Truck drivers tell of long delays for checks at the Eurotunnel as trade barrier goes up between UK and EU
Roger White arrived in France at 2.30pm on Tuesday with a truckload of hard cheese from Somerset.
Before Brexit he would have rolled off the Eurotunnel train and carried on up the A16 to Belgium, unloading his wares a few hours later at his ultimate destination in Utrecht.
Continue reading...Boeing has been fined $2.5bn by the US justice department after being charged with fraud and conspiracy in connection with two fatal crashes of its 737 Max airliner.
Continue reading...Tesla co-founder overtakes Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as car firm’s shares soar after ‘blue Senate’ victory
Elon Musk, the maverick boss of Tesla, has overtaken Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to become the world’s richest person, after shares in the electric car company he co-founded soared on hopes that a Democrat-controlled US Senate would usher in a new green agenda.
A 4.8% rise in Tesla’s share price was enough to push Musk into the top spot according to the Bloomberg billionaires index, which tracks the daily changes in the fortunes of the world’s 500 wealthiest people.
Continue reading...Economic fallout from Covid pandemic and rise of home working likely to spur exodus
London’s population is set to decline for the first time in more than 30 years, driven by the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and people reassessing where they live during the crisis, according to a report.
The accountancy firm PwC said the number of people living in the capital could fall by more than 300,000 this year, from a record level of about 9 million in 2020, to as low as 8.7 million. This would end decades of growth with the first annual drop since 1988.
Continue reading...Trucks arriving at GB ports lack paperwork needed to enter region, business leaders say
Northern Ireland is facing disruptions to its food supply because suppliers in Great Britain are unaware of the Brexit-related paperwork needed to send goods to the region, business leaders have said.
Trucks are arriving at GB ports with incorrect or absent documentation that delays their passage across the Irish Sea, they told MPs on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Workers on farms supplying world’s biggest meat firms allegedly paid £8 a day and housed in shacks with no toilets or running water
Brazilian companies and slaughterhouses including the world’s largest meat producer, JBS, sourced cattle from supplier farms that made use of workers kept in slavery-like conditions, according to a new report.
Workers on cattle farms supplying slaughterhouses earned as little as £8 a day and lived in improvised shacks with no bathrooms, toilets, running water or kitchens, according to a report from Brazilian investigative agency Repórter Brasil.
Since 1995, the report said, 55,000 Brazilian workers have been rescued by government inspectors from “situations similar to slavery”. While the number of investigations has fallen in recent years – 118 workers were freed in 2018, compared with 1,045 a decade earlier – that does not mean the situation has improved, just that inspections have been reduced, it noted.
Continue reading...Vast gap in earnings described as ‘unfair’ and ‘repugnant’ by trade union leaders
Bosses of top British companies will have made more money by teatime on Wednesday than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year, according to an independent analysis of the vast gap in pay between chief executives and everyone else.
The chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid a median average of £3.6m a year, which works out at 115 times the £31,461 collected by full-time UK workers on average, according to research by the High Pay Centre thinktank.
Continue reading...Alibaba co-founder has fallen out of favour with Beijing, but observers cautious about drawing conclusions
Speculation is mounting over the whereabouts of the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, who has not been seen or heard in public for more than two months.
Ma, the co-founder and former chairman of the technology firm Alibaba, has fallen out of favour with China’s leadership. In late October, he stood alongside senior officials and delivered a blunt speech criticising national regulators, reportedly infuriating China’s president, Xi Jinping.
Continue reading...The Tesla project will put Grünheide on the map, but some say it is doing ‘irreversible’ harm to the environment
For the past 10 months, Silas Heineken has been flying a drone over one of Germany’s biggest building sites and posting the images on YouTube.
The 14-year-old self-named “Tesla Kid” has built a significant following, as tens of thousands tune in each week to see the latest developments in Elon Musk’s GigaFactory as it emerges at speed from the sandy ground of Brandenburg, south-east of Berlin.
Continue reading...Cryptocurrency passes $30,000 as financial institutions express growing interest
Bitcoin has surged to a record high amid rising interest from investors and claims that the volatile cryptocurrency is on the way to becoming a mainstream payment method.
Having quadrupled in value during 2020, bitcoin began 2021 strongly by breaking through the $30,000 (£22,000) mark for the first time, less than three weeks after first trading above $20,000.
Continue reading...Government is withdrawing critical support when it is most needed and has no proper plan for jobs, federal opposition says
The Morrison government faces new calls to offer targeted support to businesses in the hardest hit parts of the Australian economy as the Coalition presses ahead with cuts to emergency wage subsidies from Monday.
Labor has accused the government of withdrawing critical support from the economy at a time when Covid-19 outbreaks in New South Wales and Victoria have sparked the return of tight domestic border rules and curbs on business activities.
Continue reading...As Uber parks its plans for robotaxis, experts admit the autonomous vehicle challenge is bigger than anticipated
By 2021, according to various Silicon Valley luminaries, bandwagoning politicians and leading cab firms in recent years, self-driving cars would have long been crossing the US, started filing along Britain’s motorways and be all set to provide robotaxis in London.
1 January has not, however, brought a driverless revolution. Indeed in the last weeks of 2020 Uber, one of the biggest players and supposed beneficiaries, decided to park its plans for self-driving taxis, selling off its autonomous division to Aurora in a deal worth about $4bn (£3bn) – roughly half what it was valued at in 2019.
Continue reading...Many customers of Sydney bottle shop are considered to be close contacts and must isolate for 14 days. Follow latest updates
MEDIA RELEASE: From 1am Monday 4 January, anyone who has been in Victoria on or since 21 December will be restricted from entering vulnerable facilities, including aged care facilities, hospitals, disability accommodation and correctional facilities.https://t.co/xd8p24VvdZ
Some more details on that cyclone warning from AAP.
A severe weather warning has been issued for far north Queensland as a tropical cyclone is expected to develop in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Continue reading...Some forecasters, buoyed by the success of big tech and vaccines, are predicting 10‑15% gains
The new year is traditionally a time for looking forwards, for hopeful resolutions, for celebrating. But for economists and investors, the annual forecasts for 2021 might be something of a painful reminder of exactly how much they failed to foresee.
The pandemic quickly made a mockery of all projections. An entertaining analysis of US chief executives’ statements during 2020 by data company Sentieo for the New York Times showed a 70,000% year-on-year rise in the use of “unprecedented”, while “humbled” tripled – perhaps code for “it wasn’t my fault, so you should still pay me the same”. To be fair, though, in March it really did feel like nobody had a clue what to do – even governments, who are meant to have “pandemic” firmly on their risk radars.
Continue reading...UK company says it will keep trying to use leverage to get compensation from local supplier
Tate & Lyle has been accused of betraying 200 families in Cambodia who have fought for years to secure compensation for land they say was taken from them to make way for a sugar plantation.
Residents in Koh Kong, Cambodia, say their livelihoods, and their children’s futures, were devastated when their land was taken from them in a process that began in 2006. The land was later used to supply sugar to Tate & Lyle.
Continue reading...Universal credit boost, ban on evictions and mortgage holiday must continue, party says
Many low- and middle-income households will face financial hardship unless ministers maintain support for those who have lost their jobs or experienced steep cuts in income during the second wave of Covid-19, Labour has said.
The shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, said in a new year message to Rishi Sunak that the chancellor must extend a range of Covid-19 rescue measures due to run out over the next three months “to protect struggling households from financial ruin”.
Continue reading...As Brexit’s tangible effects kick in, we look at the impact the EU’s most far-reaching project has had on British society
Historians of the future will judge the politics of the half century before the Brexit transition ended on 1 January 2021. What, though, of social and cultural historians, those who study how we live?
Perhaps the most symbolic cultural artefacts of the last 50 years will turn out not to be a blue flag but a bottle of Blue Nun, a block of mozzarella, a Ryanair boarding printout or a ticket to a Bayern Munich v Manchester City football game.
Continue reading...Escargots are traditional hors d’oeuvre at end-of-year celebrations that account for 70% of business
For France’s heliciculteurs, or snail farmers, 2020 was a desperately sluggish year.
With seasonal festivities all but cancelled, Christmas markets called off, a lack of tourists and restaurants shut down because of the coronavirus crisis, business has slowed to, well, a snail’s pace.
Continue reading...With plans for satellite launches and investment in space-based solar, can the UK become a space super power?
In 1969, a British engineer was invited to the White House to meet President Nixon. His name was Francis Thomas Bacon and he had developed the fuel cells used on Apollo 11. Known now as Bacon fuel cells, these power sources consume hydrogen and oxygen to produce water, heat and, in theory, a continuous supply of electricity.
His invention was considered so integral to the success of the Apollo mission that Nixon told him, “Without you Tom, we wouldn’t have gotten to the moon.”
Continue reading...Many at the harbour in the Devon town are concerned that their industry has been sold short
Anton Bailey had just taken a delivery of a new set of fishing nets and was patiently sorting them on the harbour-side at Brixham in Devon. The skipper, who first boarded a fishing boat four decades ago when he was just three, was feeling a mixture of optimism and frustration.
He is optimistic that when he chugs out to fish for pollock with his fresh nets in the new year he will be lucky and return with a good catch, but frustrated that, to his mind, the Brexit fishing deal has sold the British industry short.
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