Author: SKYNEWS

As part of the Cheap Eats series in our Money blog, we ask top chefs to pick their favourite affordable places to eat out where they live.Here, we speak to Mark Birchall, chef-patron at two Michelin-starred Moor Hall in West Lancashire, and Andrew Sheridan, of 8 By Andrew Sheridan in Liverpool. Here are their recommendations for places to get a meal for two on Merseyside for less than £40…MARKSwan fish and chip restaurant, Southport. It’s fresh fish, nice chips, lovely pies! A great one to visit on a family day out – kids all love it too.For a cheap burger, Five…

A deal to buy The Body Shop has come closer to being agreed, the administrators have announced. The high street cosmetics chain went into administration in February with the closure of 75 shops and the loss of 489 jobs. Money latest: Blow for mortgage holders as rate cut predictions rewrittenBut a team managed by former Molton Brown chief executive Charles Denton is now officially lined up to complete a rescue takeover deal as administrators said they agreed to an “exclusivity agreement” after “a competitive bidding process”.The agreement has been entered into by a consortium led by investment platform Aurea group.…

Maya Jama and Stormzy have announced they are breaking up. TV presenter Jama, 29, and rapper Stormzy, 30, met when they were 20 and 21 and spent five years together from 2014 to 2019. After a separation, they got back together in August 2023 – but have now decided to call it quits.Jama announced the news on Instgram, saying they had “spent this past year trying our best to make it work”.She said she was making the announcement publicly “for the sake of clarity and, more importantly, to allow us the space and grace that’s needed for us both to be…

One of Britain’s biggest petfood manufacturers is in talks to add another independent producer to its stable of brands.Sky News understands that Capvest, the owner of Inspired Pet Nutrition (IPN), is orchestrating a bid for Butchers Petcare. Other bidders are also understood to have bid for Butchers, although IPN is seen as the most obvious buyer given its existing scale in the UK petfood market.IPN already owns brands including Wagg and Harringtons, while Jollyes, a petfood retailer, was recently sold to TDR Capital, the private equity firm.Butchers was founded by Graham Baker, the son of a livestock farmer, in 1987,…

Minnie Driver says the death of her parents gave her a new sense of appreciation for the life she has.The British-American actress says when her father, Ronnie Driver, died 15 years ago and her mother, Gaynor Churchward, died three years ago, she felt her “life had stopped in some way” and she believed “there wasn’t any way to recover”. Speaking to Sky News, Driver says these huge “personal disasters” paved a new way of thinking for the actress. Image: Minnie Driver as Queen Elizabeth I in The Serpent Queen. Pic: Starz/Lionsgate “Something happens when there is a great schism in…

There is nothing in today’s inflation data that will cause the nine policymakers who decide UK interest rates to panic.The overall CPI inflation rate stayed steady at 2% – bang on the Bank’s target. Core and services inflation – other measures of the prices in the inflation “basket” which the Monetary Policy Committee focus on – were also unchanged. Money latest: Number of people claiming non-dom status risesSo in a sense, the story is the same one as last month: the era of double-digit inflation does appear to be receding into the rear-view mirror, even if the pain of higher…

Drake has posted a video that appears to show part of his Toronto home submerged in flood waters.The rapper shared a video on Instagram, joking that the murky-looking water had “better be espresso martini”. Canada’s largest city has been hit by storms that have cut power and stranded motorists.Toronto police said part of the Don Valley Parkway was closed due to flooding.They also said part of Lakeshore Boulevard, which runs along Lake Ontario, was flooded and closed. At the heart of the downtown core, flooding was reported at Union station, a key transit terminus. Image: Drake poses at the Billboard…

There has been no change to the rate of inflation which remained at 2%, the target rate for the Bank of England, according to official figures.It means prices in June rose at the same rate as in May, data from the Office for National Statistics showed. Money latest: Number of people claiming non-dom status risesInflation was unchanged as hotel prices rose strongly while second-hand car costs fell at a slower pace.Clothes sales also brought costs down, the ONS said, while raw material costs also fell. The figure is higher than expected, economists had forecast a slight fall to 1.9%.The absence…

Elon Musk has said California’s new gender identification law was the “final straw” and that he is moving the SpaceX and X headquarters to Texas.The billionaire posted on X on Tuesday that he plans to move SpaceX from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas, and X to Austin from San Francisco. The new law, signed on Monday by California governor Gavin Newsom, bars school districts from requiring staff to notify parents of their child’s gender identification change.”This is the final straw,” Mr Musk wrote”I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would…

A “mega den” of as many as 2,000 rattlesnakes can now be viewed online thanks to a round-the-clock webcam.Not everybody will be glued to the footage – but it is expected to be a must-watch for scientists and other snake enthusiasts who are helping to broaden understanding of these unusual reptiles. The remote site on private land in northern Colorado is on a hillside full of rock crevices where the snakes can keep warm and hide from predators. Image: Pic: Project RattleCam via AP “This is a big, big den for rattlesnakes. This is one of the biggest ones we…