Lidl enjoys record £1bn UK sales in run-up to Christmas

Lidl made more than £1bn in sales in the run-up to Christmas for the first time in the three decades the discount grocer has been operating in the UK as cash-strapped shoppers cut costs.The German-owned discounter, which is close to overtaking Morrisons to become the UK’s fifth biggest supermarket chain, said it made more than £1bn in sales in the four weeks leading up to Christmas Eve.The company recorded a 7% increase in sales on the same period a year earlier as more than 2 million shoppers sought festive season deals. The supermarket chain experienced its busiest day of the year on 23 December.Lidl said it sold more than 16m British pigs in blankets, 8m stuffing balls and 2m litres of gravy

UK needs to ban full hybrid cars by 2030 or face net zero ‘catastrophe’, says motoring body

Britain needs to press ahead with a ban on the sale of new hybrid cars with no plug from 2030 or risk taking “a catastrophic misstep” on the road to net zero, ministers have been warned.Cars such as the Toyota Prius, which charge a battery from an internal combustion engine, need to be excluded from the list of vehicles sold in the UK from 2030 or there will be a “profound” fall in confidence in the government’s commitment to electric motoring, according to the representative body Electric Vehicles UK (EVUK).The Department for Transport (DfT) will ban the sale of new cars powered solely by internal combustion engines from 1 January 2030.It is consulting on what other types of new cars – such as full hybrids – can be sold between that date and the end of 2034, after which all non-zero-emission new cars will be prohibited.Ministers have come under huge pressure to delay the date when a full ban on non-electric cars takes place

‘Preying on investors’: how software firm MicroStrategy’s big bet on bitcoin went stratospheric

In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic upended economies around the world, an obscure US software firm decided to diversify. MicroStrategy, whose head office is situated next to a shopping mall and metro station in Tysons Corner, Virginia, had decided the steady business of “software as a service” was not racy enough.Instead, it would branch out by investing up to $250m in alternative assets – “stocks, bonds, commodities such as gold, digital assets such as bitcoin or other asset types”.Less than five years later, that bitcoin side hustle has gone stratospheric. MicroStrategy’s share price has swollen twentyfold, lifting its market capitalisation to almost $75bn and catapulting the stock into the Nasdaq 100 index of top technology shares

The most important tech stories of 2024, and also my favorite ones

Last week, we looked back at how 2024 made Elon Musk the world’s most powerful man. Today, we’re looking at a few other important themes that will influence the online and offline worlds in 2025.Google: Ruled an illegal monopoly in August, Google could be broken up. The results are anybody’s guess, but what seemed impossible for a company worth $2.5tn is at play

Luke Littler dismantles Aspinall to make PDC world championship last four

Nathan Aspinall probably thinks he just took part in a game of darts. And look, his name was definitely on the scoreboard, and you may have glimpsed him on your television grinning away in the background, and in a few days’ time there will be a hefty bank transfer from the Professional Darts Corporation confirming he did, indeed, participate.But while Aspinall may have been here corporeally, in a very real sense he wasn’t actually here at all. He was essentially a tower of pixels, a mannequin, an uncredited extra, the silent letter in the middle of a word. He was one of those characters in a noughties video game who walks into a wall and disappears

PDC World Darts Championship: Littler overpowers Aspinall to set up Bunting clash – as it happened

Chris Dobey 5-3 Gerwyn PriceMichael van Gerwen 5-3 Callan RydzPeter Wright 2-5 Stephen BuntingLuke Littler 5-2 Nathan AspinallA very good day of darts, with one classic match in Van Gerwen v Rydz. I’m shattered so I’m going to wrap this up, but Jonathan Liew’s report will be along shortly. In the meantime here’s his take on the afternoon games.Niall McVeigh will be here tomorrow night for the semi-finals: Van Gerwen v Dobey and Littler v Bunting. It’ll be great, it always is