Author: News Desk

Labour’s Rachel Reeves to set out plan to recover Covid fraud billions The Labour Party has said if they win the next general election, a Labour government would create an anti-corruption commissioner to recoup billions of pounds lost to fraud and waste during the pandemic. Rachel Reeves will set out the plan in her speech at Labour’s conference on Monday. She is expected to put the cost to the taxpayer of Covid fraud at £7.2bn. Reeves, the shadow chancellor, will also pledge to speed up the planning process for critical infrastructure if the party comes to power. Labour’s proposal to…

US moves warships closer to Israel after Hamas attack The US has announced it will move an aircraft carrier, ships and jets to the eastern Mediterranean and give Israel additional equipment and ammunition. According to a US National Security spokesperson, the Hamas attack on southern Israel has killed at least 700 people and around 100 people have been kidnapped.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by US News (@wtxnewsusa) More than 400 people in Gaza have been killed in retaliatory Israeli air strikes, according to Palestinian officials. Along with the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, a missile…

Israeli music festival: 260 bodies recovered from site after Hamas attack More than 260 bodies have reportedly been recovered from the Supernova festival site, according to the rescue agency Zaka. The festival – in the desert in southern Israel, was stormed by militants, who opened fire as part of a huge surprise attack on Israel. More than 100 people have been kidnapped. Eyewitnesses say the barrage of rockets were quickly followed by gunshots. “They turned off the electricity and suddenly out of nowhere they [militants] come inside with gunfire, opening fire in every direction,” one festival-goer told Israel’s Channel 12.…

Oil prices rise following Hamas attack on Israel Oil prices have jumped on concerns that the situation in Israel and Gaza could disrupt output from the Middle East. Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose more than $3 to $87.68 a barrel, while US prices also rose. Israel and Palestinian territories are not oil producers but the Middle Eastern region accounts for almost a third of global supply. View this post on Instagram A post shared by EU NEWS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦☮️🇷🇺 (@wtx_eu_news) Hamas’s assault on Israel was the biggest escalation between the two sides for decades. A spokesperson for Hamas told…

Metro Bank agrees rescue deal with investors The Guardian says The embattled high street lender Metro Bank has agreed a rescue deal with investors to shore up its balance sheet after a weekend of negotiations. The bank announced late on Sunday that it had secured a £325m capital raise, including £150m of new equity from shareholders, and £600m of debt refinancing. The equity raise will be led by its largest shareholder, the Colombian billionaire Jaime Gilinski Bacal’s Spaldy Investments, which will contribute £102m. His stake will rise from 9% to 53%, making him the controlling shareholder. Metro is also in…

Hiring boom fading but three-quarters of UK firms still struggle to find staff The Guardian says Three-quarters of UK firms are still struggling to recruit staff, research has found, but the post-pandemic “jobs boom” appears to be in decline, with hiring intentions continuing to fall last month. A survey by the British Chambers of Commerce found that 73% of the almost 5,000 companies it polled had faced hiring difficulties in the July to September quarter – a nine percentage point drop from the record high of 82% in the final three months of 2022. The hospitality sector continues to suffer…

‘Customers are coming to us crying’: staff mourn as Wilko exits high street The Guardian says There was a mournful, empty feeling in the Wembley High Road branch of Wilko that closed its doors for the last time on Thursday. It was one of 68 stores that the hardware and homeware retailer shut last week, with the final 37 of what was until last month a 400-strong empire closing on Sunday. With prices cut throughout the day, from 40% to 90% reductions, by 3pm the Wembley shop looked like a homage to a Soviet-era supermarket, the shelves all but bare,…

Waitrose in talks with Amazon over online grocery deal, says report The Guardian says Waitrose is reportedly in talks with Amazon to sell groceries via the internet marketplace, in an attempt to lure in more shoppers and claw back market share. The Sunday Telegraph reported that the upmarket supermarket, part of the John Lewis Partnership, and Amazon were discussing a third-party deal, after the world’s biggest online retailer struck a similar agreement with the supermarket Iceland recently. Iceland launched on the Amazon website in mid-September, offering thousands of products to Prime subscribers that the US company delivers from Iceland stores.…

House of Kardashian review – this exhaustive show turns Kim and co’s circus into a meaningful story The Guardian says House of Kardashian is put together in such a way that it may well act as a Rorschach test. You might come away from this three-hour documentary series thinking that the Kardashian-Jenner family is a pioneering model of female-led entrepreneurship and empowerment – or that they are a late-stage capitalist nightmare, changing society for the worse, atop their gilded mountains of cash. At the end of each instalment, there is a note to say that the Kardashian-Jenners (and later, Kanye…

Smitten Harry Styles and Taylor Russell take their romance to the next level with very public outing The Metro says Harry Styles and Taylor Russell could not have looked more smitten with one another as he supported her at her theatre show this weekend. The Canadian actress, 29, did her final performance in The Effect in London on Saturday night (October 7) and, of course, rumoured boyfriend Harry, also 29, was there to cheer her on. This was far from the first time Harry has been in the audience supporting Taylor while she did her thing, as the One Direction…