What happened
The government has postponed a planned increase in fuel duty until the end of the year to help with the cost of living. “We’re backing drivers by extending the freeze on fuel duty,” Keir Starmer told the House of Commons on Wednesday. Labour had planned to raise the tax, which has been frozen for 15 years, by 5p a litre in September.

Who said what
Chancellor Rachel Reeves “had resisted calls to abandon the 5p increase for months, with Reform UK and the Conservatives putting pressure on the government to ease costs for motorists”, said The Telegraph. “Countries including France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Australia have already cut taxes on petrol and diesel.”

Questions still remain over what will happen next year, the RAC’s head of policy Simon Williams told the BBC. “Will drivers be hit with the full 5p in one go in the spring, will a new phasing be agreed, or will the government even abandon an increase altogether?” he said.

What next?
Starmer also announced a 12-month holiday on vehicle excise duty for HGVs, with the measure due to shave off £600 for a typical heavy lorry.

What happened
Accommodation bookings for this year’s Fifa World Cup are well below expectations in almost every host city, according to a report produced by the American Hotel & Lodging Association.

Who said what
For hotels, “this World Cup could fall flat”, said the BBC. Hoteliers blame the high price of match tickets, transport and taxes, as well as the political backdrop, and say Fifa block-booked “far too many rooms for its own use” before cancelling them. Fifa said it followed agreements made with hotels.

Flights “are not selling particularly well either”, said The Telegraph. Advance bookings for July are down about 14% year-on-year, according to aviation analyst Cirium, “not exactly the sort of indicator that one of the world’s biggest sporting events is about to take place”.

What next?
There might be some relief for hotels when it comes to the knock-out rounds, as fans will have to make bookings at short notice. But the World Cup “seems unlikely to bring in the revenue that was being predicted”, said the BBC.

Bacteria may be able to help mass-produce a natural UV-protectant ingredient called gadusol that is found in many fish and marine organisms. The chemical could be used to make sunscreen safer and greener in the future. However, much more testing is required to determine its efficacy and safety compared to other currently available sunscreens.

Finding natural sunscreens has become a growing interest as some people have become opposed to their conventional ingredients. Gadusol could potentially be produced using E. coli, according to a study published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology. The compound helps protect against ultraviolet damage, but it is “scarce in nature, and extracting it is inefficient and can carry environmental costs”, said Ping Zhang, a biochemist at Jiangnan University in China and lead author of the study. “We want to find a scalable and greener way to produce gadusol.”

Gadusol is “transparent, unlike melanin, and yet is perfectly tuned to block out harmful UV rays from the sun, which makes it ideal for organisms hiding from prey”, said New Scientist. Instead of harvesting the compound directly from fish, researchers opted to turn the bacteria E. coli into “mini chemical factories”, said Popular Science. They “rebuilt a zebrafish’s pathway for making gadusol inside of an E. coli bacterium”, and then “tweaked the E. coli’s genetics and growing conditions”.

The lab-made gadusol “showed promise in preliminary UV-protection tests”. The results suggest that “we may be able to meet future demand for natural sunscreen ingredients through microbial production”, said Zhang. However, the study didn’t compare gadusol’s effectiveness to currently available sunscreens. The process also needs to be assessed for long-term safety and whether it can be scaled for manufacturing.