New Year 2021

The firework display over London included tributes to NHS staff and figures including Captain Sir Tom Moore  who raised £33m for the NHS by walking laps of his garden, amid 78 per cent of the UK population in tier four coronavirus lockdown. The light projections lit up the sky over the O2 Arena, including the…

Ring in the New Year from around the world

New Zealand rings in 2021 with a fireworks display in Auckland amid strict lockdown and border closures in the country. Australia rings in the New Year with a fireworks display in Sydney, without the crowd. In China, the annual New Year Light show in the capital Beijing has been cancelled with celebrations scaled-down in cities…

New Year Honours 2021

EX footballer Jimmy Greaves, 106-year-old Charity volunteer Anne Baker, from Salisbury, who has been involved with fundraising for the NSPCC since the 1950s,  104-year-old Ruth Sanders another charity worker during Covid who walked a marathon to raise money for Thames Valley Air Ambulance this year, Emma Henderson, from Moray, who set up a first-class lounge…

Sydney will usher in New Year without crowds

Australia’s Sydney will mark New Year’s Eve with a fireworks display which will run approximately seven minutes instead of the usual 12 as crowd number will be limited to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The city precinct will be restricted to those with restaurants, cafés, and hotel bookings. Households will now be limited to only…

Tesco, Superdrug, Pizza Hut named and shamed for minimum wage fail

Superdrug, Tesco, and Pizza Hut are among the 139 firms named and shamed by the government for not paying workers the minimum wage, investigated between 2016 and 2018. They failed to pay £6.7m to more than 95, 000 workers. The minimum wage ranges from £4.15 an hour for apprentices to £8.72 an hour for over-25s.…

Landslide in Norway

A Landslide in the Village of Gjerdrum, 15 miles east of Oslo, Norway,  in the early hours of Wednesday covering 210, 000m², buried houses and injured 10 people, still 21 unaccounted for. Five hundred people have been evacuated from Gjerdrum.  Several people are believed to be trapped. Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg posted on social…

House price highest in six years

UK house prices defied pandemic and climbed 7.5 per cent in 2020, the highest growth for six years according to the Nationwide Building society. Prices ended the year 5.3 per cent above the level prevailing March, as the housing price were 0.8 per cent higher in December and November with an average property valued at…

Brexit Bill approved by the Commons

The House of Commons votes on the first stage of the EU-UK Brexit trade deal which put the agreement into law. The Commons approves the measures by 521 votes to 73 at its first stage in Commons as the Parliament was recalled to put the agreement into UK Law, one day before the UK stops…