Sainsbury's has confirmed plans to merge with Asda, which is currently owned by US supermarket giant Walmart.
The supermarkets said that grocery prices would fall in both chains as a result of the merger.
Sainsbury's chief executive Mike Coupe said the deal would lead to no store closures and no job losses in stores.Aye, well. Believe if you like. I don't ...
Bob Dylan will next month launch a range of whiskeys, hoping to capitalize on growing demand for all things celebrity-tagged.
The 76-year-old singer and Nobel laureate has joined with liquor entrepreneur Marc Bushala to turn a deconsecrated church in Tennessee into a distillery. Their Heaven’s Door Spirits – a Tennessee straight bourbon, a double barrel whiskey and a straight rye – will first be available in Tennessee, Florida, California, Illinois, New York and Texas. A wider rollout will follow.
Dylan’s new project was announced on Saturday. “You don’t always find inspiration,” he mused in a press release. “Sometimes it finds you. We wanted to create a collection of American whiskeys that would each tell a story.”
After the best part of two weeks trying to firefight the Windrush scandal, Amber Rudd is a shell of a human being. Devoid of honour and credibility, her ambition narrowed down to mere survival. Putting one foot in front of the other and keeping on keeping on. One day after another, one blunder after another. She now knows so little she can barely remember her own name. Or what her job is. Her incompetence is now almost total.
For her latest outing in front of the Commons to explain why she had told the home affairs select committee there were no targets for deportations, when a Home Office official had minutes earlier admitted there were, the home secretary came armed with the support of, not just her Home Office team, but also cabinet members Michael Gove and Sajid Javid and several dozen backbenchers. The Tories are desperate for her to keep her job. Not because they believe in her competence but because they know that if she goes, the prime minister is vulnerable.
In any other circumstances, Rudd’s defence would be fairly straightforward. It was nothing to do with me, guv. It was the fault of my predecessor, who was a bit useless. As this is denied her, she is left not waving but drowning. She began by declaring her undying love for the Windrush generation. The home secretary has been doing a lot of hand-wringing loving in recent days. But then she’s got a lot of loving to fit in to make up for the many years when she didn’t give a toss.And she is not the only one in this government to appear utterly unsuited to her or his appointment. Consider David Davis, the Brexit minister who said his department had undertaken Brexit impact statements when they clearly had not and who is obviously not up dealing with Michel Barnier.
The Home Office is to axe immigration removal targets - a day after Home Secretary Amber Rudd said they did not exist, the BBC understands.
Ms Rudd told MPs investigating the Windrush scandal on Wednesday targets were not set for immigration officials.
But after fresh evidence emerged overnight she was forced on Thursday to admit to MPs that "local" targets for "internal" use had been set.
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The home secretary faced fresh calls to quit following her admission that the targets did exist and, according to union officials, are prominently displayed on posters at regional immigration centres.She's toast.
Amber Rudd was accused of trivialising a main Brexit issue after comparing a registration scheme for EU citizens to an account at a luxury fashion store.
The home secretary said that millions of EU citizens living in Britain would find the Home Office’s registration scheme after Britain left the EU as easy as setting up an LK Bennett account.
The women’s clothing chain, where a pair of court shoes sells for £195, is a favourite with the prime minister, who has a discount card for shopping there.Like the overwhelming majority of UK citizens (and that goes equally for EU residents in the UK), I haven't a scooby-doo as to how easy it is to set up an account with L K Bennett. Maybe Ms Rudd, a graduate of Cheltenham Ladies College, thinks that we all live affluent middle-class lives in the home counties ...
Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford is serving up a three-part spread of largely American cuisine, with hints of French influences. The first course, using greens from the White House kitchen garden to represent a celebration of spring’s first harvest, will feature a goat cheese gateau, tomato jam, buttermilk biscuit crumbles and young variegated lettuces. Then, on to the main course: a rack of spring lamb and a New Orleans-inspired Carolina gold rice jambalaya — scented with celery, peppers and onions, and spiced with herbs from the South Lawn. Finally, the denouement will come in the form of a nectarine tart dessert infused with White House honey and accompanied by crème fraîche ice cream. No word yet on whether President Trump will ask for two scoops.
Downing Street rules out U-turn on customs union pledge
UK will leave single market and customs union, No 10 maintains, as MPs prepare for key debate
Social media firms are being threatened with new laws if they don't do more to protect children online.Perhaps the health secretary thinks this kind of stunt will add lustre to his leadership ambitions. But I rather suspect that the great British public would prefer him to concentrate on his day job and the twin problems of the health service and social care.
In a letter to companies including Facebook and Google, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt accuses them of "turning a blind eye" to their impact on children.
He gives them until the end of April to outline action on cutting underage use, preventing cyber bullying, and promoting healthy screen time.
As I write, Amber Rudd and home secretary can still be put in the same sentence without it including the word former. Her non-resignation from the cabinet, despite a mammoth scandal perpetrated by the major department for which she is responsible, tells us something about this government, something about its opponents and more about shifting standards in public life. None of the things it tells us is good.
The suffering inflicted on “the Windrush generation” has been abominable. I struggle to recall an example in modern times of a British government treating such a large group of its citizens so atrociously. It takes a particularly noxious combination of incompetence and inhumanity to tell people who have been living in Britain entirely legally and for many decades that they are going to be thrown out.
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What we haven’t seen is the only penance that really means anything with politicians. There have been no resignations. Lives have been wrecked; Westminster careers sail on. Ms Rudd’s reputation has taken a battering, but she is still in her ministerial suite, still cruising around in her government limo and still drawing her cabinet salary.Worth reading the whole thing here
When a cancer diagnosis is given, the first impulse is to get as much information as possible on the disease. But does a frantic Google search do more harm than good?
You could go Google cold turkey, as Emma Agnew and her husband - the BBC's cricket correspondent Jonathan Agnew - chose to when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Talking to the BBC podcast You, Me and the Big C, the sport commentator said he and his wife made a deal not to look anything up on the internet.
Explaining their decision he said: "There is so much stuff out there that you can't even begin to understand."
"And there's so much rubbish," he added.
"We just went to our people and they looked after her and that was it."I choose to disagree. First, in my experience, the medics - doubtless from the most admirable of motives - only tell you what they think you need to know - which may be radically different from what you actually want to know. Second, there are some useful and reliable websites out there. I found both www.nhs.uk and www.macmillan.org.uk particularly helpful.
When a home secretary describes her own department's treatment of people as "appalling" and criticises it for "losing sight of the individual", it's clear something has gone very wrong.
Amber Rudd's admission in the House of Commons that she could not say whether any of the Windrush immigrants had been wrongly deported only made things worse.
More than one MP harked back to the department's previous leadership under Theresa May. Her intention to create a "hostile environment" for illegal immigrants had led to what David Lammy called a "day of shame" for the government.
A steady stream of stories about mishandling of cases, a minister appearing unsure about deportations and an apparent U-turn from Number 10 on a meeting with Caribbean leaders have all fuelled criticism of the government.:In 1954, in the light of an apparently trivial case of land transactions in Dorset, Sir Thomas Dugdale, the Minister for Agriculture, resigned even though he was not directly involved in the matter. The case was known as the Crichel Down Affair and was for long regarded as an important precedent in terms of ministerial responsibility.
“I, as minister, must accept full responsibility for any mistakes and inefficiency of officials in my department, just as, when my officials bring off any successes on my behalf, I take full credit for them.”Impossible to imagine any minister in the current government saying such a thing.
What seems almost certain is that the war in Syria will grind bloodily on, becoming more complicated than ever. The biggest victims – as they have always been – will be Syria’s own citizens.
Full of sound and fury – contrary to Donald Trump’s “mission accomplished” tweet – the strikes may not signify much in Syria’s wider war.
Jeremy Hunt has admitted breaches of parliamentary rules on MPs’ financial interests and legislation introduced to curb money laundering, it emerged last night.
The health secretary failed to make a declaration to Companies House in relation to a company used to buy seven luxury flats and did not record the purchase in the MPs’ register of interests within four weeks, according to The Daily Telegraph. Mr Hunt said that he corrected the errors before they came to light and the Cabinet Office has ruled that he did not break the ministerial code.
A Downing Street spokesman said: “Jeremy has rightly apologised for an administrative oversight and as the Cabinet Office has made clear there has been no breach of the ministerial code. We consider the matter closed.”
The newspaper said that Mr Hunt failed properly to register his interest in a company set up by himself and his wife that was used to purchase flats in Southampton on February 7. Only his wife was named in documents registered when the company was incorporated last September. Laws introduced to curb money laundering require that anyone with more than a 25 per cent stake should declare their interest.
Mr Hunt, one of the richest members of the cabinet with an estimated £14.5 million, declared his interest in Mare Pond six months after its incorporation, in an apparent breach of the Companies Act, an offence punishable by a fine or up to two years in prison.And thus a member of the Cabinet admits a breach of parliamentary rules on financial interests and apparently commits a criminal offence. Yet there is no breach of the ministerial code?
Having as little as one alcoholic drink a day could shorten your life, according to a major new study.
An analysis of 600,000 drinkers found that drinking five to 10 alcoholic drinks a week was likely to shorten a person's life by up to six months.
This increases with higher alcohol consumption, with those who have 18 drinks or more losing up to five years of life.
Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” (From Donald Trump's Twitter feed, 11 April)Then he marched them down again:
Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! (From Donald Trump's Twitter feed, 12 April)Meanwhile Theresa May and President Macron are neither up nor down, wondering pointlessly what position Trump will take next and how to avoid being left out on a limb.
A leading BBC presenter has revealed for the first time that she was “incandescent with rage” when she found out she was being paid less than male colleagues.
Writing in The Sunday Times about her experience, Sarah Montague, who left Radio 4’s Today programme last month to join The World at One, says her lower salary was “professionally damaging” and made her feel like “a sap”.
Montague underlines calls for fair pay with a T-shirt featuring an equals sign
She writes that women who were underpaid compared with male colleagues at the BBC were angry that they had been “sold a pup”.
Montague, who until July was paid £133,000 a year for her work on Today, was the only presenter on Radio 4’s flagship news programme who was not on the BBC’s list of those earning £150,000 or more a year.Poor girl, Imagine the difficulties of having to struggle by on £133.000 a year.
Hundreds of translated pop lyrics are in a new book by Sarah Rowley, an Oxford classics graduate who runs the Twitter page @LatinRocksOn devoted to the subject.
...To be pedantic, the Sloop Sloop song was first recorded by Betty Everett in 1964.
Ms Rowley worked with leading classicists to make the modern lyrics as accurate as possible, although punctuation was inserted into the Latin as a translation guide. The book has pop lyrics spanning five decades, from Nat King Cole to Rihanna, grouped into 11 categories, including the 80s, nice noughties and hip-hop. Lyrics include Dancing Queen by Abba: “tu es saltans regina” (You are the dancing queen). And Shoop Shoop Song by Cher: “estne in eius oculis? eheu! Tu falleris!” (Is it in his eyes? Oh no! You’ll be deceived).
The Beano comic has issued a cease-and-desist letter to MP Jacob Rees-Mogg claiming he has modelled himself on its character Walter the Softy.
The Scottish-based comic accused the Tory MP of "masquerading" as Walter Brown, a foe of Dennis the Menace.
It listed traits including his side parting, round glasses and "snootiness" as "distinctly copying" the character.
Donald Trump has said only “stupid people” don’t want to get along better with Russia.
“If we got along with Russia, that would be a good thing not a bad thing”, he said during a working lunch with Baltic leaders. “And just about everybody agrees with that, except very stupid people.”To whom could he possibly be referring, I wonder?
A survey by the National Centre for Social Research found that more than 56 per cent of the British public do not feel any of the political parties represent the views of people like them. Although between them Labour and the Conservatives swept up more than 80 per cent of the votes at the last election their dominance is more fragile than it appears. What is missing is a credible alternative and a leader who can capture the mood.
Imagine if David Miliband announced that he was returning to Britain to set up a new party. It would be socially and economically liberal, internationalist and domestically reforming, including of capitalism. Opposing Brexit would be part of its agenda, but not its whole identity. The movement would quickly gain traction. The Lib Dems would almost certainly fold into it. Sir Nick Clegg says “I’m a Lib Dem but it’s not the be all and end all”, and I am told that Sir Vince feels the same. “It’s the values not the vehicle that matter,” says one Lib Dem strategist.
Labour moderates would then have to decide whether to stay with the antisemitic, misogynistic bullies of the hard left whose politics they despise, or join an alliance that would be recreating the party of Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair. Some pro-European Tories might be persuaded to jump ship too, if the prime minister continues to pay more attention to Jacob Rees-Mogg than to them. In fact it’s possible to see the former leaders of three different parties — Sir John Major and Mr Blair as well as Sir Nick — all throwing their weight behind a new centrist party, along with a host of business people, scientists, actors and writers.Dream on. It will never happen.
