Move to cut one in five outlets means bank has more than halved number of branches since 2018
Virgin Money has announced it will close 31 branches – almost all in Scotland and the north of England – in the latest stage of the UK banking sector’s retreat from the high street.
The bank said it expected to make 112 jobs redundant because of the closures after the coronavirus pandemic accelerated the shift to online and mobile app-based banking, a move that has rapidly reduced the profitability of physical bank branches.
Together, Climate Visuals and TED Countdown are releasing 100 photographs that depict climate solutions alongside the global impact of the climate crisis. The images were selected from more than 5,500 shots taken by professionals and amateurs from more than 150 countries. The images will be freely available to key groups communicating on climate – the editorial media, educators, campaigns and non-profit groups – via the Climate Visuals library.
The chosen images needed to be illustrative and powerful, and to communicate positive climate solutions in five key areas: energy, transport, materials, food and nature.
The collection will be displayed at the TED Countdown Summit in Edinburgh from 12-15 October and will also feature during the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow from 1-12 November.
Met officer used police ID card and handcuffs to lure Everard into car before strangling her and burning body
The former Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens will be sentenced today for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard, whom he lured off the street by abusing his powers and position as a police officer.
Couzens, 48, used his police warrant card and handcuffs to lure Everard off the street before strangling her with his police belt and burning her body, depriving her family of the chance to say a final goodbye, a court has heard.
China’s factory activity has shrunk unexpectedly amid curbs on electricity use and rising prices for commodities and parts, raising more concerns about the state of the world’s second biggest economy.
A closely watched survey released on Thursday showed that China’s factory activity contracted in September for the first time since the pandemic took a grip in February 2020.
Good morning: China manufacturing PMI contracts below 50 to 49.6 & the details are terrible:
Output, new orders, employment, new export orders all down!
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of the world economy, the financial markets, the UK’s supply chain crisis and business.
The supply chain problems gripping the global economy are threatening to undermine the recovery, and raising fears of stagflation -- that sickly mix of rising prices and slowing growth.
The pound has come under pressure as fears over "stagflation" stalk the economy amid a supply chain crisis and surging energy prices https://t.co/CqzjfjGWvv
“I expect us to be back to the pre-pandemic level in the early part of next year, possibly a month or two later than we thought we would be at the start of August.”
“the big challenge now is how we can get through this period of uneven growth, supply-side bumps and come out of the other side with both a smoother recovery and balance of supply and demand.”
GAS MARKET: European natural gas closes at a fresh all-time high after rising >10% today (both for UK NBP and Dutch TTF benchmarks). At the close, European gas was at the equivalent of ~$29 per mBtu, or close to $170 per barrel of oil equivalent. Yes, you read that correctly.
Asian benchmark coal (Newcastle) has been changing hands on the spot market above $200 per tonne for the last couple of days, above the weekly all-time high set in July 2008. Incredible prices, with runaway Chinese demand clashing against ESG-crunched supply | #CommodityInflationpic.twitter.com/fMalfrCPKc
Fears over stagflation do appear to be rising, after all, how could they not be when you see the sorts of increases being seen in energy prices, a trend that will eat into people’s disposable income, thus reducing their capacity to spend on other incidentals.
“The last few days have been difficult, we’ve seen large queues. But I think the situation is stabilising, we’re getting petrol into the forecourts. I think we’re going to see our way through this.”
France has accused Australia of lying shortly before Canberra cancelled a major submarine contract, with the French foreign minister declaring “someone lied”.
With no sign of any imminent easing of tensions between the two countries, Jean-Yves Le Drian told a parliamentary hearing that Australia had never expressed doubts about the €56bn (A$90bn) submarine contract or the strategic Indo-Pacific pact before breaking the contract.
Exclusive: soprano, who died in 2019, stopped performing after surgery in London in 2015
She had a voice described as a “grand mansion of sound”, won four Grammy awards and thrilled audiences in the world’s opera house – but suddenly stopped performing in 2015.
When Jessye Norman died four years later at the age of 74, her family said she had passed away from septic shock and multi-organ failure secondary to complications of a spinal cord injury she had sustained in 2015. The circumstances surrounding the injury and disappearance from public life were never explained.
The myth of a silenced English majority betrayed by a liberal metropolitan elite goes back decades
Patrick Wright is the author of The Village That Died for England: Tyneham and the Legend of Churchill’s Pledge
Like some of the emeritus professors who have recently steamed into the Conservative party’s “anti-woke” campaign under the name of History Reclaimed, I grew up in a less fractured country, in which, stately occasions apart, waving union jacks seemed largely left to the National Front.
In English classrooms, we were encouraged to be more moved by the famous list of “characteristic fragments” that George Orwell pulled together in the first months of the second world war, as he searched for a unifying “pattern” in the diversity of English life. He wrote of old maids biking to communion through autumn mists and the clatter of clogs in a Lancashire mill town.
The successful referendum to expropriate the city’s apartments from corporate landlords is a potential template for Europe
With coalition talks that could last months under way to form Germany’s next government, the reverberations of Sunday’s election will be felt for quite a while. But one of the most significant developments in voters’ weekend trip to the polls was a local referendum in Berlin, which strongly endorsed a campaign to expropriate properties owned by large corporate landlords.
More than a million Berliners supported the campaign Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co, which targeted companies holding 3,000 or more apartments (Deutsche Wohnen is one of the largest investment trusts in the city). In total, 240,000 properties, or 11% of all apartments in Berlin, would come under the terms of the initiative, which was backed by a majority of 56.4% in the referendum. The vote isn’t legally binding, however, so it is now up to the city’s government, which was also elected on 26 September, to decide whether to move forward. And while struggles over housing are nothing new in Berlin, this successful campaign marks a potentially transformative moment – one that could have a major impact on housing struggles in other cities, and also serve as a template and inspiration for activists in Europe and elsewhere.
Labour accuses PM of ‘reducing the country to chaos’ with cars continuing to queue and fights breaking out
Britain’s supply chain strain could last until after Christmas, Boris Johnson has admitted as he urged motorists to stop panic-buying fuel by insisting supplies were “improving” – despite thousands of forecourts remaining dry.
The prime minister intervened after being accused by Labour of “reducing the country to chaos” with car queues continuing to build up and fights breaking out at petrol stations, while teachers and hospital workers were left unable to get to work.
Reports suggest a decision on whether to deploy military tanker drivers has yet to be taken but 150 will get ready
Oil prices are falling for a second day as crude’s rally petered out, with Brent crude – the global benchmark – down 1.7% at $77.75 a barrel and US light crude trading 1.8% lower at $73.9 a barrel. US crude inventories unexpectedly rose and doubts over demand have resurfaced as Covid-19 cases continue to climb around the world.
Oil prices had been rallying as economies recover from the coronavirus crisis and fuel demand has picked up, while some oil producing countries have suffered supply disruptions.
Europe’s stock markets have opened higher, rebounding from yesterday’s losses.
This simmering 70s-set domestic drama is warm, expansive and funny – a pure pleasure to read
The times are a-changing in solid, respectable New Prospect, Illinois, where Christmas 1971 arrives in a whirl of sex, drugs and folk music, while the Vietnam war grinds on off stage. Inside the First Reformed church, the worshippers are attempting to ride out the storm, casting about for something rock solid and true. This might be God or family or a fresh myth to believe in, a 20th-century pursuit-of-happiness tale, self-authored if need be.
New Prospect is in a state of flux but Jonathan Franzen remains reliably, defiantly Franzen-esque, tending to his faltering flock in fair weather or foul, and whatever the ructions in the country at large. Crossroads, his splendid sixth novel, comes billed as the first part of a proposed trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, named after Edward Casaubon’s absurd, unfinished tract in Middlemarch. But, in the best possible way, it feels less like a beginning than like the latest yield of a familiar crop, or a newly discovered branch of a big midwestern family.
Covid-19 can infect insulin-producing cells in the pancreas and change their function, potentially explaining why some previously healthy people develop diabetes after catching the virus.
Doctors are increasingly concerned about the growing number of patients who have developed diabetes either while infected with coronavirus, or shortly after recovering from it.
Earlier this month, proceedings opened in Austria in a civil suit brought against the authorities by the widow and son of a man who died of Covid-19 after staying in Ischgl, the ski resort widely regarded as having hosted a super-spreader event early in the pandemic. The week before, former French health minister Agnès Buzyn was ordered by a court to answer, essentially, for the government’s lack of anticipation of the pandemic.
In the UK, meanwhile, the government has promised a public inquiry into the handling of the crisis. It’s due to start next spring. Those pushing for it to begin sooner argue that the lessons learned could still save lives, but apportioning blame is another function of a public inquiry. The finger of blame has hovered over this pandemic since the beginning, and now it is tapping on actual shoulders.
Koci Selamaj, 36, was arrested on Sunday over death of Nessa, 28, whose body was found in Kidbrooke
A man has been charged with the murder of Sabina Nessa, the primary school teacher who was found dead in a park close to her south London home.
Koci Selamaj, aged 36, was arrested by police early on Sunday morning in Eastbourne, east Sussex, just over a week after the body of the 28-year-old teacher was found. He will appear at Willesden magistrates court on Tuesday on a charge of murder.
Ofcom hopes One Touch Switch process will encourage people to seek out better deals
The UK media regulator, Ofcom, has introduced a new service to make it easier for customers to switch broadband supplier to get a better deal.
Ofcom hopes the new process, One Touch Switch, will encourage people to seek out better deals after research found that more than two-fifths of people were put off switching broadband suppliers because of the hassle.
Jury finds singer guilty of running a criminal enterprise that recruited women and children and subjected them to unwanted sex and mental torment
A jury has found the R&B superstar R Kelly guilty of being the ringleader of a decades-long racketeering and sex trafficking scheme that preyed upon Black women and children.
The disgraced singer was found guilty on all nine counts on Monday afternoon after decades of avoiding criminal responsibility for numerous allegations of misconduct, in a major #MeToo victory for Black women and girls.
Japan will lift emergency coronavirus measures across the board at the end of this week, amid a dramatic fall in cases and rapid progress in its vaccination rollout.
The prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, said restrictions in place in 27 of Japan’s 47 prefectures would end on Thursday.
At first, I thought drivers lining up in case they was a fuel shortage were foolish. Then I joined them
Before this weekend, I had never seen a petrol station cashier answer a telephone. Yet here he was, this harassed man in front of me, fielding several calls as I queued to pay for my fuel. “I would come soon if I were you,” he suggested to one caller. “We haven’t got much left.”
A couple of hours earlier I had been relaxing in the bliss of the era before this latest episode of Crisis UK – the nationwide rush for petrol, ultimately sparked by labour shortages in the haulier industry. I admit that I had read the news of clogged forecourts with a sense of smugness at the perceived foolishness of those involved – collectively worsening the problem that they were trying to avoid. Then I joined them. My fuel story was that I had a call from my wife who reminded me that she was planning to drive her mother from Essex to Norwich to visit her new grandson. The trip had been planned for months and so, of course, was one of those marked essential. And our tank was empty.