Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
New Ross reinvented itself as a shrine to the Kennedy clan. Can towns linked to Biden, the most Irish American president since JFK, do the same?
After its factories died and its port withered, New Ross, a town perched by the River Barrow in south-east Ireland, decided in the 1990s to tap a unique asset: John F Kennedy.
The US president’s great-grandfather had sailed from the quays of New Ross to America during the 1840s famine, leaving behind a modest homestead that JFK twice visited, including a few months before his assassination in 1963. Like many Americans, not least the current US president-elect, Joe Biden, Kennedy was proud of his Irish connections and keen to re-emphasise the links.
Centre for Economics and Business Research says it expects this to happen half a decade sooner than it forecast a year ago
China will overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy before the end of the decade after outperforming its rival during the global Covid-19 pandemic, according to a report.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research said that it nowexpected the value of China’s economy when measured in dollars to exceed that of the US by 2028, half a decade sooner than it expected a year ago.
British scientists are trialling a new drug that could prevent someone who has been exposed to coronavirus from going on to develop the disease Covid-19, which experts say could save many lives.
The antibody therapy would confer instant immunity against the disease and could be given as an emergency treatment to hospital inpatients and care home residents to help contain outbreaks.
Americans, Canadians and Britons among those lured by campaign to attract foreign tech workers
Finland has received more than 5,300 applications in a month for a groundbreaking scheme offering foreign tech workers and their families the chance to relocate to the Nordic country for 90 days to see if they want to make the move permanent.
“We’re not top of many relocation lists, but we know once people do come, they tend to stay,” said Johanna Huurre, of Helsinki Business Hub which devised the campaign. “There’s huge competition globally for talent, so we had to think creatively.”
Warning comes as all passengers on board a regional flight told to isolate, and alerts issued across Sydney for a gym, cafes, shopping centre, food court and Santa photos
Sydney shoppers have been urged not to enter the central business district for the traditional Boxing Day sales after the state recorded seven new locally acquired coronavirus cases and the northern beaches cluster grew to 108.
The Australian Retailers Association labelled the NSW premier’s plea for consumers to stay at home on “the biggest day on the retail calendar” as “incredibly disappointing”.
Boris Johnson is confident he can sell the trade deal to Brexiters, according to the FT (paywall).
Sebastian Payne and George Parker report that Downing Street has been preparing the ground for weeks with the ERG, ensuring that senior backbenchers were aware of the shape of things to come and compromises being made.
Senior members of the group have already welcomed Johnson’s imminent deal as the “Christmas Eve Agreement”, a reference to the 1998 Belfast Good Friday Agreement that secured peace in Northern Ireland.
Indications from senior figures within the ERG suggest that many of its members will accept the compromises negotiated by Johnson and Lord Frost.
If they want help from the party to stay in parliament, then they’ll back the deal.
In case you’re just joining us, the final stage of the negotiations for a post-Brexit trade deal has been delayed after it emerged that the European commission was using out-of-date figures to calculate the reduction in the amount of fish that member states can catch in British waters after 1 January.
A deal was due to be announced early this morning but the announcement had to be postponed when officials noticed a discrepancy between two sets of fishing figures and realised that the numbers used in the negotiation appeared to be out of date.
Sydney to keep 10-visitor rule but from 24-26 December children under 12 not counted; lockdown continues in half of northern beaches, but small Christmas gatherings allowed. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
The Northern Territory has revoked its categorisation of New South Wales region Illawarra as a coronavirus hotspot.
Health minister Natasha Fyles made the announcement this afternoon following an emergency cabinet meeting, saying the decision was made because there were no cases from the northern beaches there.
This is based on the evidence that they’ve had no cases from the northern beaches coronavirus cluster. I know people are anxiously awaiting other local government areas, but the advice from our chief health officer Hugh Heggie ... is that it is safe to remove that hotspot declaration for the Illawarra Shire local government area. The others will remain in place.
Victoria is reminding people from greater Sydney, the Central Coast or the northern beaches to not attempt to enter Victoria, just in case you might have forgotten.
If you have been in Greater Sydney, the Central Coast, or Sydney's Northern Beaches since Dec 11 please do not attempt to enter Victoria. Only people who have exclusively visited or travelled through other parts of NSW can apply for a Border Crossing Permit to enter Vic. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/bad8irfvqn
As soon as it’s safe to open back up to NSW, we will. For now, we’re making sure Victoria can stay safe and stay open.
Pakistani workers describe trying to survive on the less than £50 a month many of them earn making items for firms such as Boohoo
When Qasim Ahmed* arrived in Faisalabad a year ago, he didn’t want much – just enough money to pay for a roof over his head, buy food and send a little cash home each month.
Today, that seems like a fantasy. Instead of having enough to get by, he claims, he has found himself struggling to survive, frequently going hungry, feeling abused by his boss and fearing he is working in a factory that could go up in flames. “It makes me sad that I can’t help my parents and siblings the way I hoped before coming here,” he says.
Guardian investigation finds claims of safety issues, with workers saying they sometimes work 24-hour shifts
The fast fashion brand Boohoo is selling clothes made by Pakistani factory workers who say they face appalling conditions and earn as little as 29p an hour, an investigation by the Guardian has found.
In interviews in the industrial city of Faisalabad, workers at two factories claimed they were paid 10,000PKR (£47) a month, well below the legal monthly minimum wage for unskilled labour of 17,500PKR, while making clothes to be sold by Boohoo.
France is expected to reopen its border with the UK but only to its own nationals, French residents and professionals such as truck drivers, all of whom will have to provide a recent negative test, France’s public broadcaster has reported.
Britons or other non-French nationals with a permanent residence in France will be able to return, but the border is set to remain closed to all other non-French citizens in the UK, France Info said. It was not yet clear how long the measures would be in place.
France and Denmark thought to be most cautious about budging from current demands on fish caught in British waters
EU member states with the largest fishing fleets are being asked by Ursula von der Leyen’s senior team to rethink their “final offer” after Downing Street made a significant move to break the Brexit deadlock.
France and Denmark are understood to be the most cautious about making a counter-proposal, budging from their current demand that their vessels lose only 25% by value of the fish they catch in British waters.
European commission president said to be in constant contact with Boris Johnson as fishing remains key issue
Ursula von der Leyen took personal control of Brexit negotiations in an attempt to strike a deal before Christmas as talks went to the wire over tens of millions of pounds worth of fish.
The European commission president is understood to be in constant contact through a series of unscheduled phone calls with Boris Johnson and the EU capitals as she battles to find a compromise.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission concerned tech giant could harm competitors in wake of deal
Google faces a fine of up to $400m if it takes over Fitbit before the Australian competition regulator completes an investigation into the transaction.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) on Tuesday rejected an offer from Google to enter into a court-enforceable undertaking limiting the way it would use data gleaned from the wrist-worn fitness tracking devices.
Supreme court upholds order against Zamira Hajiyeva, who spent £1m a year at Harrods
A woman who spent £1m a year at Harrods will be forced to give up her £15m home unless she reveals the source of her fortune following the UK’s first McMafia-style “dirty money” investigation.
Zamira Hajiyeva, the wife of a former boss of the Azerbaijani state bank jailed for fraud, has lost her final appeal against a court order forcing her to reveal how she came by so much money.
Britain risks weeks without trade transition plans from 1 January after missing EU parliament Sunday deadline
Negotiators of a Brexit trade deal inched towards a compromise on fishing rights on Sunday but missed a major deadline, raising the prospect of weeks without arrangements from 1 January even in the event of agreement.
The teams led by the chief UK negotiator, David Frost, and his EU counterpart, Michel Barnier, were expected to continue talks on Monday despite the European parliament’s notice that it would not vote on a deal if not secured by midnight on Sunday.
Campaigners say the deals revealed in new report are a breach of firms’ human rights responsibilities
Human rights groups are demanding that two of Britain’s biggest banks explain why they have lent tens of millions of pounds to a technology company building a telecoms network that is part-owned and used by the Myanmar military.
HSBC and Standard Chartered have loaned $60m (£44.5m) to Vietnamese telecom giant Viettel in the last four years, a period when the Myanmar military has been accused of committing war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Viettel is a major investor in Mytel, a Myanmar mobile network that, since its launch in June 2018, has grown to become the second-biggest operator in the country with over 10 million users.
Ten of the richest people in the world have boosted their already vast wealth by more than $400bn (£296bn) since the coronavirus pandemic began as their businesses were boosted by lockdowns and financial crises across the globe.
The extra wealth accumulated by the 10 men – approximately $450bn, using Forbes figures – over the past nine months is more than the £284bn the British government is estimated to have spent on tackling the pandemic and the economic damage it has wrought on its 66 million people.
“They used to stand at the bar three deep,” says John Moran, surveying the long, empty counter at Killarney Rose, a Wall Street bar that would, in another era, have been stuffed with early-shift construction workers and, at lunch and late into the evening, suited bankers.
The world’s pre-eminent financial thoroughfare – at least throughout the 20th century – is a ghost of what it once was. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are still located here, but dozens of financial institutions have emptied out from New York’s financial district in an exodus that started in the wake of 9/11 and has been hastened by Covid.
Starring Keanu Reeves and hyped to the heavens, Projekt Red’s dystopian but glitchy romp has been pulled from sale. What went wrong?
Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most-anticipated video games of the year was released last week. A dystopian romp around a Blade Runner-inspired city, it had all the ingredients for a perfect storm of hype: it’s been nearly a decade in the making; its creator, Warsaw’s CD Projekt Red, was behind one of the greatest games of the last decade (The Witcher 3 – think Game of Thrones but grimier); it stars Keanu Reeves, who is as popular with gamers as he is with everybody else. Eight million people had pre-ordered and paid for the game before it came out. But since 10 December, it’s all gone horribly wrong.
On launch day, the reviews were good – great, even. Many critics praised the fictional Night City’s realism, its striking skyscraping architecture and grubby alleys; they loved the invigorating gunplay, ballsy characters and neon swagger. Some expressed reservations about the game’s rather adolescent tone and its eagerness to objectify women’s bodies – neither of which were a surprise to anyone who’d been keeping an eye on the game’s marketing.