Marks & Spencer pushes further into tech as high street giant extends 15-year old pact with Flooid July 18, 2022 UK high street retailer Marks & Spencer confirmed this morning it has extended its agreement with Flooid for the provision of store point-of-sale and unified commerce platform basket services for up to another five years. Flooid, formerly PCMS Group, agreed with Marks & Spencer in 2007 to supply software to run point-of-sale and self-checkouts across [...]
Brits turn to ice cream, paddling pools, BBQs and fans as temperatures set to break record today July 17, 2022 Sales of paddling pools and fans are soaring and ice cream is set to break a record for the amount bought in a single week as Brits prepare for more heat with temperatures continuing to rise. With an “amber” extreme heat warning in place for much of England and Wales today, tomorrow and Tuesday, Tesco [...]
From translations to chatbots: The future has arrived as UK firms rush to implement artificial intelligence July 17, 2022 It seems the future is knocking as more and more UK businesses are actively looking to implement artificial intelligence, with solutions such as speech recognition, machine translations, chatbots and sentiment analysis being the key drivers. Many businesses are opting to take a low- or no-code approach to implementing artificial intelligence solutions into their operations, according [...]
Newsroom’s fake news dilemma: The role of NGOs in an understaffed, hyper-competitive sector July 17, 2022 Th pressure on media outlets to rapidly get good quality footage to support global news stories has never been greater. Understaffed news rooms are rushing to beat the competition – not just the vast number of global online, print, radio and television media but also the factories dedicated to creating fake news stories that are propagated through [...]
Jubilant Kremlin held ‘big party’ when Boris Johnson resigned as Putin expects to break West’s resolve this winter July 16, 2022 RUSSIAN government officials held a party in the Kremlin in Moscow to celebrate the resignation of Boris Johnson, it has been claimed. “What I can tell you is that there was a big party in the Kremlin, when Boris Johnson resigned,” Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko said. “It was in all Russian propaganda, it was said [...]
Channel 4 chief pockets more than £1m as Alex Mahon is handed biggest bonus possible July 15, 2022 Annual reports from broadcaster Channel 4 show this afternoon that its chief executive received a salary of more than £1m last year. Alex Mahon was handed the biggest bonus possible after the number of people watching the company’s programmes online boomed. She was paid £1.2m in 2021, compared with £991,000 a year earlier, as her [...]
Refuse collection workers go head to head with Serco as they plan to strike during Commonwealth Games July 15, 2022 Refuse collection workers in the West Midlands are to strike on the opening week of the Commonwealth Games. Members of the GMB union will take five days of action – on July 28, when the Games open in Birmingham, July 29 and August 4, 5 and 8. The union said private contractor Serco, which runs [...]
Latest Chinese economic data sends shockwaves through Asia as world’s second-largest market shrinks July 15, 2022 After Shanghai and other cities shut down to fight coronavirus outbreaks, China’s economy contracted in the three months ending in June compared with the previous quarter. The world’s second-largest economy shrank by 2.6 per cent, down from the January-March period’s already weak 1.4 per cent, official data showed today. Activity was “much weaker than expected”, [...]
Calls grow to pause benefits sanctions until merciless cost-of-living crisis has calmed down July 14, 2022 Benefits sanctions should be paused by the UK government until the cost-of-living crisis has been resolved, Citizens Advice Scotland has said. Advice from the charity on sanctions to Universal Credit rose by 5 per cent in 2021-22, research published today indicated. With inflation rising and impacting on the cost of goods, Citizens Advice said a [...]
21 killed and 100 wounded in central Ukraine: Russian Army accused of ‘open act of terrorism’ July 14, 2022 Around 21 people were killed and more than 100 wounded after Russian missiles struck a city in central Ukraine. The country’s president called the attack “an open act of terrorism” against civilians in locations without military value. Ukraine’s national police said three missiles hit an office building and damaged nearby residential buildings in Vinnytsia, which [...]