The Test to Release programme is supposed to cut quarantine times for people arriving in England.
Day: December 15, 2020
The 80-year-old Great British Bake Off judge has shared her experience of getting the new jab
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp says he is very impressed with how Jose Mourinho has turned Tottenham into a “results machine”.
US video games giant Electronic Arts (EA) is in pole position to acquire Codemasters in a proposed buyout that has been agreed by the boards of both companies.
Formula 1 game maker Codemasters had been set to sell to New York City-based Take-Two Interactive Software, which made a £725m bid for the British firm in November. But Fifa publisher EA has “gatecrashed” the takeover with a last-minute bid of $1.2bn (£945m), Sky News reports.
Codemasters develops a range of racing games including the F1 franchise, DiRT, DiRT Rally, Grid and Project Cars. The takeover would see these titles join Need for Speed, Burnout, and Real Racing in EA’s portfolio.
And while that combined line-up does not represent a total monopoly on racing games, it’s “as close as you’re likely to find for any major genre in gaming”, says ARS Technica.
‘Superior offer’
The Codemasters board has withdrawn its recommendation to accept Take-Two’s lower offer in order to “unanimously recommend” taking the bid from EA, Sky News reports. The proposed deal would see Codemasters shareholders receive 604p per share – a premium of 13.1% to the last closing price of the company’s shares.
The takeover is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2021.
In a statement confirming the offer, Codemasters said: “The EA offer price of 604 pence per share in cash represents an aggregate value of £945m for Codemasters’ issued and to be issued share capital.
“In evaluating the EA offer, the Codemasters board has considered various aspects of the EA offer and considers the EA offer to represent a superior offer for Codemasters’ shareholders as compared with the Take-Two offer.”
Boom time
With people worldwide stuck at home as a result of Covid outbreaks, the video game sector has been “one of the largest winners of the pandemic” as the industry’s sales “boom”, says gamesindustry.biz.
Thanks to new titles and the strength of its back catalogue, Codemasters saw its first-half revenues double in 2020, and the group’s year-on-year sales increased to £80.5m in the six months to the end of September.
F1 2020 was “especially well-liked” by gamers, reaching the No.1 spot in the UK physical games charts in July, in the “best opening week in three years” for the series, This is Money reports.

A new variant of the Covid-19 virus is behind a sudden spike in cases in London and the Southeast of England, experts believe.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the House of Commons yesterday that almost 60 local authorities had identified a total of more than 1,000 Covid infections caused by the new variant. “And numbers are increasing rapidly,” he added.
The latest strain was “highly unlikely” to make vaccines less effective or to be more deadly, Hancock said, but the newcomer appears to be “growing faster than the existing variants”.
The rapidly spreading strain is understood to have originated in Kent and “has been suggested as one reason why cases continued to rise in the county during the lockdown”, writes The Times‘ science editor Tom Whipple.
“Viruses mutate with predictable regularity, and it’s rarely a concern,” Whipple continues. “Pure dumb chance can lead to one strain predominating and nothing functional will have changed to cause it. So why the worry?”
- SEE MORE Spanish coronavirus mutation blamed for Europe’s second wave
- SEE MORE Coronavirus: Tier 3 fears for London as capital tops England’s infection rate table
- SEE MORE What is the science behind the Christmas Covid break – and will the let-up cost lives?
According to Professor Thomas Connor, a bioscience expert at Cardiff University, research suggests the new strain may bind to human cells more easily than previous strains, leading to an “obvious increase in case numbers”. The mutation also appears to have changed the shape of the virus, which “could change how the immune system sees it”, Connor told the paper.
Sky News‘ science correspondent Thomas Moore says that while the mutation is “not wholly unusual”, it is something that scientists “will be keeping a very close watch on”.
Or as Connor puts it, the changes seen in the new mutation were “always going to make us twitchy. Even if it is just random chance, we want to be looking at it.”