Next head across the Brooklyn Bridge to stroll the deliciously breezy Brooklyn Heights Promenade, catch an outdoor Shakespeare performance in Brooklyn's vast green Prospect Park, and scoop up a butter pecan sundae at the waterfront Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory (1 Water St), housed in a 1920s fireboat house.

BBC: Summer in the city: New York

There had been the prospect of vast job cuts, with a total of about 16, 000 staff expected to be axed worldwide from a combined workforce of 142, 000.

BBC: German bank merger off

Firms the world over licked their chops at the prospect of a vast new middle class.

ECONOMIST: India��s economy

When Netflix combined DVDs and streaming, it offered both a vast selection of up-to-date content and the prospect of instant gratification.

ECONOMIST: Home entertainment

What used to take months of golf outings and lunches is now pulled together by a solution like Salesforce.com and its vast ecosystem of partner solutions which provide volumes of research data on any given prospect.

FORBES: Latest trait of successful start-ups: Speed & iteration of learning...and yes un-learning!

But this is the era of vast new-issue wealth, and Babson did not want to alienate a hot prospect like DeMello.

FORBES: They Want Your Founder's Stock

The prime minister has said the prospect of enfranchising others makes him feel "physically ill", and the vast majority of MPs from all parties want to see the blanket ban maintained.

BBC: MPs can force UK to keep ban on prisoner votes - minister