"I'm sorry we couldn't keep it going longer - god knows we've tried," said co-owner Miles Palliser. "Thank you for everything you've done for us; it's been a wonderful ride. We've opened a few businesses over the years, and we've had to close a couple. And I don't know if any of them have hurt as much as this one."
On Feb. 11, 1975, Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of Britain's opposition Conservative Party, a prelude to her eventual rise to prime minister in 1979. Also on this date: In 1847, American inventor Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, Ohio. In 1937, a six-week-old sit-down strike against General Motors ended, with the company agreeing to recognize and negotiate with the United Auto Workers union.
Germany's economic losses from years of overlapping crises have been mounting to nearly 1 trillion, according to estimates by the German Economic Institute (IW). The employer-aligned research institute said the inflation-adjusted shortfall in gross domestic product since 2020 has totaled about 940 billion (about $1.1 trillion) over six years, reflecting the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the effects of Russia's war against Ukraine, and confrontational US policy.
Sometimes I think I became a mother not in a hospital room but in a Trader Joe's in New York City. It was May 2020. A masked but smizing employee took one look at my stomach and handed me a packet of dark-chocolate peanut-butter cups. "Happy Mother's Day!" she said. I was pregnant, with twins, during the early months of the pandemic, and all I could think about was food—what to eat and how to acquire it.
Some of the report's strongest criticism was directed at the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the toxic and chaotic culture of his government during its response to the pandemic. Giving evidence, the former head of the civil service Simon Case said good people were just being smashed to pieces, while others claimed there was a sexist culture where junior women being talked over or ignored.
I'll never forget, I met with pollsters the day before I got the news about Covid. But I met two pollsters because we were starting to think about the next election. They said, sir, if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came back from the dead and they aligned, and they went for the president, vice president as a combination, you'd be beating them by 25 points.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, homicide rates have risen meaningfully in the United States. The annual number of reported homicides between 2014 and 2019 ranged from 15,775 to 19,393 nationwide, according to the National Center for Health Statistics . Over that period, the average homicide rate in the U.S. was 5.6 incidents for every 100,000 people. Between 2020 and 2023, however, the homicide rate surged to 7.3 per 100,000, with at least 22,800 reported homicides each year.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic drastically reshaped the restaurant industry. Many places had to close overnight, losing their biggest source of income from dine-in customers. Though many quickly pivoted towards a delivery-and-takeout type of operation, the rapid loss of revenue still spelled doom. One restaurant that hit a rough patch as a result of the pandemic was California Pizza Kitchen, the iconic pizza chain that popularized California-style pizza.
We were focused on trying to delay the peak of the pandemic and we thought that the closure of schools, if it had to be used at all, would be a measure of last resort, the former prime minister said. He added: It was my impression that the work was being done. I certainly, let me put it this way, I certainly assumed that the work was being done.
