Image of the week: Cold dark rooms
Ask anyone who lives in a normally hot climate, as opposed to one that has tipped into record extreme heat thanks to human folly, and they will tell you that there are some days when the relative cool of a beach just doesn’t cut it. If you haven’t got decent air conditioning at home or in the office, what you will need to do to make it through the day is skive off work and head to a cinema, like this one near Leicester Square in London, where the invitation to “sod the sunshine, come sit in the dark” came as temperatures across swathes of England blasted past 40 degrees and the London Fire Brigade had its busiest day since the second World War. Perhaps the time has come for journalists to stop seeking out sun-worshippers during heatwaves and instead congregate in the foyers of fully air-conditioned cinemas to hear from people who choose to make vampiric escapes to the movies rather than fry outdoors.
In numbers: EDF nationalisation
€9.7 billion
Sum that Emmanuel Macron’s government will pay to buy the 16.2 per cent of French energy giant EDF it does not own and complete its full nationalisation, helping France move away from fossil fuels.
€12
Price per share the French government will pay to take 100 per cent control, or an attractive premium of more than 50 per cent over its share price when the announcement was made. The offer comes as France is preparing for a full shut-off from Russian gas supplies.
€32
Sum that EDF investors, including former and then current employees, paid for its shares in 2005 when the electricity company was partially privatised. Investors’ woes have accelerated this year after Macron imposed a public-interest price cap to protect households.
‘She’s a broken woman’: Homeowner paid €9,000 to liquidated Dublin windows firm
Ireland meteor shower tonight: Getting the best view of the ‘shooting stars’ during the Geminids
Stephen Collins: Despite the rhetoric from Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Féin was the big election loser
Radio Review: At Newstalk, Ciara Kelly gets righteously annoyed
Getting to know: Pushing hand emojis
Another year, another brand new batch of emojis. This year’s draft list — unveiled by emoji reference website Emojipedia — is as eclectic as ever, with a jellyfish, a moose, a goose and some maracas on the 31-strong selection due to be approved this autumn by the all-powerful Unicode Consortium. Perhaps the ones with the most universal potential, however, are the emoji known as “rightwards pushing hand emoji” and “leftwards pushing hand emoji”, which, it has been suggested, can be combined to form a double-emoji “high five”. Will people high-five themselves on social media? Probably. But what the pushing hand emojis better represent is an advance on the existing raised-hand emoji for expressing “stop”. They might also prompt a revival of a phrase for “shut up” once beloved of 1990s kids: “Talk to the hand (because the face ain’t listening).”
The list: Celebrities’ lost luggage
It’s not just us civilians who have suffered the galling nuisance of having luggage going missing between airports during their baggage-handling chaos era. Some well-known people have endured the same fate.
1. Leona Maguire: The pro’s golf bag went missing between check-in and take-off at Dublin, with airline Swiss and handlers Swissport initially having “no idea where it is”. Thankfully, “a legend called Claire” located it in time for Maguire’s participation at the Evian Championship in southeast France.
2. Nick Kyrgios: The Wimbledon finalist was heading to the Bahamas with his girlfriend when they encountered flight delays and missing baggage issues at Toronto’s notoriously chaotic Pearson airport.
3. Hugh Grant: The actor (and tennis fan) this week advised against checking in bags when flying British Airways (BA) out of Copenhagen. “Bags ‘vanish’ and you never hear a squeak of concern or apology from anyone,” he tweeted.
4. Lupita Nyong’o: Oscar-winning actor Nyong’o travelled unexpectedly light to Cannes in June after KLM lost her luggage. Dolce & Gabbana “came to the rescue”, which sadly they don’t do for just anyone.
5. Aisling Bea. After BA lost her luggage, the comedian and actor appeared on American chatshow Jimmy Kimmel Live in her hotel dressing gown and slippers, styling it out for the ages.
