Business

Passengers Stuck for Hours in Long Lines Amid Passport Control Meltdown

Border control at many of the UK’s biggest airports was disrupted for multiple hours on Tuesday evening after electronic passport gates suffered a nationwide outage.

Thousands of passengers landed at London Gatwick — Europe’s eighth busiest airport — late on Tuesday to face massive delays in entering the country.

This reporter was among those to face the huge lines, spending almost two hours queuing to get through passport control — longer than the flight from France I’d taken.

Similar issues were reported at major airports nationwide, including hubs like Europe’s busiest airport, London Heathrow, as well as Manchester, Birmingham, and Edinburgh.

“Only the manual desks are being manned and it’s going to take a while to get through,” one airport staff member shouted to passengers who had just disembarked a flight only to see crowds filling the hallways.

“All airports in the UK are impacted,” she added.

Polly Thompson

The crowd was left waiting in the increasingly hot corridor, slowly edging forwards with no idea how long the delay would last. Many made calls to relatives, telling them not to wait up.

There was mostly no access to toilets or water, and buggies carrying disabled and elderly passengers could not pass through the crowds.

“It’s absolute chaos. They’re telling us nothing,” complained one passenger, who had just flown back from holiday in Benidorm, Spain, with his family.

A group of upbeat young men cracked jokes, drawing a few laughs from tired passengers.

“Oh… and it’s another long corridor boys,” they joked as the crowd slowly moved around yet another corner in the airport. “Every ten feet we have to cheer.”

“Let’s light a cigarette and set off the fire alarm. That would get us all out of here quickly,” said another.

As the temperature in the packed hallways began to rise, others became more frustrated.

“We have no idea what is happening. These are crazy queues in Gatwick airport,” Gedi, a Lithuanian national returning to his home in the UK, told BI. “I’m feeling very sweaty and very hot.”

After around 50 minutes, BI’s reporter entered the main border control hall, where more staff were on hand, trying their best to calm the crowds and handing out bottles of water.

“It’s a national outage of the e-gates,” one airport official confirmed to BI. “The Home Office will know more, but it’s across all the airports nationwide. It’s unplanned.”

A massive

AstraZeneca withdraws Covid-19 vaccine, citing low demand

London
CNN
—

AstraZeneca is withdrawing its highly successful coronavirus vaccine, citing the availability of a plethora of new shots that has led to a decline in demand.

The vaccine — called Vaxzevria and developed in partnership with the University of Oxford — has been one of the main Covid-19 vaccines worldwide, with more than 3 billion doses supplied since the first was administered in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2021.

But the vaccine has not generated revenue for AstraZeneca since April 2023, the company said. It has not been used in the United Kingdom for some time.

“As multiple, variant Covid-19 vaccines have … been developed, there is a surplus of available updated vaccines. This has led to a decline in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer being manufactured or supplied,” it said in a statement shared with CNN Wednesday.

“AstraZeneca has therefore taken the decision to initiate withdrawal of the marketing authorizations for Vaxzevria within Europe,” it added.

In a notice on its website, the European Medicines Agency also announced the withdrawal, which means that Vaxzevria is no longer authorized to be marketed or sold in European Union countries.

AstraZeneca said it would work with regulators in other countries to “align on a clear path forward,” including withdrawing marketing authorizations for the vaccine where no future commercial demand is expected.

“We are incredibly proud of the role Vaxzevria played… Our efforts have been recognized by governments around the world and are widely regarded as being a critical component of ending the global pandemic,” AstraZeneca said.

Dr Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton in England, said the likely key reason for the withdrawal was the fact that other Covid vaccines, including the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, were “essentially better products.”

The newer mRNA vaccines use genetic material to instruct cells to make the coronavirus spike protein, which in turn causes the body to create antibodies to combat an actual Covid infection. AstraZeneca’s Covid shot uses a cold virus common to chimpanzees as a viral vector to carry the spike protein from the coronavirus into cells.

“AstraZeneca is very good, but the mRNA products… are better,” Head said. “They have higher effectiveness and the mRNA platforms are more easily adapted towards the latest Covid variants. Thus, they form a key part of most countries’ longer-term strategies.”

Pinky Cole Says This Is The Secret Sauce To Running A Business

Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole poses for a photo.

Slutty Vegan

Running a business is far from easy. From coming up with an initial concept to acquiring investors, being an entrepreneur is serious work. There are thousands of entrepreneurs in the United States, but some especially stand out. For example, Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole has made her mark in the vegan space. The Black female vegan entrepreneur started Slutty Vegan in 2018. Six years later the fast-food vegan chain has fourteen brick and mortar locations. But Cole isn’t stopping there. She is a big believer in mentoring and investing in Black vegan entrepreneurs like Angela Simmons, who started a vegan funnel cake company called Angela’s Cakes. Simmons was inspired to start Angela’s Cakes when Cole initially came up with the idea. Now Angela’s Cakes is operated as a partner through Pinky Cole and Slutty Vegan.

Simmons only had kind words to say about her mentor and business partner Pinky Cole. “Pinky and I had a relationship prior and then we talked. Pinky was the part of the brainchild behind Angela’s Cakes. I talked to her and she had an idea. We collaborated and came up with Angela’s cakes. It’s really important to be behind one another when it comes to the different ideas we have. I’m a really big believer in collaboration,” she told me.

“It’s always great to get advice from someone who’s done it before. I’m really big on getting advice from people who have done it successfully, who have great input. Pinky is a mentor. This is what she does in the food world. This is my first go at being in the food space. Even though I love it, it’s much different when you’re actually in it from a business perspective. Make sure you have a mentor in that space, and, if not, look for one,” she said. And Cole is one of Simmons’ biggest champions. I spoke with Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole about what she believes is the secret sauce to running a successful business.

Emphasize Marketing and Branding

Cole isn’t in the food industry for the money, although according to her, Slutty Vegan is valued at nearly one hundred million dollars. She believes that marketing is the voice of a business– and she isn’t wrong. The Atlanta based entrepreneur has plenty of solid advice for up and coming entrepreneurs, especially those

Warren Buffett Paid $1.7 Billion For A Business Without Ever Meeting Its Founders By Using The ‘Most Important’ Thing in Business

Warren Buffett is known for his astute business practices and hardball negotiation tactics. His company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., is one of the largest conglomerates and investment companies in the world. It has acquired dozens of companies over the years with over 75 wholly owned or controlled subsidiaries. It owns shares valued at billions of dollars in companies like Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Mastercard Inc. and others.

Buffett amassed his incredible portfolio and his company’s nearly $1 trillion value through decades of astute investing, smart acquisitions and business acumen. Buffett, a long-time resident of Nebraska, earned his undergraduate degree in business from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1950. Nearly six decades later, he returned to the university to give a speech to the graduating class, talking about some of the most valuable things he learned at a young age that helped propel him to where he is today.

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Buffett said there’s nothing more important to understand than accounting.

“People ask me what they should take in business school,” Buffett said. “You have to understand accounting. It’s the language. It’s like being in a foreign country without knowing the language if you’re in business and you don’t understand accounting.”

Not only is this a valuable tool for understanding the world of business, Buffet says it made him “a lot of money.”

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Accounting isn’t an abstract principle only used in textbooks. Buffett recounts how he used accounting to acquire the popular home manufacturing company Clayton Homes in early 2003.

Most acquisitions have extensive due diligence, meetings, negotiations and other processes before an acquisition can take place. While much of this likely still took place, Buffett gave a unique, billion-dollar example of how he used accounting to acquire the business.

“We agreed to $1.7 billion for it. I made that deal over the phone without ever meeting the people there,” Buffett said. “But I had seen enough through reading 10-Ks, 10-Qs, annual reports.”

Buffett admits using his accounting skills and an acquisition target’s Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures to analyze the company and learn about its quality based on the decisions revealed in their filings.

While it’s likely a host

Comer denounces Greene’s motion to vacate Speaker: ‘Not the right business model’

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) pushed back on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) motion to vacate against Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), saying it is “not the right business model.”

“Now Mike Johnson walked into a bad situation,” Comer said Friday in an interview with Fox News’s Martha MacCallum. “It’s gotten a lot worse since he’s been here. But changing Speakers is not the right business model.”

His comments come as Greene has ramped up her threat against the Speaker in light of his efforts to provide additional aid to Ukraine. She filed the motion to vacate against Johnson back in late March and has gained at least three GOP co-sponsors.

Earlier this week, the Georgia Republican said she doesn’t care if the “Speaker’s office becomes a revolving door.” In an appearance on former White House aide Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, she said she wants “an ‘America First’ economy” and that “we are going to demand it from our Republican leaders.”

Comer appeared to disagree, saying Friday that Johnson should “remain Speaker,” at least until the end of the current session. Then, he said, “we can re-huddle, and decide which direction to go in next year.”

He also acknowledged he thought the motion to vacate that resulted in the historic ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) late last year was a “mistake.” He added that the move “really disrupted” the House Republican Conference in “a bad way.”

Also asked about former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s (R-Ga.) recent comment that the motion to vacate was “totally stupid,” as it would be difficult to find 218 supporters, Comer seemingly agreed, standing behind Johnson.

“But right now, as you mentioned, there’s not going to be another candidate that 100 percent of our conference is gonna rally behind,” the lawmaker said.

Still, Comer said he was opposed to the Ukraine aid provisions within the foreign spending package introduced by Johnson nearly a week ago.

The pressure on the Speaker to pass additional assistance for the embattled country has been strong. With the help of Democrats, to some conservatives’ dismay, the House advanced the group of bills that would send more aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific region, among other priorities.

“They are different aid bills. With respect to Ukraine, I’m totally opposed to that,” Comer told MacCallum. “I don’t believe the hard-working, tax-paying people in Kentucky want to

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