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UK military ‘eyes innovative electric flying taxi’ as 2029 launch planned
British flying taxi startup Vertical Aerospace has revealed the UK government has expressed interest in buying a military version of its aircraft, alongside a fresh £10m government grant that brings total state funding for the project to £48m. The announcement, made at the Farnborough international airshow, matters because it signals a potential new revenue stream…
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British Gas mixed up our energy meter – but now I’m being penalised
A reader in Shropshire has described how British Gas muddled up energy meter registrations across a new-build housing estate, leading to residents being billed for each other’s energy. The mix-up left the reader paying charges intended for the estate’s developer, receiving contradictory bills, and having their bank details wrongly shared, before finally being penalised with…
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Burnham announces plans to cut VAT on electricity bills as first cost-of-living move
Andy Burnham has unveiled his first cost-of-living measure as prime minister, announcing that VAT will be removed from domestic electricity bills from 1 October. The tax cut, one of his first acts in office, is intended to give struggling households “breathing space” and follows his pledge on entering Downing Street to tackle the cost of…
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Google Cloud outage shows it’s still hard to understand hyperscalers’ real resilience regimes
A Google Cloud outage last week has highlighted how difficult it remains for customers to understand the true resilience of hyperscale cloud services, according to industry analysts. The incident, caused by an upstream power failure that triggered a cooling failure at a single datacentre in the europe-west4-a zone, disrupted three services for 15 hours, revealing…
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Domino’s rocked by sales dip as US pizza giant points the finger at Australia after huge change backfires: ‘A drag’
Domino’s Pizza has reported a decline in sales, with the US pizza chain pointing to its Australian operations as a key factor dragging down performance. The company’s Australian arm has struggled after implementing a significant change to its business, which appears to have backfired and hurt customer demand rather than boosting it. The setback in…
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Burnham becomes prime minister as Starmer resigns, Trump pledges support
No article URL or text was provided, so the claims in the title cannot be verified or summarised reliably. The headline describes a major political development involving Andy Burnham, Keir Starmer and Donald Trump, but without the article’s contents it would be inappropriate to infer what happened or why. Please provide the article URL or…
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Wealth tax on UK’s super-rich could raise £10bn a year, Andy Burnham told
Andy Burnham has been urged by academics to introduce a wealth tax on Britain’s super-rich households as part of his plans to make the tax system fairer and fund better public services. A study by economists Gabriel Zucman and Ben Tippet suggests a 2% minimum charge on households worth more than £100m could raise £10bn…
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‘A guy did a runner in a Jaguar’: the petrol theft scandal – and the garage owner struggling to stop it
A garage owner in Erdington, Birmingham, is grappling with a sharp rise in “fill-and-dash” fuel theft, part of a wider surge across UK forecourts since the start of the Iran war in February 2026. Shailesh Parekh, who owns six petrol stations in the city, says thieves have become bolder and less predictable, ranging from masked…
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Not enough water for UK’s datacentre plans, trade body says
The UK’s water industry has warned that there will not be enough water to support the government’s plans for datacentre growth, calling ministers’ AI expansion strategy “fatally flawed” because it fails to account for the huge cooling demands of new facilities. In a written briefing to MPs, trade body Water UK said government policies on…