Author: LoveWorld UK

British banks and other lenders have provided over 1.2 million mortgage payment holidays to households whose finances have been impacted by COVID-19, UK Finance, an industry group, said on Tuesday. “Action by lenders means one in nine mortgages in the UK are now subject to a payment holiday,” it said in a statement.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson was resting in hospital on Friday as he recovered from COVID-19 while Britons were told to avoid the temptation of spring sunshine during the Easter break with the coronavirus outbreak approaching a peak. The flamboyant 55-year-old leader’s visible decline shook the nation, but he came out of three nights of intensive care at St Thomas’ Hospital after going in with a high temperature and cough. “He must rest up,” his father Stanley Johnson told BBC radio, thanking Britons for their outpouring of support and telling them to heed the lesson. “If it can hit the prime…

Chemical company INEOS, which sponsors the Tour de France-winning cycling team, is starting to deliver hand sanitisers to NHS hospitals as part of its efforts to help Britain contain the coronavirus outbreak. “INEOS has today announced that it has started delivering a million bottles of hand sanitiser a month to NHS hospitals across the UK,” INEOS said in a statement on Friday. “The project brought together the manufacturing and enterprise of INEOS led by Sir Jim Ratcliffe and the racing team logistics led by Sir Dave Brailsford, the Team Principal of Team INEOS.” Some 28 hospitals across Britain will receive…

European Union finance ministers have agreed to an economic recovery plan for the coronavirus crisis that France’s minister said implicitly opens the door to jointly issued debt and which he hailed as a French success. The agreement was reached only after Germany and France overcame opposition from the Netherlands to the crisis plan during marathon talks. The final agreement avoids an explicit mention of jointly issued debt, which was anathema to the Dutch, but French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said it was there implicitly. Le Maire told reporters after talks with his euro zone counterparts that European Union member…

Days after Congo announced emergency restrictions to curb the new coronavirus, a police video started circulating online showing an officer in the capital beating a taxi driver for violating a one-passenger limit. The driver pleads with officers as they order him to lie face down on the road. But the punishment is meted out anyway: a sharp truncheon blow to the calves that leaves him writhing in pain. Sylvano Kasongo, who heads the Kinshasa police and is seen in the March 26 video, sent a copy to Reuters because he said he wanted to encourage others to obey the rules.…

The Skype call had to be rebooted, but after several attempts Danielle Martin, a 71-year-old locked down inside a French retirement home, could finally see her niece Nathalie via the tablet propped up in front of her wheelchair. “There you go, now I can see her,” the pensioner said to Emilie Neumann, an employee at the home whose job since the coronavirus outbreak involves compering video calls between residents and their families. Old people are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus – in France to date there have been 4,166 deaths related to the disease in retirement homes – and so…

MINISTERS will today sit in an emergency Cobra meeting to discuss whether to extend the UK lockdown. Ministers are to discuss a review of the UK’s lockdown and whether they believe it necessary to extend the current restrictions. Downing Street’s emergency Cobra committee meeting will consider evidence from leading scientists on how successful the measures have so far been. The UK has been on lockdown for two-and-a-half weeks, though rules have been more relaxed compared to other countries. It comes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson enters his fifth day in hospital. On Monday Mr Johnson was admitted to intensive care as his coronavirus symptoms worsened.…

The online retailer told customers that the service, Amazon Shipping, will be paused starting in June, according to the Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the change. Amazon is suspending the service because it needs people and capacity to handle a surge in its own customers’ orders, the Journal reported, citing sources. “We regularly look at a variety of factors across Amazon to make sure we’re set up in the right way to best serve our customers,” an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters in an email confirming the halt in service. Amazon Shipping is available in a handful of…

Britain’s stock markets looked set to post weekly gains on Thursday, as investors pinned hopes on the COVID-19 crisis nearing a peak. The blue-chip index .FTSE rose 0.67%. Shares in Just Eat Takeaway (JETJ.L), an online food ordering and delivery company, surged 9% to the top of the index after saying total orders for the group jumped 50% in the first quarter. Stock markets globally have gained this week amid signs that coronavirus death toll was levelling off in the U.S. hotspot of New York and receding in hard-hit regions of Europe. New York state set another single-day record of COVID-19 deaths…

Britain’s opposition Labour Party leader called on Thursday for the government to publish its exit strategy from the coronavirus lockdown, the most stringent measures in the country’s peacetime history. “I’m calling on the government to publish its exit strategy,” Labour leader Keir Starmer said. “I’m not calling for precise timings, but the strategy. This is incredibly difficult on people and we need to know that plans are in place, and what they are,” Starmer said.