Author: admin@primenews

Shares of ride-hailing app Uber reached a new 52-week high last week as the San Francisco-based firm prepares to make its S&P 500 debut in Monday trading. “Super proud of the Uber team for S&P 500 inclusion,” wrote CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on X. “Great way to head into the weekend and get back to building on Monday! The addition isn’t a huge surprise. The company is worth about $127 billion, making it the largest US company not currently in the index. It’s been a good year for both Khosrowshahi and Uber. The company has had regulatory wins in both the US and UK, has reported…

Quaker Oats on Friday recalled more than 40 granola bar and cereal products because they could be contaminated with salmonella. The affected foods include the classic Chewy granola bar variety pack, the chocolate-covered Chewy Dipps bars, puffed and protein cereals, and even granola bars that are included in some Frito-Lays snack boxes, according to a list reported by the US Food and Drug Administration. “To date, Quaker has received no confirmed reports of illness related to the products covered by this recall,” the FDA said in a news release announcing the recall. The potentially contaminated products have “best by” dates ranging until October 2024…

A site in the Shetland Islands has become the UK’s first spaceport for vertical rocket launches. SaxaVord Spaceport on the small island of Unst has been given approval from the Civil Aviation Authority to begin launches in 2024. It will be the first fully-licensed spaceport in Western Europe able to launch vertically into orbit. It permits up to 30 launches a year, that will be used to take satellites and other payload into space. The site, which is the first spaceport in Scotland, has a number of launch operators around the world currently developing rockets. It is hoped that German…

Chileans have voted not to adopt a new constitution to replace the current one written during the military regime of Gen Augusto Pinochet. The draft was put forward by a council dominated by right-wing delegates, after voters rejected a more left-wing proposal last year. It would have affected laws in areas including abortion access, the ability to strike and indigenous rights. In a referendum on Sunday, the draft was reject by 56% of voters to 44%. Efforts to replace Chile’s existing constitution, adopted in 1980 under the Pinochet dictatorship, began in 2019 following anti-government demonstrations. The protesters, many of them…

Record rainfall is causing widespread flooding in far north Queensland, in what authorities expect will be the Australian region’s worst-ever flood. Thousands of people have been evacuated but others remain stranded. Extreme weather driven by a tropical cyclone has dumped a year’s worth of rain on some areas. Images from the region show planes submerged at Cairns airport, a crocodile seen in the middle of a town, and people fleeing homes in boats. So far no deaths or missing people have been reported. Intense rainfall is expected to continue for another 24 hours. Hundreds of people have been rescued -…

Nissan Motor said on Sunday it would sell China-developed electric vehicles (EVs) globally as it struck a deal with the country’s top university to leverage local resources to accelerate research and development on electrification. The Japanese automaker is considering exporting the line-up of existing internal combustion engine vehicles and upcoming pure electric and plug-in hybrid cars manufactured and developed in China to overseas markets, Masashi Matsuyama, vice president of Nissan Motor and president of Nissan China, told reporters in Beijing. Nissan is considering aiming at the same markets as Chinese rivals such as BYD, he said. The company is joining foreign brands including Tesla, BMW and…

As washed-up rock star Billy Mack, played by Bill Nighy, finally nails the lyrics to the festive version of Love Is All Around (aptly renamed Christmas Is All Around), he realises how awful the song is. His manager, grinning, agrees that it is rubbish – “solid gold” rubbish. And so the scene is set for Love Actually: a two-hour whirlwind of improbable, questionable and downright daft scenes of love, propped up by a star-studded cast. The world may have moved on from dial-up internet, Apple’s iPod and low-rise jeans – but two decades on, Richard Curtis’s 2003 festive drama remains…

When 23-year-old Shih Chin-tay boarded a plane for the United States in the summer of 1969, he was flying to a different world. He grew up in a fishing village surrounded by sugarcane fields. He had attended university in Taiwan’s capital Taipei, then a city of dusty streets and grey apartment buildings where people rarely owned cars. Now he was off to Princeton University. The US had just a put a man on the Moon and the Boeing 747 in the skies. Its economy was larger than those of the Soviet Union, Japan, Germany and France combined. “When I landed,…

The chief executive of Sellafield has hit back at reports that computer systems at the nuclear site in Cumbria have been hacked. Euan Hutton told the BBC there was no evidence of Sellafield’s IT networks having been targeted by groups linked to foreign governments. He also rejected allegations of serious safety failings at the plant. Mr Hutton was responding to claims in a series of articles published in the Guardian earlier this month. Sellafield, a sprawling facility on the Cumbrian coast, is widely regarded as Western Europe’s most hazardous nuclear site. In the past, its activities included generating electricity and…

North Korea has fired a suspected intercontinental ballistic missile, its second missile launch in hours. It comes after South Korean and US defence officials met last week to update plans on how to respond to a nuclear attack from the North. In response, Pyongyang on Sunday said it would take “more offensive countermeasures”. The state launched a short-range missile on Sunday night and the longer-range weapon on Monday morning. South Korean and Japanese officials said they detected the launch of the missile from the Pyongyang area at 08:24 local time (23:24 Sunday GMT). The missile travelled for 73 minutes, covering…