Supported by a group of British business leaders, Eurostar reiterated its request to the British government for a bail-out.Operating trains through the tunnel linking Britain and France, Eurostar’s passenger numbers have plummeted by 95% since March.The British government sold its stake in 2015. Eurostar is majority owned by sncf, the French state-owned railway company.London’s transport authority, Tfl, abandoned plans to make payments on the network completely cashless,after an experiment prompted by COVID concerns last summer was criticised by the official watchdog.COVID is causing problems in other ways.Tfl’s finances are floundering as passengers avoid travel, and the mayor is reluctant to increase fares.Despite securing a 1.8bn pound ($2.5bn) bail-out last year,Tfl’s financial plans recently submitted to the government forecast more than 3bn pounds in shortfalls in each of the next two years.United Airlines said it would need to make further cost-cutting measures,after the rate at which it was burning cash to keep flying during the pandemic rose sharply. Its annual loss last year was $7.1bn.General Motors announced a partnership with Microsoft in which vehicles being developed by Cruise,its autonomous-car startup, will be plugged in to Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing platform.Netflix added another 8.5m subscribers in the final months of last year, taking the total to almost 204m.
