curiosity about America and how they can develop that audience.”

Newspapers like the Guardian, which is owned by an independent trust, and the Times papers, which are part of News Corp., are not the first Britain-based media to blaze a trail, virtual or otherwise, through America.

The Economist magazine, in which Pearson, the London-based media company, owns a 50 percent stake, has more than half of its 1.2 million circulation in America, compared with 170,000 copies sold at home. The U.S. edition of The Financial Times, which is owned by Pearson, this year edged past its British counterpart in circulation, selling 147,000 copies in May, compared with 142,000 in Britain and Ireland.

But now interest in the U.S. market is filtering down to media organizations that had only limited international ambitions before the Internet era.

The Guardian in May appointed a U.S. editor for its Web site, naming Michael Tomasky, a former editor of the magazine American Prospect. The Guardian is preparing to introduce a U.S.-focused home page, www.GuardianAmerica.com , aimed at the roughly 2.5 million unique users who visit the papers Web site each month from America, according to ComScore.

Times Online has already created a separate global home page, distinct from its British edition. The Times last year also started a U.S. edition of the printed newspaper, for limited distribution on the East Coast, as a “marketing tool” for the Web site, according to Anne Spackman, editor of Times Online.

Now Times Online is working on ways to generate more traffic, using search-engine optimization and other techniques intended to draw in American readers, Spackman said. U.S. audiences are more likely than their British counterparts to arrive at the site via Web “aggregators” like Google News, rather than through the home page, she added.

Technology is not the only thing that draws American readers to British papers sites, according to Spackman and Emily Bell, editor of Guardian Unlimited, the Guardians Web site. American media have been cutting back on international reporting, they said, at a time when U.S. audiences are looking for more coverage of the Middle East, for example. And Bell said American readers seem to like the fact that the Guardian is unabashed in its liberal leanings, while American newspapers typically say they strive for objectivity.

“We provide a level of debate and examination you might not get in the mainstream U.S. media,” Bell said.

The BBC, with more than nine million monthly unique users of its Web sites in North America, according to ComScore, is one of the biggest destinations for Americans seeking an outside perspective on world events. Now the BBC is trying expand its presence in America.

John Smith, chief executive of BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the British public broadcaster, said last week that the organization stood ready to tap a debt facility of 350 million, or $702 million, for international expansion.

In Britain, the BBC has a variety of advertising-funded magazines, some linked to television programs like “Top Gear,” which is about cars and driving. The BBC also wants to broaden availability of BBC America, a television channel available in 54 million homes as of the end of last year. The idea, Smith said, is to make Americans more aware of the range of output from the BBC, which some people associate primarily with news.

“In the United States, the position of the BBCs brand is quite unusual,” Smith said. “It commands a great deal of respect, but when you ask people, What else does the BBC do, in addition to news, it just doesnt command the same level of knowledge. “