Author: LoveWorld UK

British property website Rightmove said a mini housing market boom was gathering pace after a tax cut by finance minister Rishi Sunak. The number of sales agreed in England — which eased coronavirus restrictions on the market before other countries in the United Kingdom — jumped by an annual 35% in the five days after Sunak’s announcement on July 8, Rightmove said. A recovery had already been under way with agreed sales in England up by 15% in June, it said on Monday. Hoping to give a boost to the economy, Sunak raised the threshold for paying tax on property…

Britain has not achieved a good outcome in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, the government’s chief scientific adviser said on Thursday, adding that he was sure mistakes had been made. Britain has the highest COVID-19 death toll in Europe, which, including deaths from suspected cases, is nearly 56,000 according to a Reuters tally of official data sources. Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered a lockdown on March 23, though a former member of the government’s scientific advisory group has said that introducing measures a week earlier could have halved the death toll. “It’s very difficult to know exactly where we stand…

British Airways, the world’s largest operator of Boeing 747s, will retire its entire jumbo jet fleet with immediate effect after the novel coronavirus pandemic sent air travel into freefall. For over 50-years, Boeing’s (BA.N) “Queen of the Skies” has been the world’s most easily recognised jetliner with its humped fuselage and four engines, but its days had already been numbered before the pandemic struck earlier this year. BA had been planning to retire the aircraft in 2024 but with passenger numbers decimated this year and forecasts that it will be years before they recover, the airline said it was unlikely…

Leicester City manager Brendan Rodgers says his team can “create some more history” by sealing Champions League qualification for a second time after Thursday’s 2-0 Premier League win over Sheffield United kept them in the driving seat for fourth spot. A top-four finish will ensure a place in Europe’s elite club competition but with Manchester United trailing Leicester only on goal difference Rodgers said it was no time to relax. “If you go back a year, when we were setting our goals for the season, our main goal was could we break into the top six,” Rodgers told reporters. “That…

Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) disclosed late on Thursday that hackers targeted about 130 accounts during the cyber attack this week, an incident in which profiles of many prominent personalities and organizations were compromised. Hackers had accessed Twitter’s internal systems to hijack some of the platform’s top voices including U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, former U.S. President Barack Obama and billionaire Elon Musk and used them to solicit digital currency. In its latest statement, Twitter said that the hackers were able to gain control to a “small subset” of the targeted accounts, and send tweets from them.…

The British government on Thursday eased lockdown restrictions imposed upon the COVID-19 hotspot of Leicester, but said the central English city was still suffering above-average infection rates and some restrictions must remain. “We’re now in a position to relax some, but not all of the restrictions that were in place,” health minister Matt Hancock said. The situation would be reviewed again in two weeks, he added. Hancock said the seven-day average infection rate in the city at the end of June was 135 cases per 100,000 people, three times higher than anywhere else in Britain. The latest data indicated it…

Europe’s top court on Thursday rejected the validity of a mechanism used by thousands of companies to send data to the United States, backing concerns about U.S. surveillance raised by privacy activist Max Schrems in his clash with Facebook. The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield was set up in 2016 to protect the personal data of Europeans when it is transferred across the Atlantic for commercial use. The same court also rejected its predecessor, known as Safe Harbour, in 2015. “In respect of certain surveillance programmes, those provisions do not indicate any limitations on the power they confer to implement those programmes,…

The slide in Britain’s jobs market eased in June, data showed, although the figures did not include the most recent slew of job losses and analysts said they represented a “calm before the storm” caused by the coronavirus’ hit to the economy. The number of employees on company payrolls tumbled by 649,000 between March and June, but the largest falls came at the start of the lockdown, the Office for National Statistics said on Thursday. The number of people on payrolls fell by just over 74,400 in June, a much smaller decline than April’s 450,000 and May’s 124,000. Separate figures…

More than 200 of Britain’s top financial experts have joined forces to design initiatives to help small businesses restructure and repay as much as 35 billion pounds in “unsustainable” COVID-19 relief debt. TheCityUK Recapitalisation Group on Thursday proposed the launch of a UK Recovery Corporation (UKRC) to oversee a massive pile of government-guaranteed loans issued since lockdown, offering more manageable terms to borrowers and preventing a wave of bankruptcies borne by the taxpayer. “COVID-19 is a 100-year storm which has caused untold economic damage. The government’s support schemes have been the essential sandbags holding back the flood, protecting businesses and…

The extraordinary hacking spree that hit Twitter on Wednesday, leading it to briefly muzzle some of its most widely followed accounts, is drawing questions about the platform’s security and resilience in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election. Twitter said late Wednesday hackers obtained control of employee credentials to hijack accounts including those of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, former president Barack Obama, reality television star Kim Kardashian, and tech billionaire and Tesla founder Elon Musk. In a series of tweets, the company said: “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully…