Author: LoveWorld UK

British Gas has reported its highest ever first-half profits, of almost £1bn, after the energy watchdog let it claw back more money from household bills. The UK’s biggest energy supplier reported profits of £969m for the first six months of 2023, up nearly 900% from £98m in the same period last year. The profit boom is largely thanks to a tweak to the regulator Ofgem’s energy price cap that allows the supplier to recoup some of the costs of supplying its 10 million customers during the energy crisis. The supplier’s FTSE 100-listed parent company, Centrica, reported a profit of £6.5bn for…

Manchester United have been far slicker under Erik ten Hag and a generous rating out of 10 for this flat performance would be no more than five. André Onana had done enough to suggest he will be the upgrade on David de Gea the manager wants, until the closing moments when Joselu struck acrobatically to settle the encounter in Houston. It was the goalkeeper’s loose header from a midfield area that ceded the ball and allowed Real Madrid to attack. They worked the play along the right where Lucas Vázquez crossed for the on-loan striker to hit a perfectly-executed bicycle kick past…

The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, briefly left his own press conference on Wednesday after stopping his remarks mid-sentence and staring off into space for several seconds. McConnell approached the podium for his weekly press conference and began speaking about the annual defense bill on the floor, which he said was proceeding with “good bipartisan cooperation”. But he then appeared to lose his train of thought, trailing off with a drawn-out “uh”. He then appeared to “freeze” and stared for about 20 seconds before his colleagues in the Republican leadership, who were standing behind him and could not see his…

Democrats defended school closures while Republicans called the decisions one of the worst policy mistakes of the COVID-19 pandemic during a contentious House hearing on July 26 titled “Generational Learning Loss: How Pandemic School Closures Hurt Students.” A subcommittee from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce heard testimony from witnesses in the forum chaired by Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.). In his opening remarks, he said that learning loss during the pandemic was so severe that progress dating to the 1990s was erased. “The great irony of COVID is how a majority of parents so easily predicted online education…

Soldiers in Niger say they have removed President Mohamed Bazoum from power, after armed troops earlier blockaded the presidential palace in Niamey, the capital in one of the world’s most unstable nations. A group of soldiers appeared on the west African country’s national television late on Wednesday, a few hours after the president had been detained. Reading from a statement, Colonel Amadou Abdramane, seated and flanked by nine other officers wearing fatigues, said the defence and security forces had decided to “put an end to the regime that you know due to the deteriorating security situation and bad governance”. He said the…

Conservative weaponisation of discontent about London’s Ulez traffic charging scheme in the recent Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection could be used to save a raft of under-threat Tories in the city’s outskirts, MPs have claimed. The former party leader Iain Duncan Smith, who is defending a 1,262-vote majority in the ultra marginal north-east London seat of Chingford, said that opposition to expansion of the charge translated beyond the byelection last week and could motivate certain groups, including Labour voters and users of older cars. “It’s not party political and is clearly deeply unpopular with Labour voters. To impose a Ulez zone in an area like…

LeBron James’s son, Bronny James, was rushed to the hospital after suffering cardiac arrest during a basketball workout, a spokesperson for the family told news outlets on Tuesday. The 18-year-old basketball prospect was treated in the intensive care unit before being released to general care, the spokesperson said. “Yesterday while practicing Bronny James suffered a cardiac arrest. Medical staff was able to treat Bronny and take him to the hospital. He is now in stable condition and no longer in ICU,” the spokesperson said. “We ask for respect and privacy for the James family, and we will update media when there is…

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (formerly Facebook) and its subsidiary has been slapped with $20 million (US$13.54 million) in fines after an Australian court found it secretly harvested data from users. Onavo Protect, which was acquired by Meta in 2013, is a free virtual private network service that promised to keep user data “safe online” and give customers “peace of mind” when browsing the internet. However, in 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) filed a lawsuit against the company and Facebook Israel alleging that the app was secretly collecting “significant amounts” of data for commercial purposes from February 2016 to…

An evening at San Diego’s Snapdragon Stadium billed as a fantasy football encounter between Manchester United and Wrexham was bad-tempered and aggressive, featuring a slew of yellow cards, one red, a serious injury to Paul Mullin, a half-naked pitch invader and victory for Phil Parkinson’s League Two team. When Sam Dalby steered beyond Radek Vitek in the second half to make it 3-1 to Wrexham, substitute beat substitute – each had entered following the break – and the record 34,248 crowd had witnessed a contest in which United were run ragged for swathes. The game became combative just 12 minutes in when United’s…

Dame Alison Rose, the chief executive of NatWest Group, has stood down after a row over the closure of Nigel Farage’s bank account with the private bank Coutts, which NatWest owns. Rose has resigned from the banking group after Farage complained to the BBC about a report that claimed his accounts with Coutts were closed for commercial reasons. The broadcaster has since apologised and amended its story. In a statement released on Wednesday morning, the NatWest Group chairman, Sir Howard Davies, said: “The board and Alison Rose have agreed, by mutual consent, that she will step down as CEO of the NatWest Group. It…