1 Gas bills will become permanently higher as a result of the move away from fossil fuels, Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, has warned. He said that households would feel a squeeze on their incomes this winter as a result of inflation.
2 The European Union has threatened “serious consequences” if the government triggers an emergency clause to suspend customs and food safety checks on goods entering Northern Ireland, where supermarkets have complained of delays or delivery problems on shipments across the Irish Sea.
3 Millions of landlords will be barred from letting their properties unless they spend thousands of pounds making them more energy-efficient under government plans to hit net zero from 2050.
4 Britain ordered 250,000 courses of Pfizer’s antiviral pill in the expectation that it would perform well in trials. It should become part of the NHS’s armoury in fighting Covid-19, alongside another antiviral drug that was approved this week.
5 When Frances Haugen decided to leak thousands of documents obtained as a product manager at Facebook, she found herself the underdog pitted against Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s richest people. Now she has Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, in her corner.
Advertisement
6 Matt Moulding, the boss of THG has said that he regrets floating the embattled technology group in London, appeared to hint that he could take the business private if its share price does not increase, and he compared short-sellers to bank robbers.
7 Widespread problems in the supply chain should disappear next year, but there is significant uncertainty about the jobs market, Silvana Tenreyro, a ratesetter at the Bank of England, has said after voting to keep the base rate at 0.1 per cent, a record low.
8 Luis Gallego, chief executive of International Consolidated Airlines Group, the owner of British Airways, said the carrier would plunge to losses of €3 billion this year, despite getting its flying schedule back up to more than half the levels it was operating before the pandemic.
9 Jes Staley is lying low, but that might not be for long. The former boss of Barclays could be heading for a court case to tell his side of the story on his 15 years of dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted paedophile.
10 The promise of new blockbuster drugs to come at GlaxoSmithKline has been boosted by encouraging results from a key late-stage trial.