Boots enjoyed a bumper year thanks to booming sales of COVID-19 tests, according to its latest company results – despite footfall levels on the high street still being weaker than they were before the pandemic. In the 12 months between August 2020 and August 2021, sales topped £34bn at parent company Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA).
Banksy’s Love Is In The Bin – the artwork that shredded itself after being sold in 2018 – has gone for £18.5m, a record for the artist at auction. Sotheby’s said the “decommissioned, remote controlled shredding mechanism” was still in the frame. The piece was originally titled Girl With Red Balloon when it sold for
Recent data from LinkedIn shows the skills that are most in-demand as the labor market attempts to slowly regain its footing after the steep decline caused by Covid-19. Aytac Unal | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images Microsoft announced Thursday it will shut down its local version of LinkedIn in China. LinkedIn was the last major
Butchers and abattoir workers from overseas will be granted seasonal worker visas to deal with the backlog of pigs that need to be slaughtered, the government has announced. Agriculture Secretary George Eustice said about 800 pig butchers from overseas are needed to avoid a mass cull of up to 150,000 of the animals. He expects
Travis singer Fran Healy says there was “so much blood” after he was “mauled” by a runaway sausage dog he tried to save from the middle of a car crash. The musician said it happened in Los Angeles – where he now lives – and that he had to drive to hospital while bleeding. Healy
8:15 AM ET The New York Islanders are going to win the 2022 Stanley Cup. “Please God, no,” wrote reader “Hockey Island,” whose Twitter profile includes an image of the team’s previous four championship banners from the 1980s. People like Mr. Island understand that my predicting the Stanley Cup winner is usually the kiss of
Maintenance of the International Space Station (ISS) can become hectic for astronauts. So, NASA has devised a way to help astronauts with their chores. Astrobee, a free-flying robotic system assistant, is NASA’s new addition onboard the ISS. The purpose of this robot is to undertake routine tasks so that astronauts have ample time to spare
When The Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess was spending time looking through the band’s back catalogue for ideas to mark their 30th anniversary, a gem was unearthed in the unlikely setting of his mum’s CD collection. Sandwiched somewhere between Queen’s A Kind Of Magic and Abba’s Arrival, Burgess found a long-forgotten Charlatans demo, created around the
The killings of five people in Norway by a man armed with a bow and arrows “appears to be an act of terrorism”, the country’s security agency has said. Four women and one man were killed during the rampage in Kongsberg, with a police officer among others left injured. A statement issued by PST, Norway’s
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In this article BTC.CM= ETH.CM= Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during the Russian Energy Week event on October 13, 2021 in Moscow, Russia. Mikhail Svetlov | Getty Images Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks cryptocurrencies have value — but he’s not convinced they can replace the U.S. dollar in settling oil trades. Some months
Mars is quite similar to Earth, as per a NASA scientist. In a video interview, astrobiologoist Dr. Becky McCauley Rench said that the Red Planet wasn’t as dry always, as we see it today. As per NASA’s own website, “Mars, like Earth, has seasons, polar ice caps, volcanoes, canyons, and weather.” Signs of ancient floods
The government is expected to back down today in a row over visas for foreign butchers to prevent a mass cull of British pigs. A shortage of butchers at industrial slaughterhouses has left farmers with too many pigs on their farms, leading to warnings that 10,000 pigs a week could have to be destroyed. It
Behind-the-scenes footage of The Beatles has been teased in a new trailer for a highly anticipated documentary series on the Fab Four. Get Back, directed by Oscar winner Peter Jackson, has been created from almost 60 hours of previously unseen footage shot in January 1969, as well as more than 150 hours of unheard audio.
The suspect in the Norway bow and arrow rampage which left five people dead had been flagged for possible signs of radicalisation, police have said. Officers had been worried about signs the man, who is a Muslim convert, may have been radicalised, police chief Ole Bredrup Saeverud said at a news conference. The 37-year-old Danish
A customer uses a SumUp payment card reader in Lisbon, Portugal, on Sept. 13, 2019. Angel Garcia | Bloomberg via Getty Images LONDON — SumUp, a U.K.-based payment processor, has acquired marketing start-up Fivestars in a bid to expand its reach across the U.S. and take on giants like PayPal and Square. The company said
A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have come up with a bipedal robot that performs the twin function of walking and flying. The team claims that their latest creation is not just agile but also capable of complex movements. Named Leonardo, the part-walking robot, part-flying drone is built in such
Having made a career out of playing an explorer of the cosmos, William Shatner – Captain James Kirk of Star Trek fame – did it for real on Wednesday, becoming at age 90 the oldest person in space aboard a rocketship flown by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin, an experience the actor called profound. Shatner
With the COP26 conference in Glasgow coming up soon, many climate and environmental groups are urging nations to accelerate the transition to renewable energy. A new report from Wärtsilä entitled Front Loading New Zero argues that nations can adopt 100% renewable systems faster than currently planned. It says significant cost reductions can be achieved by
The world is going through historic transitions, a global shift of energy, transportation, and consumption that will impact every aspect of our lives, but is that not the norm and could we learn from De Nederlandse aardgastransiti (“the Netherlands natural gas transition“) in the 1960s? De Nederlandse aardgastransitie Humanity has not always used petroleum, natural