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Friday newspaper round-up: High speed rail line, Boeing, Grangemouth

(Sharecast News) - A plan for a new high-speed rail line linking Birmingham and Manchester has been unveiled, claiming to deliver most of the benefits of the scrapped northern leg of HS2 at significantly cheaper cost and with only slightly longer journey times. The 50-mile track would run from where the HS2 line is now due to end in Staffordshire to join a planned Northern Powerhouse Rail line west of Manchester airport, under a plan unveiled by the mayors of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands. - Guardian Boeing workers voted on Thursday night to strike for higher pay, halting production of the planemaker's strongest-selling jet as it wrestles with chronic output delays and mounting debt. Newly installed Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg pleaded with workers not to go on strike - the first since 2008 - ahead of the vote, saying the action would put the company's "recovery in jeopardy". - Guardian

Low-paid migrant workers are an immediate drain on the public purse, costing taxpayers more than £150,000 each by the time they hit state pension age, according to the Government's tax and spending watchdog. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said the average low-earner who came to Britain aged 25 cost the Government more overall than they paid in from the moment they arrived. - Telegraph

Scotland's last remaining oil refinery at Grangemouth is to close next year with the loss of 400 jobs, leaving the UK with only a handful of refineries and increasing the country's reliance on imported fuel. The site's owner Petroineos, a joint venture between Sir Jim Ratcliffe's Ineos and PetroChina, believes that domestic demand for motor fuels will fall sharply with the forthcoming ban on new petrol and diesel cars. - The Times

Artificial intelligence has moved to more human-like reasoning, OpenAI has claimed, with the launch of its latest model. In a blogpost, the ChatGPT maker said that "much like a person would", its new o1 series would spend more time thinking before it responded to queries. The company said it could "reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and maths". - The Times

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Thursday newspaper round-up: Solar panels, OBR, Chevron
(Sharecast News) - California's home-insurance safety net does not have enough money to pay all of the claims from damage caused by the Los Angeles wildfires and has asked private insurers to contribute $1bn toward those claims. All private insurers operating in California are required to contribute to the Fair plan, a plan of last resort established so all Californians would have access to fire insurance. More than 450,000 California homeowners got their insurance through the Fair plan in 2024 - more than double the number in 2020. As of 4 February, the plan had received more than 4,700 claims from the Palisades and Eaton fires, almost half of which were for "total losses". - Guardian
Wednesday newspaper round-up: British economy, Heathrow, FOS
(Sharecast News) - The British economy is on course to expand by 1.5% this year after the budget gave a boost to public spending but could be blown off course if Donald Trump goes ahead with threatened tariffs, a leading economic thinktank has warned. In a boost to Rachel Reeves after a bruising month of negative economic figures, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) upped its annual growth prediction from 1.2% to 1.5%. - Guardian
Tuesday newspaper round-up: OpenAI, EVs, gas prices
(Sharecast News) - Elon Musk escalated his feud with OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman on Monday. The billionaire is leading a consortium of investors that announced it had submitted a bid of $97.4bn for "all assets" of the artificial intelligence company to OpenAI's board of directors. The startup, which operates ChatGPT, has been working to restructure itself away from its original non-profit status. OpenAI also operates a for-profit subsidiary, and Musk's unsolicited offer could complicate the company's plans. The Wall Street Journal first reported the proposed bid. - Guardian
Monday newspaper round-up: Service charge, BP, Heathrow, Elon Musk
(Sharecast News) - An increasingly complex tax system is burdening the government and businesses with hundreds of millions of pounds more in administration costs, Whitehall's spending watchdog has warned. The report by the National Audit Office (NAO) also said "poor levels of service" meant some taxpayers and their representatives were "finding it more difficult to deal with their tax matters and are losing trust in HM Revenue & Customs [HMRC]". - Guardian

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