Author: admin@primenews

 Good luck getting a late-morning McMuffin in Australia. McDonald’s has cut breakfast service timings by 90 minutes, the company said, after a shortage of eggs caused by bird flu outbreaks that have led to the slaughter of about 1.5 million chickens. “Like many retailers, we are carefully managing supply of eggs due to current industry challenges,” McDonald’s said on Facebook, adding that from Tuesday it would stop serving breakfast at 10:30 a.m. instead of the usual time of midday. “We are working hard with our Aussie farmers and suppliers to return this back to normal as soon as possible,” the fast food…

When BP struck oil in the North Sea in 1970, Aberdeen struck gold. The discovery of the giant Forties Field was the beginning of a boom which brought jobs for the city, profits for energy giants, and taxes for the Treasury. It fuelled the rise of nationalism too, with the UK government privately acknowledging that oil had the potential to make an independent Scotland one of the richest nations in Europe. But North Sea production peaked 25 years ago and in this general election the focus is on managing a shift to renewable energy including wind, wave and solar. The UK’s…

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation is entering the UK’s highly competitive free, ad-supported video streaming market. Tubi will compete with the likes of Netflix, Disney+, ITVX and Channel 4’s streaming platform as well as the BBC iPlayer. The platform has been quickly gaining market share in the US where, according to Fox, it has almost 80 million monthly active users. In the UK, Tubi says it will launch with more than 20,000 films and TV series, including content from Disney, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal and Sony Pictures Entertainment. The platform will also include a selection of British,Indian and Nigerian content. UK viewers will…

The US government has given Moderna $176m (£139m) to develop a messenger-ribonucleic-acid-based (mRNA) pandemic influenza vaccine that would work against bird flu. It says it wants to be “better prepared” for public-health crises, having learned lessons from Covid. Bird flu is not a big threat to people, despite outbreaks in poultry and cattle. But experts want a working vaccine that could be quickly rolled out, in case the virus mutates and becomes a problem. Vaccines using mRNA technology – which the Moderna’s Covid jab is also based on – can be produced more quickly. And the US government says adding…

A remote controlled car modelled on Michael Schumacher’s 2002 world championship Ferrari and signed by the F1 legend could fetch between £150,000 and £200,000 at auction. The piece, which is set to go under the hammer at Silverstone, is a 1:3 scale replica, weighs 32kg (71lb) and took three years and more than 1,000 hours to build. The winning bidder could race the car “in excess of 80km/h (50mph)”, Graham Budd Auctions said, but they would need “a full training session” before using it. Adam Gascoigne, the auction house’s chief executive, said the item was “as close to a genuine Formula 1…

Life comes at you fast. Last month, AI chip giant Nvidia briefly became the world’s richest company, overtaking Microsoft, which had in turn risen above Apple. When this news was mentioned on stage at a tech industry event I attended in Copenhagen, there was spontaneous applause from the audience. As I write, Nvidia is now back in second place, after a fall in its share price took its combined value down to $3tn (£2.4tn) compared with $3.4tn for Microsoft. Two things have propelled these two US tech titans to such a dizzying pinnacle: AI and foresight. Microsoft started investing in…

Twelve former Biden administration officials who resigned over policy on Israel and the Gaza war say the government’s actions have endangered US national security. The policies have further destabilised the region and “put a target on America’s back”, they say in a joint statement. One of the 12 resigned only on Tuesday from the US Department of the Interior. The US Department of State has previously denied such claims, pointing to its criticism of civilian casualties in Gaza and its efforts to boost humanitarian aid. The joint statement by the former officials says: “America’s diplomatic cover for, and continuous flow…

A desperate search is under way in northern Australia for a child feared to have been taken by a crocodile. The 12-year-old was last seen around dusk on Tuesday, swimming near the remote town of Palumpa – about a 7-hour drive south west of Darwin in the Northern Territory (NT). Police say a specialist search and rescue team has been deployed after “initial reports stated the child had been attacked by a crocodile”. The NT is home to an estimated 100,000 saltwater crocodiles, more than anywhere else in the world, but attacks are uncommon. Members of the community in Palumpa…

A purge of frozen sperm has been ordered in the Australian state of Queensland, after an audit by its health watchdog found almost half of fertility samples were at risk of misidentification. Such mix-ups can rob parents and donor children of key genetic information and medical records, and advocates say creates a danger of accidental incest. Queensland is home to one of the country’s largest IVF industries, however it is self-regulated and has come under scrutiny as some of its biggest providers face claims of malpractice. The clean out compounds a national shortage of donated sperm which has been driven…

Companies have become fonder of part-timers these days. Demand for full-time workers on jobs site Indeed has been flat from January 2022 to May of this year, according to a recent analysis of millions of job postings, but advertisements for part-time gigs were up about 10% over the same period. Postings for those kinds of jobs took off in 2022 and have remained near those elevated levels ever since. (Full-time is still the most common type of work on Indeed by far, according to the report.) Hiring activity has shown a similar trend: The level of part-time employment was up 8.9% in May…