Strong results follow drop in European airline stocks this week after Ryanair reported profit plunge
The budget airline easyJet is predicting a record-breaking summer of travel after profits jumped 16% in its most recent quarter of trading.
The bumper figures come only two days after the rival no-frills carrier Ryanair reported a plunge in earnings and a poor outlook for the holiday getaway season, pushing down many European airline stocks.
Continue reading...Suggestions definition of petrostate is too narrow as many rich countries that could phase out fossil fuels double down
“Drill, baby, drill!” Donald Trump’s ominous avowal to pump up the oil and gas production of the US has horrified many people around the world about the intentions of the Republican candidate, who has also declared he wants to be “dictator for a day”. Rather than the prospective leader of the free world, the election frontrunner sounds more like the tyrant of a petrostate.
That should not be entirely surprising given the country’s recent record: it has ramped up fossil fuel production to become the world’s biggest producer. As a Guardian investigation reveals, the total number of projected licences by the US for 2024 could lead to an estimated 397m tonnes of planet-heating emissions.
Continue reading...Record-high 17.78 million foreign tourists came to Japan in the first half of year, with arrivals in June led by travellers from South Korea, China, Taiwan and the US
Businesses in Japan are considering a dual pricing system for foreign tourists and local people amid a surge in inbound visitors and the continued weakness of the yen.
The head of the Hokkaido Tourism Organization has called on businesses in Japan’s northernmost prefecture, known for its beautiful scenery and winter resorts, to set lower prices for locals.
Continue reading...Banking body reports increase to 1.5m in 2023 – the highest since before Covid – despite move to cashless society
There has been an unexpected jump in the number of people who mainly use notes and coins for their daily spending, despite the UK moving closer to becoming a cashless society, a report has found.
The volume of contactless and mobile payments increased last year, while the number of cash payments resumed a downward trajectory after enjoying a brief comeback in 2022, the banking body UK Finance noted in its annual report on the UK payments market.
Continue reading...CEO Elon Musk blames ‘bit of a hangover’ from rivals’ discounting but insists challenges are ‘fairly short-term’
Earnings at Tesla almost halved as discounts and price cuts pile pressure on the electric carmaker’s profit margins.
Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, blamed “a bit of a hangover” after rivals cut prices “very substantially, which has made it a bit more difficult for Tesla”.
Continue reading...Women who sorted frankincense told to change their story ‘or face consequences’ in doTERRA’s investigation
An investigation into the abuse of women working to supply frankincense to a leading US essential oils brand built on ethical sourcing has left workers unpaid and frightened, with some saying they were told to change their stories “or face the consequences”.
Last year doTERRA, which sells essential oils and other wellness products to a mostly female customer base, launched an investigation into its frankincense supplier in Somaliland after reporting by the Fuller Project uncovered allegations of serious abuses, including sexual harassment and assault. Many women hired as frankincense sorters said they were routinely underpaid and faced harsh working conditions that had impacted their health.
Continue reading...Billionaire says Optimus will start performing tasks for carmaker in 2025 and could be ready for sale in 2026
The Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, has claimed the company will produce “genuinely useful” humanoid robots to start working in its factories next year.
The world’s richest person, who has a penchant for making overambitious claims on social media, posted on his platform X, formerly Twitter, that he also hoped to expand into “high production” mode to make robots with a humanlike form available sell to other companies in 2026.
Continue reading...Israeli company aims for stock market flotation after spurning biggest deal in tech group’s history
The cybersecurity firm Wiz has turned down a $23bn (£18bn) takeover bid from Google’s parent, Alphabet, spurning what would have been the tech company’s biggest ever acquisition and seeking a stock market flotation instead.
Alphabet had been in talks with Wiz, founded by alumni of Israel’s cyberintelligence unit, as it seeks to catch rivals Microsoft and Amazon in the hyper-competitive cloud services market.
Continue reading...Jonathan Reynolds says he expects Royal Navy ships will continue to be built at the struggling Belfast yard
The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, has said he is confident that the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast will continue to build ships for the Royal Navy, despite ruling out government support for the struggling company.
Harland & Wolff is part of a consortium on a £1.6bn contract to build three naval fleet solid support ships to supply the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers. However, it has faced months of uncertainty over its future.
Continue reading...Some top backers throw weight behind Harris amid flood of grassroots donations but others pointedly decline to do so
Top Democratic donors helped end Joe Biden’s re-election bid in the past weeks by publicly and privately calling on him to stand aside, and threatening to pull their funds.
In the hours after he withdrew from the campaign, some of the party’s highest-profile backers promptly threw their weight behind Kamala Harris. Others pointedly did not.
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Continue reading...Europe’s largest airline says passengers are waiting until later in the season to book tickets
Ryanair has said its profits plunged by almost half between April and June and warned that fares this summer would be “materially lower” than last year.
Europe’s largest airline reported profits of €360m (£303m) in the spring quarter, 46% lower than the same period last year, despite passenger numbers rising 10% to 55.5 million.
Continue reading...Rescue deal with Tapi Carpets and Floors will still result in about 1,000 job losses
The Carpetright brand and 54 of the flooring retailer’s stores are being bought by its rival Tapi Carpets and Floors in a deal that will save 300 jobs.
The multimillion-pound deal, which is expected to be finalised on Monday, does not include Carpetright’s head office in Purfleet, Essex, or 220 further shops, and will result in about 1,000 job losses.
Continue reading...Opposition in wealthier areas is likely and overcoming it is essential, says Resolution Foundation
The government will need to “take on net-zero nimbys” and ramp up public investment to decarbonise Britain’s homes, transport and electricity system, a leading thinktank has said.
With Keir Starmer promising a rapid transition to decarbonise the power system by 2030, a report by the Resolution Foundation said achieving the target would require more government spending and private investment.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Several sent home for slow fruit picking face debts as watchdog investigates alleged illegal fees
Indonesian workers who paid thousands of pounds to travel to Britain and pick fruit at a farm supplying most big supermarkets have been sent home within weeks for not picking fast enough.
One of the workers said he had sold his family’s land, as well as his and his parents’ motorbikes, to cover the more than £2,000 cost of coming to Britain in May and was distressed to find himself unemployed with few possessions.
Continue reading...Flights continue to be cancelled while GP surgeries and hospitals will be dealing with impact of backlogs
The aftershocks of the Microsoft IT outage continued to ripple across the UK on Saturday as holidaymakers and patients suffered the brunt of the computer systems failure.
Customers experienced flight cancellations, faulty train ticket machines and failures in GPs’ prescription and appointment systems after a flawed security update from CrowdStrike, a US cybersecurity firm, crashed 8.5 million devices across the world running the Windows operating system.
Continue reading...Countries and companies involved in oil and gas extraction to be asked to join scheme aimed at tackling global heating
Fossil-fuel producing countries and companies are being asked to pay into a new international fund to help poor countries cope with the effects of the climate crisis.
The climate investment fund is being set up by the Azerbaijan government, host country of the Cop29 UN climate summit in November.
Continue reading...IT support staff need to implement the fix in person, one computer at a time, experts have said
Supermarkets, banks, airlines and industries across Australia are slowly recovering on Saturday morning from the massive global Windows outage caused by a CrowdStrike software update gone wrong, with experts warning it could take weeks to resolve.
On Friday morning, the CEO of the Texas-based cybersecurity company, George Kurtz, apologised for the outage, and said it was not a cyber-attack, but a software update issue on its cloud-based cybersecurity platform Falcon for Microsoft Windows. It had since been fixed.
Continue reading...Police say Serbian man detained near Paris after 74-year-old Ian Cameron was stabbed to death at home in Germany
The alleged killer of a British former Rolls-Royce designer who was stabbed to death at his home in Bavaria last week has been arrested outside Paris after a Europe-wide search, German police said. A motive was not immediately established.
Ian Cameron, 74, was attacked with a knife on 12 July and fatally wounded. A Serbian citizen, 22, was identified as the prime suspect based on tips from the public, the Fürstenfeldbruck police department said.
Continue reading...More than 3,000 flights cancelled worldwide after problem affecting Microsoft Windows
Passengers have described “bedlam” at UK airport check-ins after a global IT outage on what was due to be the busiest day for flying since the start of the Covid pandemic, while train networks have also been disrupted.
More than 3,000 flights have been cancelled worldwide after Microsoft Windows operating systems used by airlines, airports and some air traffic systems were affected.
Continue reading...Former postal affairs minister says conduct of some civil servants was ‘Orwellian’ and raises questions of objectivity
The former postal affairs minister Jo Swinson has railed against the “Orwellian” and “duplicitous” behaviour of some civil servants who kept her in the dark about goings on at the Post Office, as she made a tearful apology for failing to expose the Horizon IT scandal.
The former Liberal Democrat leader, who held the postal brief in 2012-13 and again in 2014-15 in the coalition government, also said she deeply regretted turning down a meeting with Sir Alan Bates.
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