We last wrote about Lassie, a pet health app and insurance provider, when it closed an €11 million Series A round in 2022. It’s growth had been spurred by the boom in pet ownership during the pandemic (nearly half of all European households now own a pet, and and owners spend €23.5 billion on them annually) and when pet owners turned to mobile apps to maintain their pet’s health. This turned out to be a big driver of pet insurance companies such as ManyPets (UK) and Dalma (France).
Lassie has now raised €23 million in a Series B funding led by Balderton Capital. Previous investors including Felix Capital, Inventure, Passion Capital and Philian (H&M Chair Karl-John Persson) also participated in the round. That means Lassie has now raised a total of €36.5 million.
The funding will be used to develop Lassie’s team and products such as its in-app sale of health products for pets, and expand beyond its core bases of Germany and Sweden. The app features online courses, and other information on preventative health for pets. Owners who complete the courses receive rewards every insurance year, from lower premiums to loyalty points for its online store.
Lassie co-founder and CEO Hedda Båverud Olsson was partly inspired by growing up with a veterinarian parent. She was joined by insurance expert, Sophie Wilkinson (a former head of pet insurance at a Nordic insurance company), and technology lead, Johan Jönsson (formerly of Spotify and King).
The HMV owner Doug Putman has said his planned rescue of the retailer Wilko collapsed because “everyone just got a little bit greedy” and was not thinking about the jobs that could have been saved.
The Canadian retail billionaire, who has engineered a turnaround of HMV in the UK and owns Toys R Us in Canada, was close to a deal to take over as many as 200 of Wilko’s 408 stores in September, which would have saved more than 12,000 jobs.
Struggling under a debt pile of £625m, Wilko collapsed into administration in August and called in PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Speaking on Tuesday, before former Wilko bosses will be grilled by MPs on the collapse of the chain, Putman said: “I thought we did have a deal, we thought we would get that over the line.”
He said he would have needed to use Wilko’s IT systems for about four months before transitioning to a new system, and agreement could not be reached on the financial terms.
“They were super inflexible,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, referring to the retailer’s IT suppliers. “For those four months, the amount of money that the companies wanted to charge made the Wilko deal literally impossible to do. And that was something that was found out really late in the game.”
He said one of the landlords, who hosted Wilko’s servers in a tiny room, wanted to charge rent on the whole 1m sq ft facility for Putman to keep the computers.
“Everyone just got a little bit greedy and unfortunately weren’t thinking about the 10,000-plus jobs that would have been saved and were only thinking about their little piece of it,” Putman said.
“PwC really wanted the deal, we wanted the deal, we had a deal. We had an agreement and these things kind of came out of the woodwork for both of us where we were both a bit stunned. So that was kind of the most unfortunate piece of the whole thing. Sometimes big companies just don’t think an awful lot about the impacts to individuals.”
Wilko’s former bosses including Lisa Wilkinson, its former chair and a member of the founding family that had still owned the retailer, and Mark Jackson, the company’s chief executive at the time of its collapse, will be questioned by MPs on the parliamentary business and trade committee later on Tuesday. The business minister, Kevin Hollinrake, will be questioned on measures to support the retail sector and the role of the Insolvency Service.
Former Wilko workers are travelling from across the country to attend the hearing in Westminster.
Despite its problems, owners of the Wilko chain, led by the Wilkinson family, took £3m in dividends in the 12 months to the end of February 2022. The company’s collapse left a £50m shortfall in its pension fund.
Ten people have died in snowstorms in Ukraine, the country’s interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, has said.
Icy winds and storms have swept in since Sunday, cutting power and blocking roads, particularly in the south.
“As a result of worsening weather conditions, 10 people died in Odesa, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Kyiv regions,” Klymenko wrote on Telegram.
“Twenty-three people were injured, including two children,” he added.
A total of 411 settlements in 11 regions had lost power, and more than 1,500 vehicles had to be rescued, Klymenko said.
Summary
It is Tuesday and this is the Guardian’s continuing live coverage of the Russian war against Ukraine. Here are the top developments.
Russian forces are intensifying their drive to capture Avdiivka, trying to advance on all sides, according to Vitaliy Barabash, the head of Avdiivka’s military administration. “The Russians have opened up two more sectors from which they have begun making assaults – in the direction of Donetsk … and in the so-called industrial zone. The enemy is attempting to storm the city from all directions.”
Hurricane-force winds, snowfall and flooding have lashed Russia’s southern regions of Dagestan, Krasnodar and Rostov, as well as the occupied Ukrainian territories of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea. In Ukraine, the severe weather killed at least five people and cut power to almost 1,500 towns and villages after storms dumped up to 25cm (10in) of snow in some places. A further four people were reported dead in Moldova. Freezing temperatures were forecast for Tuesday morning. Russia’s energy ministry said power cuts affected 1.9 million people.
Weather forecasts show downpours were continuing late on Monday in the Crimean port of Sevastopol and Sochi on Russia’s Black Sea coast, amid hopes the storm’s impact might deliver a setback to the Russian war effort.
The UK Ministry of Defence has described as “plausible” Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties – the number killed or wounded – running at a daily average of almost 1,000 in November. This would, on the face of it, make November 2023 one of the most difficult months for Russian forces, with many of its losses coming from its assault on Avdiivka – although figures on Ukrainian losses were not provided.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is attending a Nato session in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will include the first foreign minister-level meeting of the Nato-Ukraine Council, a body created to improve cooperation and coordination and help prepare Kyiv for membership. “Allies will continue to support Ukraine’s self-defence until Russia stops its war of aggression,” said Jim O’Brien, the top US diplomat for Europe.
Ukraine will become a member of Nato subject to reforms after the war, the military alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said. Nato states still agreed that full membership remained impossible in the midst of war, even while ways to move Ukraine and Nato closer continued, he added.
The Chechen ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, has said another 3,000 of his fighters are ready to go to and fight in Ukraine for Russia. Kadyrov is suspected to be ill, and his soldiers are frequently derided online for appearing to be mostly concerned with posting staged videos of themselves on TikTok. There have also been several Chechen armed formations choosing to fight on the side of Ukraine rather than Russia.
Exports to Russia from Turkey of civilian goods used by the military such as microchips and telescopic sights are increasing, causing concern to the US and the EU.
Ancient Scythian artefacts from museums in Russian-occupied Crimea have been returned to Ukraine after a legal dispute over ownership rights during which they spent almost a decade in the Netherlands, a Ukrainian museum said.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, says he plans to travel to Nato member North Macedonia this week to attend a conference of the 57-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which includes Russia. Bulgaria, another Nato member that borders North Macedonia, said it had issued permission for Lavrov to fly through its airspace.
Moscow does not have plans to expand its territory any further in Europe, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, insisted in response to remarks by the US defence secretary last week that Putin would not stop at Ukraine if he was victorious.
French startup Augment has seen the incredible rise of online courses and edtech companies, as well as its potential when it comes to reinventing education at scale. That’s why the startup has been working on highly polished online courses sold as a package. Augment thinks its main program could potentially become an alternative to traditional Masters of Business Administration (MBA).
Augment has recently raised a $6 million seed round led by RTP Global with other funds also participating, such as Motier Ventures, Origins Fund, Kima Ventures, Bpifrance and Financière Saint James. Several angel investors also invested in the startup, such as Thibaud Elziere and Roxanne Varza.
The startup’s main program is called the Augment MBA. It is an opinionated and differentiated take on MBAs as everything happens online with a mix of videos from inspiring business leaders, case studies, quizzes, written assignments, downloadable handbooks, etc.
I haven’t enrolled in Augment’s program so I can’t tell you if it’s an effective way to learn new business skills. A few months ago, the Augment team showed me some of the videos they were working on, such as a video with Eventbrite co-founder Renaud Visage. It was highly scripted but it looked great, in case you’re wondering about the video production standards. It’s also worth noting that the Augment MBA is an unaccredited MBA.
But things seem to be going well so far as Augment told me that the course has been live for six months with over 500 students enrolled in the Augment MBA from all over the world — 80% from the U.S., followed by the U.K. and Middle Eastern countries.
Augment isn’t a subscription-based product. Instead, you can get access to the platform with a one-time payment. The Augment MBA currently costs $1,750.
A faculty of tech founders
In many ways, Augment feels like an alternative to MasterClass with a specific focus on business education and a structured curriculum that goes beyond video courses. Some of the first entrepreneurs turned teachers include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, YouTube founder Steve Chen, and Shazam founder Chris Barton.
A successful MBA also offers you some networking opportunities so that you can help each other out in your career after graduating. That’s why Augment is also trying to create a community around its MBA-like program with some opportunities to network with fellow students.
The co-founders of Augment Roy Wellner (L) and Ariel Renous (R). Image Credits: Augment.
While the company’s first MBA-like program will remain the main program going forward, the startup is already working on other formats and topics. Augment told me that there will be some shorter, cheaper courses on specific subjects, or “mini-MBA programs,” as they call them.
The startup hopes it can address three different types of professionals — aspiring entrepreneurs who want to go beyond a simple idea, managers who want to improve their leadership skills, and technical professionals looking for business skills to become senior leaders.
There are some high upfront costs to create those programs, so it’s important to recover some of those costs to expand the startup’s business with more programs and new sales channels (corporate offerings, bundles, etc.). It’s going to be interesting to see if Augment manages to sell its programs to a larger crowd now that it has nailed down its main program and some funding.
Introduction: “Everyone got a little bit greedy” as Wilko failed, claims Putman.
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.
Greed has been blamed for the failure to agree a rescue deal for Wilko, as MPs prepare to examine the collapse of the discount retailer this autumn.
Doug Putman, the billionaire Canadian business executive, says he came very close to agreeing a deal that would have saved thousands of jobs, but was thwarted by the homeware chain’s suppliers.
Putman told Radio 4’s Today Programme that he really thought he had a deal to take over Wilko, which closed its doors last month with the loss of around 12,000 jobs.
But, he explains, companies – such as Wilko’s IT suppliers – refused to budge on fees they wanted to charge for the transition.
Putman says these companies were “super inflexible” about cooperating for the “four months or so” that he would have needed their systems before transitioning to his own.
Putman, who owns HMV, says:
I thought we did have a deal. We thought we would, we would get that over the line….
But for those four months, the amount of money that the companies wanted to charge made the Wilco deal literally impossible to do. And that was something that was found out really late in the game.
He cites a landlord who hosted Wilko’s servers, in a tiny room, but wanted to charge rent on their whole million square feet facility for Putman to keep the server.
He explains:
So I would say everyone just got a little bit greedy, and unfortunately, weren’t thinking about the 10,000-plus jobs that would have been saved and were only thinking about their little piece of it.
Wilko fell into administration in August, as it struggled with debts of £625m.
Putman offered to take on up to 350 of Wilko’s 400 stores and ensure the main creditors – led by the restructuring specialist Hilco – were paid. But that offer collapsed in mid-September, and was followed by the closure of the company.
Putman says today:
PwC [Wilko’s administrators] really wanted a deal. We wanted a deal. We had a deal.
We had an agreement and I think these things came out of the woodwork for both of us, where we were both a bit stunned.
MPs on the Business and Trade Committee will dig into the colllapse of Wilko today, when they hold a hearing with the firm’s former chair, LisaWilkinson (who stepped down in January) and MarkJackson, the company’s CEO.
The committee say they will examine:
the Wilkinson family’s justification for taking millions of pounds in dividends out of the firm, even when it was heavily indebted;
what attempts were made to save the business and whether crucial advice was ignored; and
the £50 million shortfall in the company’s pension fund.
They’ll also hear from union representatives and industry experts about what went wrong, and quiz business minister KevinHollinrake.
Here’s a post from the committee from last night:
The agenda
10am GMT: Business and Trade committee hearing on Wilko’s collapse begins
10.15am GMT: Treasury committee questions OBR officials on autumn statement
2pm GMT: US house price index for October
2.15pm GMT: Treasury committee questions economists on autumn statement
3pm GMT: US consumer confidence index for October
Key events
For the first time since Wilko’s collapse – their boss will be grilled by MPs today.
Here’s the schedule for the Business and Trade Committee hearing into the collapse of Wilko:
Panel 1 (10.00am GMT):
Nadine Houghton, National Officer, GMB
Patrick O’Brien, Global Retail Research Director, GlobalData
Professor Atul Shah, Professor of Accounting and Finance, City University
David Steinberg, Partner, Stevens & Bolton
Panel 2 (10.45am GMT):
Mark Jackson, former CEO of Wilko
Victoria Venning, Partner, EY
Andrew Walton, UK Head of Audit, EY
Lisa Wilkinson, former Chair of Wilko
Panel 3 (11.30am GMT):
Kevin Holinrake MP, Minister for Enterprise, Markets and Small Business, Department for Business and Trade
Angela Crossley, Director of Strategy Policy and Analysis, Insolvency Service
Former Wilko workers are travelling to parliament today to hear the company former chair and CEO explain why the chain collapse, and they lost their jobs, the GMB union say.
GMB National Officer Nadine Houghton, who will testify to MPs today, explains:
“This will be the first time Wilko workers have heard from bosses about what went wrong and why the company was allowed to collapse.
“They’ve never received an apology or explanation from Lisa Wilkinson, despite many staff having dedicated decades of their lives to the business.
“Wilko chiefs should know that GMB members will be there listening; they expect the answers they have been denied for so long.”
Introduction: “Everyone got a little bit greedy” as Wilko failed, claims Putman.
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.
Greed has been blamed for the failure to agree a rescue deal for Wilko, as MPs prepare to examine the collapse of the discount retailer this autumn.
Doug Putman, the billionaire Canadian business executive, says he came very close to agreeing a deal that would have saved thousands of jobs, but was thwarted by the homeware chain’s suppliers.
Putman told Radio 4’s Today Programme that he really thought he had a deal to take over Wilko, which closed its doors last month with the loss of around 12,000 jobs.
But, he explains, companies – such as Wilko’s IT suppliers – refused to budge on fees they wanted to charge for the transition.
Putman says these companies were “super inflexible” about cooperating for the “four months or so” that he would have needed their systems before transitioning to his own.
Putman, who owns HMV, says:
I thought we did have a deal. We thought we would, we would get that over the line….
But for those four months, the amount of money that the companies wanted to charge made the Wilco deal literally impossible to do. And that was something that was found out really late in the game.
He cites a landlord who hosted Wilko’s servers, in a tiny room, but wanted to charge rent on their whole million square feet facility for Putman to keep the server.
He explains:
So I would say everyone just got a little bit greedy, and unfortunately, weren’t thinking about the 10,000-plus jobs that would have been saved and were only thinking about their little piece of it.
Wilko fell into administration in August, as it struggled with debts of £625m.
Putman offered to take on up to 350 of Wilko’s 400 stores and ensure the main creditors – led by the restructuring specialist Hilco – were paid. But that offer collapsed in mid-September, and was followed by the closure of the company.
Putman says today:
PwC [Wilko’s administrators] really wanted a deal. We wanted a deal. We had a deal.
We had an agreement and I think these things came out of the woodwork for both of us, where we were both a bit stunned.
MPs on the Business and Trade Committee will dig into the colllapse of Wilko today, when they hold a hearing with the firm’s former chair, LisaWilkinson (who stepped down in January) and MarkJackson, the company’s CEO.
The committee say they will examine:
the Wilkinson family’s justification for taking millions of pounds in dividends out of the firm, even when it was heavily indebted;
what attempts were made to save the business and whether crucial advice was ignored; and
the £50 million shortfall in the company’s pension fund.
They’ll also hear from union representatives and industry experts about what went wrong, and quiz business minister KevinHollinrake.
Here’s a post from the committee from last night:
The agenda
10am GMT: Business and Trade committee hearing on Wilko’s collapse begins
10.15am GMT: Treasury committee questions OBR officials on autumn statement
2pm GMT: US house price index for October
2.15pm GMT: Treasury committee questions economists on autumn statement
Who could have anticipated such a twist in Germany’s fraught relationship with its dark past? The German government is coming under increasing pressure to break free of the constraints of German guilt. And it is Turkey that wants the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to deliver the reversal.
On a visit to Germany earlier this month, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, standing next to Scholz in Berlin, claimed that Germany was too absorbed by historical remorse to grasp the reality of the Middle East. Before his arrival in Germany, Erdoğan had called the Hamas terrorists “freedom fighters” and said that Israel’s legitimacy was in doubt due to its “own fascism”. Scholz had staunchly resisted calls to cancel the visit, but made clear before Erdoğan’s arrival that he considered the president’s view of the conflict “absurd”.
What followed was an awkward visit that highlighted how tricky the navigation of German foreign policy has become. Erdoğan is fully aware of his leverage in Berlin: almost 3 million people in Germany are of Turkish heritage. Ankara provides close to 1,000 mosques in Germany with imams. Turkey is a vital partner in Nato’s support for Ukraine, providing drones and keeping the Black Sea open for grain exports. And Germany, most importantly, wants Turkey to control irregular migration in the Mediterranean to avoid another refugee crisis.
The two leaders avoided a public falling-out in Berlin, but back in Ankara, Erdoğan told Turkish news outlets that the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was clearly in a “crusader mindset”, and that was also true for “the other one”, referring to Scholz. Erdoğan is known for his disregard for diplomatic decorum, so Scholz decided to simply shrug off the remark.
Still, the episode points to a bigger problem. Germany’s almost unconditionally pro-Israeli stance brings Berlin into conflict with many of its essential partners. Only last year, the vice-chancellor and economic affairs minister, Robert Habeck, travelled to Qatar to purchase large quantities of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to make up for sanctioned Russian gas. Qatar is Hamas’s most important backer. The Gulf emirate is also deeply invested in German brands such as Volkswagen, Porsche, Siemens and Deutsche Bank.
There’s more: in the spirit of “de-risking” and diversifying the German economy’s overdependence on China, Scholz has been courting the rising powers of the so-called global south, including Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa. These nations take different positions on Hamas terrorism, but all of them see the Palestinian struggle in terms of their own postcolonial history. South Africa’s parliament even voted to close the Israeli embassy, while the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, accused Israel of war crimes and acts “tantamount to genocide”.
The faultlines between the west and the global south had already become obvious last year in the reactions to Russia’s war in Ukraine, when many countries refused to take sides. Now Israel’s war in Gaza threatens to deepen these divisions. Germany, with its dogged insistence on Israel’s right to self-defence, even in the face of Gaza’s devastation, finds itself in an increasingly tough spot.
What is behind the German posture? Let’s be clear: the German political establishment is not captive to an oppressive mindset that limits its ability to speak out against Israel. This is a dangerous conspiracy theory that needs to be debunked.
The idea that Germany suffers from an overdose of Vergangenheitsbewältigung – the German term for dealing with the Nazi past – is not new. The extreme right has claimed for decades that Germany is overly politically constrained by national shame. In that vein, the far-right party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) dismisses Germany’s culture of remembrance as a mere Schuldkult (cult of guilt). AfD, polling at about 20% nationwide, wants to de-emphasise the darker aspects of our heritage and focus on the bright side of our history.
A pro-Palestinian protest in Berlin, Germany, 18 November. Photograph: Adam Berry/Getty Images
Surprisingly, the originally hard-right refutation of our historical responsibility has become popular on the other side of the political spectrum. “Free Gaza from German guilt” is now a popular slogan shouted by leftwingers on pro-Palestinian marches in Berlin.
When the hard right, the left and an autocrat (who denies Turkey’s genocide of the Armenians) combine forces, you know there is something wrong. Let’s be clear: German politicians do not need to wrestle free of history to navigate the debate on the Gaza war. It is a myth that Germany is uncritical in its support of the Israeli government.
When Israel used excessive violence in earlier Gaza wars, Germany raised public concerns. Berlin has constantly criticised the expansion of settlements. More than a decade ago, the then foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, called the situation in Hebron (in the occupied West Bank) “apartheid”. Berlin has supported the Palestinian Authority with over €1bn, and is among the top donors to Unwra, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees.
There was never any love lost between either the Merkel or Scholz governments and Benjamin Netanyahu. Angela Merkel knew he was working with Donald Trump to kill off the nuclear deal with Iran behind her back. And that he was lying about his acceptance of two states. Nobody involved with the Middle East dossier in Berlin trusts Netanyahu. Politicians in Berlin roll their eyes at the suggestion that they are in Israel’s pocket.
So what accounts for the dogged support Berlin extends to Israel in its war against Hamas? You must look beyond immediate crisis. Germany’s foreign policy establishment has suffered a deep shock, indeed the second one, after last year’s realisation that Russia could not be appeased by diplomatic overtures, pipeline deals and “change through trade”. Germans had been told they were “surrounded by friends”, as Helmut Kohl put it. They woke up ill-equipped to face a world of sworn enemies. Russia pulverised decades of German Ostpolitik when it attacked Ukraine, and with it the European postwar order.
Similarly, Germany had pushed for diplomacy to deal with Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions. Berlin was a major sponsor of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement with Tehran. Germany refused to list Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terror organisation to save the deal.
Then the Gazan member of Iran’s axis of resistance attacked Israel on 7 October. The Jewish state is trapped in a pincer movement between Hamas and Hezbollah – and the possibility of a wider war. This is an existential crisis for Israel.
The cornerstones of Germany’s foreign policy have crumbled. Engagement with Russia and Iran has failed. This is the view from Berlin: these two powers must be stopped, and that includes the destruction of Hamas. This is the reason for Germany’s staunch support of Israel’s war against Hamas, notwithstanding the deep distrust of Netanyahu – and the wish to see him gone as soon as hostilities end.
Joerg Lau is an international correspondent for the German weekly Die Zeit
The fractured mood of metropolis Berlin on the verge of international calamity is captured through personal diaries, letters and extensive film footage in this haunting three-part documentary. It starts with the dawn of the new year, when the country is divided as the National Socialists have become the strongest party in Germany and Hitler aims to eliminate his opponents. Hollie Richardson
The Great British Bake Off
8pm, Channel 4
Tasha flaked out of patisserie week, which means that Dan, Josh and Matty are the three bakers in this year’s final. They have each been named star baker twice, making it one of the show’s trickiest ones to call yet. First up: the trio must wow Prue and Paul through the power of choux pastry. Then it’s time to make an eye-popping celebration cake for their nearest and dearest. HR
Louis Theroux Interviews
9pm, BBC Two
In the booth … Louis Theroux and Raye. Photograph: Ryan McNamara/BBC/Mindhouse Productions
It doesn’t take Louis Theroux long to tell singer-songwriter Raye that the 2022 remix of his rap Jiggle Jiggle has hit 6.4m Spotify streams – but her canon has reached more than 4.7bn. The young artist has already had a bad time of it in the industry, and she details how, while parting ways with her record label – after they wouldn’t release her album – she was always “on some form of sedation” to get through it. HR
Kennedy
9pm, Sky History
The recent 60th anniversary of JFK’s assassination was marked by a glut of documentaries rehashing his death. This new eight-part biography assembles a vast array of relatives, historians and politicians to contextualise his life. The opening episode examines the childhood and student days of “Jack”, culminating in his attempts to join the war effort. Graeme Virtue
Live at the Apollo
9.45pm, BBC Two
After calling the contraceptive coil a “Slinky in the womb”, Maisie Adam hosts an evening of standup with Michael Odewale (a writer on recent hit comedy Dreaming Whilst Black) and, after her Femme Fatality show at Edinburgh fringe, Glaswegian comic Susie McCabe. HR
Kin
10.40pm, BBC One
Another double bill of the gritty Irish thriller about the criminal Kinsella family starts with Frank (Aidan Gillen) and Michael (Charlie Cox) going ahead with the robbery – but, quite understandably, Eamon (Ciarán Hinds) isn’t about to let them drive off into the sunset with millions of euros worth of drugs. HR
Live sport
Uefa Champions League football: Man City v RB Leipzig, 7.45pm, TNT Sports 1The current champions try to secure a place at the top of group G.
Nearly half of the whales and dolphins found in UK waters over the past five years contained harmful concentrations of toxic chemicals banned decades ago, an investigation has found.
Among orcas stranded in the UK, levels of PCBs, a group of highly dangerous and persistent chemicals that do not degrade easily, were 30 times the concentration at which the animals would begin to suffer health impacts, researchers said.
Scientists described the findings as a “huge wake-up call” that should ring alarm bells not only for the future of marine mammal health but for human health, too.
Dr Rosie Williams, lead author and researcher from the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) Institute of Zoology, said: “It’s been over 20 years since several of these chemicals were banned globally, yet we still see concerningly high concentrations in wildlife.
“Although concentrations of the pollutants seem to be declining, our findings reveal that in many species they are still present at levels associated with negative effects on the immune and reproductive systems.”
High PCB concentrations are a major cause of decline in European cetacean populations, studies have found. One paper, from 2018, suggests orcas near industrialised areas could be at risk of population collapse as a result.
For the latest report, scientists examined postmortem records and tissue samples from 1,000 marine mammals, consisting of 11 different species stranded in the UK, using data collected over 30 years by a partnership including ZSL’s Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, a government-funded project, and the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science.
They found that concentrations of PCBs, once widely used but banned globally in 2004 under the Stockholm convention, were highest in long-lived species at the top of the food chain: orcas, bottle-nosed dolphins and white-beaked dolphins.
Researchers said they controlled for the bias introduced by examining stranded animals, whose deaths may have been hastened by chemicals, by including a high percentage of deaths from trauma, such as boat strikes or entanglement with fishing lines.
Orcas following a trawler off the Shetland Isles, Scotland. Strandings may be exacerbated by high levels of PCBs in their bodies. Photograph: Nature Picture Library/Alamy
The toxins, initially taken up by plankton at the bottom of the food chain and not susceptible to being broken down, increase in concentration the higher up the chain they go, a process known as “biomagnification”, Williams said.
In 2017, Lulu, an orca from the UK’s last resident pod, was found dead on Tiree in Scotland. She was discovered to have one of the highest concentrations of toxic pollutants ever found in a marine mammal. The extreme level of PCBs in her blubber, at 950mg/kg (0.033oz/2.2lb) – more than 100 times the limit of 9mg/kg regarded as safe – was believed by some scientists to have contributed to her infertility.
“This is a huge wake-up call,” said Williams, who called for urgent action to protect the marine environment from historical and emerging pollutants. “We rely on the same ecosystem for some of our own food – so these findings ring alarm bells not only for the future of marine life but indicate a risk to human health also.”
The NHS advises pregnant and breastfeeding women, those trying to get pregnant and girls to eat no more than two portions of oily fish a week, because chemical pollutants may build up and affect the future development of a baby in the womb.
Hussain Elius is best known as the co-founder of Pathao, one of Bangladesh’s top ride-sharing apps. For his latest startup, however, Elius is exploring the world of DeFi with Wind.app, a self-custodial, smart contract wallet with three main features. The first is enabling businesses to send payments to remote employees around the world. The second is allowing people to use Wind.app as a virtual bank account. And the third is is the on-ramp/off-ramp infrastructure that the company is building to enable users to change their crypto holdings for fiat or vice versa.
So far, Wind.app has facilitated over $3 million in annualized gross transaction volume (GTV) within a few months of its launch. The Singapore-based startup announced today that it has raised $3.8 million in pre-seed funding co-led by Global Founders Capital and Spartan Group, with participation from backers like Saison Capital, Alumni Ventures and Tiny VC.
By the time Elius left Pathao, it had become one of the most dominant consumer tech companies in Bangladesh and Nepal, offering food delivery, payments and BNPL, aside from ride-sharing, and gaining investment from backers like Gojek. During the COVID pandemic, Elius began exploring crypto. But he realized how hard it is to use for people who, unlike him, do not have a tech background.
“I”m a tech savvy person. If it takes me seven to 10 days to figure out things like MetaMask, gas fees, private keys, public keys and mnemonics, from me coming from a consumer tech background and going into crypto, I realized that crypto is still for nerds,” he said.
Elius decided to build an app accessible to people with minimal blockchain and crypto experience. For one thing, users don’t have to deal with gas fees. And they also store their money in stablecoins, since bitcoin is too volatile. Instead of using private or public keys, users can sign up for Wind.app with their emails or phone numbers.
Wind.app’s team
Wind.app is starting off by targeting freelancers and remote workers for payment, especially in Southeast Asia. It’s live in the Philippines, India and Bangladesh, and plans to enter more countries. Many of its early customers are other Web3 startups. “It’s easy to get our value proposition across to other Web3 companies because they get it from day one,” Elius said. Wind.app allows them to use it instead of an exchange with high fees to pay their remote workers.
Elius says Wind.app differentiates from Wise or Payoneer because it uses blockchain for settlement and is able to charge lower fees. Another benefit is being able to open an account quickly because Wind.app’s self-custodial wallet doesn’t require advanced KYC.
“Eventually, we want to go down the ladder and target the underbanked segment, who don’t have as much KYC information anyway, to give them a very easy way to start accepting money,” says Elius.
While Wind.app has users around the world, it started in Southeast Asia—specifically the Philippines—because there is a very large remittance market for USD there. Elius says the country is also very crypto savvy, and many people are familiar with crypto.
“I was in the Philippines a couple of times and even some of the tuk-tuk drivers own crypto,” he says. “They own some bitcoin. So it’s both a remittance market and a big crypto market, which makes it a good first market to start off with.”
One feature that may make Wind.app appealing to consumers it that it has built its own offramp and onramp for fiat and crypto coin.
“The reason we did that was because we initially tried to use different partners and saw it was pretty expensive,” Elius said. “Any other on ramps and off ramps charge between 2% to 3%, which is a lot especially if it’s a dividend. So we do our own and we got the cost down to less than 30 bips or so. And now we actually started to offer that to other businesses, and other businesses that are moving money.”
Some companies in the same space as Wind.app include Binance and Coinbase, but Elius says he doesn’t see them as competitors because people use them mostly for trading. Instead, more direct competitors include Payoneer and Transferwise. “We are coming in and saying that hey, you know we are different because our entire tech stack is different, our regulatory advantage is different,” Elius said.
In terms of user safety, Wind.app is a self-custodial wallet, which means the startup doesn’t have access or control of user funds, Elius says. Similarly to Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask or Trust Wallet, wallets are secured cryptographically in the blockchain and their private keys are stored directly in users’ phones. If Wind.app was to shut down, users would still have access to their wallets and can transfer funds to other wallets.
Wind.apps new funding will be used for tech development, and procuring licenses and compliance as it builds it off and onramps. Part of it will also be used on the startup’s customer acquisition strategy, including approaching businesses directly and individual users, too.
David Cameron will return to Brussels on Tuesday in an official capacity for the first time since his doomed campaign for Britain to remain in the European Union.
The former prime minister, who made a surprise return to frontline politics this month when he became the UK foreign secretary, will attend a Nato meeting of foreign ministers to discuss issues including ammunition supply to Ukraine and the alliance’s continued presence in Kosovo.
He is also expected to try to squeeze in a meeting with Maroš Šefčovič, the vice-president of the European Commission responsible for the Brexit deals, before or after the two-day summit.
Referring to the tortuous years-long negotiations surrounding the UK’s departure from the EU in 2020, one diplomat likened Cameron’s visit to the EU headquarters to a “divorcee returning to the family home”.
But though his history with Brussels has had its complications, Cameron’s return to politics after a reshuffle by Rishi Sunak has caused a frisson of anticipation around the Nato table.
“Everyone, I mean everyone, is looking for bilaterals with him,” said one source.
At Nato, Cameron is expected to brief fellow foreign ministers on his recent trip to Kyiv, with a tough conversation expected on the implications of Donald Trump’s possible return to the White House next year.
If he does meet Šefčovič – a man who, according to a senior diplomat, used to refer to his meetings with the UK’s chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost, as his “weekly root canal appointments” – Cameron is likely to discuss a looming 10% tariff on electric vehicle exports that was written into the Brexit deal negotiated by Boris Johnson’s team.
Germany and the UK car manufacturing sector have been lobbying hard for the tariff to be suspended for three years. But France has been holding out, arguing any change to the divorce deal, even to its annexe, constitutes a reopening of the entire agreement. That would then need signoff by prime ministers across the EU, many of whom have no interest in the issue.
The Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Monday western allies had no alternative but to keep backing Ukraine’s fight against Russia, in the face of doubts over US support to Kyiv.
He said: “It very often happens in wars that when people realise that this may last a long time, of course, that is demanding, that is difficult.
“We don’t have any alternative. The alternative, to let President [Vladimir] Putin win, is a tragedy for Ukraine and is dangerous for us.”
The US had provided more than $70bn (£55bn) to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, the second biggest contributor after the EU, which had provided about €100bn (£87bn), said James O’Brien, the US assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs, in a separate briefing to reporters.
But opposition from hardline Republicans has thrown into question the future of US assistance. “Despite the difficulties, despite the lack of progress or achievements or territorial gains, we need to continue to support Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, will also address the ministers as part of the first meeting of the Nato-Ukraine Council.
“In that session, they will have the opportunity to reaffirm the alliance’s steadfast commitment to Ukraine,” said O’Brien. “This is really a coalition effort, and I think it’s important for our partners to hear that we’ll continue to do our part, even while our Congress is debating the next steps of what we’ll provide.”
