Netherlands-based firm offloads unit to fast casual restaurant chain Wonder for $650m four years after buying it for $7.3bn

The food delivery company Just Eat Takeaway is selling Grubhub to the delivery-focused restaurant chain Wonder for $650m (£510m), only four years after buying the US app in a multibillion-dollar tie-up after the first Covid lockdowns.

The Netherlands-based Just Eat, which is Europe’s largest meal delivery company, had been looking to offload its US unit since as early as 2022 , as the pandemic-fuelled boost to online food shopping faded and it grappled with tough competition.

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Revealed: Video footage casts doubt on compliance with campaign finance laws and past characterizations of the event by the Adams campaign

Winnie Greco, a longtime Eric Adams aide now under FBI investigation, was a key player at a secretive fundraiser that netted the future New York mayor what appears to be illegal campaign cash, according to interviews with purported donors to the event and video footage unearthed by the Guardian and the City.

The City and the news site Documented previously reported on several suspicious donations stemming from the fundraiser, which was hosted in August of 2021 at the home of a Queens mall operator. One listed donor to the fundraiser, a low-wage employee at that mall, admitted to being reimbursed in cash after donating to Adams at the behest of their employer – an act that would constitute an illegal “straw” donation. Three other purported donors denied giving to Adams, including a woman who was listed in the campaign’s financial disclosures as a “deliveryman” at a restaurant in the mall that she never worked for and that doesn’t do delivery.

At the time of the original reporting, the role of Greco at the mall operator’s event was not publicly known. The newly unearthed footage shows the aide escorting Adams in and out of the event, stage-managing photo ops for the candidate, and hugging and laughing with family members of the evening’s host, Lian Wu Shao, the chairman of Queens’ New World Mall.

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Mike Johnson, House speaker, referenced president-elect’s intent at a conference addressing the GOP’s complete sweep

Donald Trump plans to address Republican legislators on Wednesday in a visit to Capitol Hill, following a meeting with the president Joe Biden that traditionally begins the transfer of power from one administration to another.

The speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, referenced Trump’s intent to meet with Republicans on Tuesday at a press conference where House leaders trumpeted taking a trifecta in last Tuesday’s elections. “We’re working out the details of him gathering with us potentially tomorrow morning before he goes to the White House,” Johnson said.

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Health secretary says bad managers are NHS’s ‘guilty secret’ in broadcast round ahead of first major speech on health service reform

In an interview with LBC Wes Streeting claimed there were “lots” of poor managers in the NHS. Asked about opposition to his plans, he said”

Look, I know it’s not going to be popular with everyone in the system. I think people would rather sometimes that I got everyone around the campfire to sing Kumbaya and hailed the great religion of the National Health Service and how wonderful it is. But when it’s going through the worst crisis in its history, I think we need to drive serious change.

That does mean more support for leaders, and today I’m not only talking about more freedoms and autonomy for our best performing leaders, but investment in leadership, development and training.

I’m not interested in humiliating individuals. What I am interested in is performance, managing poor leaders on and out of the NHS. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing when the average very senior managers play is £145,000 a year. The level of responsibility they carry is enormous. They’re responsible for a vital public service, and if they’re not up to it in a very professional way, we need to manage people onto another future.

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Julie Conalty, bishop of Birkenhead, welcomes resignation of Justin Welby but says institutional changes needed

A bishop and a cabinet minister have said more senior clergy in the Church of England may need to resign after a damning report into a sadistic abuser.

Julie Conalty, bishop of Birkenhead and deputy lead bishop for safeguarding, said Justin Welby had “done the right thing” on Tuesday by resigning as archbishop of Canterbury.

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The new Tory leader has rushed in to praise Trump and call for a US-UK trade deal that would devastate British farmers

• Tom Baldwin is the author of Keir Starmer, The Biography

The only time I have met Kemi Badenoch was in a television studio a few months ago when she shamed me into a stumbling apology. We were part of a panel discussing her plan to bar transgender people from entering female-only spaces. And the then equalities minister had, for once, gone out of her way to emphasise the need for a reasoned debate on this bitterly contested issue. So how, I asked, could she then justify a Conservative advert that day claiming Keir Starmer didn’t know “what a woman is”?

Badenoch replied with words that would chill the blood of anyone with vaguely progressive instincts. “Please don’t point at me like that, I find it unnecessarily aggressive,” she said. “Err … sorry,” I muttered, “there are some strong feelings on this.” Fair enough. Middle-aged white men like me really should have learned by now to keep their fingers under control.

Tom Baldwin is the author of Keir Starmer, The Biography

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Johan Grimonprez’s fascinating documentary suggests that the US used jazz legend Louis Armstrong in a ‘cool war’ offensive to assassinate Patrice Lumumba

I last encountered the work of the Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez in the documentary-reverie Double Take from 2009 , which imagined an encounter between two Alfred Hitchcocks. Now in this fascinating and valuably informative film, he amplifies what he sees as the mood music that lay behind the assassination of the leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961; a strange and jazzy new “cool war” offensive in which the American intelligence services, through various fronts, tried to export jazz music by black American musicians to Africa, to win hearts and minds.

The film suggests that Lumumba’s murder, perpetrated by partisans of a civil war stoked by western intelligence services soon after his election, was connived by the US, the UN and by Congo’s former imperial masters, Belgium. The reasoning was that Lumumba might withhold from the west his country’s uranium reserves, vital for making nuclear weapons. Lumumba’s Congo was also a key player in the “United States of Africa” movement which was beginning to alarm the Eisenhower government.

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Restless Development, a global youth agency, asked photographers aged 18-25 from around the world to submit images for the WHO global campaign to end violence against children on the theme of feeling safe. The resulting photo essays were displayed in Bogotá, Colombia, earlier this month

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From afternoon sherry to sex with the handyman in the lawnmower shed, Alan Bennett takes a wry look at lockdown life in a care home

Back in 2020, with the country in lockdown, the BBC commissioned updated versions of Alan Bennett’s consummate Talking Heads, originally broadcast in 1988. Ten of the 12 monologues were remade with a new A-list of British actors that included Kristin Scott Thomas, Lesley Manville and Martin Freeman reprising roles played first time around by Eileen Atkins, Maggie Smith and Bennett himself. Only two, A Cream Cracker Under the Settee and Waiting for the Telegram, both featuring the late, great Thora Hird , were not reprised. The omission was necessitated by the BBC’s rules around social distancing: during the pandemic, directors were barred from working with actors in any high-risk group, including those above the age of 70.

Bennett wrote two new monologues to replace the missing pieces, one for Sarah Lancashire and one for Monica Dolan, and very fine they were too, but Killing Time is proof that the characters he wrote for Thora Hird remained very much in his mind. In A Cream Cracker Under the Settee the fiercely independent Doris is determined never to end up in the rest home Stafford House, a fate repeatedly threatened by Zulema, the slapdash home help assigned to her by social services. “You go daft there,” Doris says vehemently. “There’s nowhere else to go but daft.”

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