Choose Scotland. Choose a high quality of life. November 25, 2016 Scotland is one of the most hauntingly beautiful places in the world, the history is fascinating, the men are handsome and the whisky is delicious. But don't eat the macaroni pies." JK Rowling says it all. (Although she might not be entirely right about the pies.) Scotland is widely-regarded as an outstanding place to live, and that's [...]
Dishonored 2: This first-person assassin game by Arkane is a glorious steampunk wonderland November 23, 2016 Dishonored 2 feels reassuringly familiar. The action may have shifted from plague-ridden, Dickensian squalor to sun-baked, equatorial squalor, but the constituent parts remain: it looks the same, it plays the same, it almost smells the same. Thank goodness, because Dishonored is at the very apex of video-game design, dense and textured, beautiful despite the muck [...]
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them review: a full-on Christmas blockbuster that’s bursting with imagination November 17, 2016 No more, JK Rowling vowed as the Harry Potter series – her magnum opus that took 17 years to write – finally came to an end. And she’s largely kept her word, apart from the studio tour, the theme park and the play that’s currently in the West End. Oh, and a website she runs [...]
Cinema workers to strike over London Living Wage at release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them November 16, 2016 London cinema workers are planning strike action around the release of Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in an ongoing campaign to receive the London Living Wage. Workers at the Ritzy in Brixton and the Hackney Picturehouse are planning strikes between Thursday this week and Monday next week to align with the release of the the [...]
Five things we learned from today’s GDP figures: Could Star Wars have saved us from a post-Brexit slump? October 27, 2016 A surprising set of GDP results came out this morning, revealing that the resilient economy had grown by 0.5 per cent in the last quarter. This was at odds to predictions from the Treasury earlier this year who thought that if the UK voted to leave the EU, economic growth could slow to one per cent. [...]
Accio investors: Bloomsbury shares up as Harry Potter enchantment continues October 27, 2016 Harry Potter continues to be the boy who lives (up to expectations) for Bloomsbury Publishing. Nearly 20 years after the company first published JK Rowling’s Philosopher’s Stone, the series continues to do the business for Bloomsbury. Total revenues in the six months to 31 August were up 19 per cent year-on-year, from £52.7m to £62.7m. [...]
Comcast reports boost in earnings after Rio Olympics and attraction openings in Hollywood and Japan October 26, 2016 Comcast posted better than expected results today as it added viewers in its third quarter as a result of the Rio Olympics over the summer. The cable giant said today that it had achieved "terrific operational and financial results" and the company remained on a trajectory for growth. The figures Revenue grew 15 per cent to [...]
Britain must deploy its vast soft power reserves to prove to the world it remains globally engaged October 26, 2016 The precise ramifications of the Brexit vote will take a while to shake out, but many people overseas have interpreted it as the UK pulling up the drawbridge and retreating from its international role. This is both unfortunate and troubling. We must show everyone that we are more committed than ever to international cooperation economically, militarily [...]
AT&T draws eye of Clinton with media merger October 23, 2016 The latest US media mega-merger has prompted political concern. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton wants US regulators to closely scrutinise telecoms giant AT&T’s $85.4bn (£69.7bn) proposed acquisition of Harry Potter and Batman film franchises owner Time Warner. The companies’ bosses announced they had signed the deal late on Saturday night, which is expected to be the [...]
Inequality doesn’t matter if we’re all paid according to the value we create October 18, 2016 Log on to Netflix and you can catch old episodes of Dirty Jobs, where you can watch host Mike Rowe visit plumbers, pig farmers, and steel mill workers and try his hand at some of the less sexy but utterly fascinating jobs that help make the world around us possible. All of these people work incredibly hard, [...]