#business-community

#business-community

Labour's election war chest has been boosted by a car glass repair tycoon promising 5m to the party.Gary Lubner, who made hundreds of millions of pounds running the company behind Autoglass, hopes his support will keep Labour in power for a long time.He gave the party 500,000 in the first quarter of the year and said this increased significantly in the last three months.

Scotland's incoming first minister must take urgent action on the economy, education, net-zero and health, a leading think tank has said.Reform Scotland has set out four immediate priorities for Nicola Sturgeon's replacement, as the SNP leadership race draws to a close.Humza Yousaf, Kate Forbes or Ash Regan will officially take up the post on Tuesday.

There will be a sigh of relief on the high street as the Deputy First Minister announced a freeze to business rates, an industry body has said.Laying out the budget for next year, John Swinney said he had listened to the lobbying coming from business organisations for a freeze to non-domestic rates to support the industry.

A landmark Belfast city centre building destroyed in a huge fire will reopen to the public later after years of restoration work.Primark is reopening its store in the famous Bank Buildings following an extensive 100 million four-year restoration project in response to the accidental blaze in August 2018.

Former US president Donald Trump has said Ireland has done a good job luring US companies to the country.He was speaking to reporters after his arrival at his golf course outside the town of Doonbeg in Co Clare.He was greeted by a line of staff at the hotel and a display of Irish music and dance.Speaking to reporters, he said the staff had done a great job and the course had become a big success.

The Northern Ireland Protocol has led to a democratic deficit where politicians in the region have no say over rules which govern trade, a Westminster committee has been told.A barrister told the European Scrutiny Committee that the current oversight role of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on protocol-related issues raised concerns around identity.

Climate scientists sometimes talk about moments when the signal emerges from the noise when the human influence on heatwaves and downpours becomes greater than what could have been caused by natural changes alone.The same might be said for Australia's reborn attempts to formulate a climate policy.Sometimes the noise that surrounds the debate is so great that it can make the underlying signal about where we're going hard to find.

By Faisal Islam & Lucy Hooker


Economics editor & Business reporter


Sir Keir Starmer has said he is not "talking down" Britain when warning that Poland is on course to overtake the UK within a decade in terms of the size of its economy per person.The Labour leader was launching details of his party's "mission" to make the UK the fastest growing G7 economy.

Friday, January 6, 2023 by Chad Swiatecki
An effort to create a new "living room" in the center of Austin along Lady Bird Lake needs some fine-tuning and a more precise mission, according to early community feedback gathered by an outside consulting firm.A memo delivered on Dec. 30 by Parks and Recreation Department Director Kimberly McNeeley includes the latest work done for a 2021 City Council resolution that sought to create a culture and climate innovation district concentrated mostly along the south shore of the lake beginning just west of MoPac Expressway and extending east past the Statesman planned unit development property.

AUSTIN, Texas  It's hard to imagine a time when choking dust swirled through the streets of Downtown Austin, but that was the case in the city's central business district during Austin's first 50 years.Congress Avenue wasn't paved until 1905.Pictures from the Austin History Center show Downtown Austin with single-story wooden buildings lining both sides of Congress Avenue.

Ian Blackford has said he could have won the SNP's race to elect a new Westminster leader if he had put himself forward.Speaking to TalkTV on Wednesday evening, Mr Blackford, who stepped down as the party's Westminster leader last week, told Jeremy Kyle: I could have seen this off, I believe I would have won if I'd put myself forward.

Primark staff formed a raucous guard of honour as they welcomed eager shoppers back to their Belfast store four years after a devastating fire gutted the historic building.Bargain-hunters began queuing outside the landmark Bank Buildings in the city centre in the early hours of Tuesday ahead of the long-awaited reopening of the retail institution that was destroyed in the 2018 blaze.

The FTC says the $69 billion merger would be a huge consolidation of industry power.In this photo illustration, the logos of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are displayed on January 18, 2022.Hakan Nural / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images In one of the most aggressive antitrust moves taken against Big Tech in recent history, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Thursday that it is moving to block Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of video games company Activision Blizzard.

I have written many times about the Hour Of Code here at AVC.It is the highlight of the annual Computer Science Education Week which is the first week of December, which is this week.Yesterday Marco Argenti, Goldman Sachs' CIO, and I went with NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks to the Hospitality Management High School in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan to do an Hour of Code with the students there.

Toronto's bike sharing agency is about to announce it's landed a major sponsor, CBC Toronto has learned  one the agency hopes will solve its nagging financial problems.Justin Hanna, the director of Bike Share Toronto, would reveal few details of the impending deal, but says he expects to make an announcement within months.