The Suffolk Gazette editor has had his arm twisted to take part in a 150-mile charity cycle ride. With hardly any training and a bulging waistline, this is sheer madness.
But you can help make his inevitable misery worth it by making a donation to the JustGiving page – it’s all for a good cause, raising money for the Ipswich Town FC Community Trust and the Futurestars charity, which helps kids in need in Ghana.
Please visit this link to find out more and help out.
Thanks!
Get Laid Beds has teamed up with Katherine Hall, a sleep expert with over 13 years of clinical experience to bust some of the most common myths around sleep, in order to further their mission of helping everyone get a better night’s sleep.
Katherine says: “If you’ve ever laid in bed staring at the ceiling for minutes or even hours trying to fall asleep, you know how frustrating it can be. You close your eyes tightly and will yourself to fall asleep, but without fail, you’re left tossing, turning, and wide awake. The idea that you can force yourself to go to sleep is a common myth that could be hindering your sleep.
“When you lie awake in bed for more than 15 to 20 minutes, your brain starts to associate your bed and bedroom with being awake and alert instead of tired and sleeping. Your bed should be reserved for sleep and sex only. If you’re awake for longer than 20 minutes, get up and perform a relaxing activity with minimal light exposure. Once you feel tired enough to fall asleep, return to your bed. Continue doing this until you’re asleep within the first 20 minutes.”
Katherine says: “We’re all guilty of watching television, reading on a Kindle or scrolling through our phones before bed as a way to relax and unwind from the day. While it may feel good to forget about your worries and indulge in some mindless entertainment, doing so on a digital device too close to bedtime could be hindering your sleep.
“These screens emit a blue light that interferes with your sleep patterns and ability to fall asleep. The blue light from electronic devices prevents your brain from releasing the sleep hormone melatonin by tricking your brain into thinking it should be awake and alert. Ditch all digital devices at least 60 minutes before bed and replace these relaxing activities with more productive ones like reading from a book, meditating, or taking a warm bath.”
Katherine says: “Staying out late with friends, working late, or simply struggling to fall asleep, can cause you to stay up into the wee hours of the morning. In an effort to make up for lost sleep, you might sleep much later than normal the next day. This is especially common on weekends or while on vacation. While it may seem like catching up on much-needed sleep will leave you feeling rested and rejuvenated, you’re actually sabotaging your natural sleep patterns and circadian rhythm.
“Your circadian rhythm is your body’s internal clock. It regulates when you feel tired and when you feel awake and alert. When you go to bed at different times every night or wake up at different times in the morning, you’re confusing your body’s natural sleep-wake cycle. You need to set a consistent sleep schedule that involves going to bed around the same time at night and waking up at the same time each morning – even on the weekends! The belief that sleeping late will help you catch up on lost sleep is a myth. While you may feel better momentarily, in the long run, you’re sabotaging your sleep quality.”
If you’ve recently stopped doing any of the above and you’ve found that your night-time snooze has improved, then Tweet us and let us know at @SuffolkGazettte.
By Sandy Driver, Golf Correspondent
Famous for their colourful and achingly cool attire, golf players have now been officially recognised as the sporting world’s best-dressed.
With intricately-patterned trousers, shorts and tops, none of which match, together with a random baseball cap or Peaky Blinders-style hat, golf players cut a dash on fairways all over the world.
As The Open Championship gets into full swing at Royal St George’s in Sandwich, Kent, fashion-conscious youngsters can be seen dressing like their heroes on the streets of Britain.
Research by the University of Suffolk reveals golf players were the most respected for their dress sense, narrowly beating darts professionals.
Fashion expert Lorraine Fisher, 34, said: “It’s extraordinary how they do it, but somehow picking up a golf club and walking onto a course gives golf players a tremendous insight into what looks good on them.
“You only have to look at the fine specimens in the golf club bar to see a wonderful display of colour and style. They are no golf mugs.”
To further improve their winning look, golf players add shoes that look like they belong to a bowling alley – a clever accessory that had boffins at the University of Suffolk drooling.
Support the Suffolk Gazette’s razor-sharp journalism by buying a golf mug from our partner, Dirty Old Goat. See all the mug collections on the website, or buy a golfing item below…
As with everything in the newly-minted digital era, Fintech is rapidly evolving. Here’s what you should know to stay on top of current trends.
Fintech, a portmanteau for Financial Technology, is a surprisingly old genre. While you’d be tempted to see it as a result of the IT boom, it actually traces its roots to 1886. As soon as we got the ability to transmit financial data fast via telegraphs, the seeds for the fintech market were sown.
When the first credit cards joined the pack in 1950, this accelerated, followed by the shift to digital from analog in the 1950s. Obviously, as bank mainframes, and then personal computers, developed, so did the financial markets.
The market truly changed after the 2008 financial crisis. Since then we’ve seen the expansion and growth of new markets, the evolution of cryptocurrencies, and the ease of access to the internet through the booming smartphone market. Surprisingly, many modern fintech innovations are driven by non-Western markets such as India and China, where lack of access to traditional physical banking means seeking out smarter solutions is a necessity, not a convenience.
So, what does modern Fintech look like on the ground? Even withdrawing cash from an ATM strictly counts as fintech in operation. More cutting-edge examples include transferring money through mobile options, making online payments using digital wallets, and other ways that make banking smarter, not harder.
We saw an accelerated push in the fintech space during the COVID-19 pandemic, where contactless payment methods, and easier ways of accessing cash than queueing in banks, became a critical focus. In fact, it was one of the few business sectors to see meaningful growth in 2020. Research by the deVere group suggests that the use of Fintech apps in the EU boomed by 72% in the pandemic period. Now that users have become acclimatized to these easier methods of dealing with money, there’s no sign of going back, either, despite the reopening of many places.
So, what upcoming changes can we predict for the fintech market? While nothing is set in stone in finance, let’s take a look at some likely growth sectors.
Many consumers are turning away from brick-and-mortar banks entirely. Digital banks have been performing strongly in many economically underdeveloped markets for several years. Now the whole world is taking note. From contactless MasterCard solutions to international remittance, digital-only banks have overcome trust issues and become a meaningful part of the fintech sphere quickly.
Most users like the lack of tedious paperwork, the removal of the need to wait in queues, and the convenience of accessing banking infrastructure at times that suit them.
Moving away from bank-only solutions, however, we also see the widening of Fintech resources into other markets. These new options in Fintech are notable in the Foreign Exchange industry, but we’re also seeing it with mass-market access to stock investing and crypto-investment through apps.
While cryptocurrencies are still a hard sell for many people, we would be remiss to not add the wider implications of blockchain technology to the developing fintech world. Offering a different way to secure and manage digital transactions, many expect the blockchain concept, possibly reworked, to continue to impact the fintech arena over the coming decades. While decentralized finance has its own risks, it’s an idea that’s become popular with many people. Provided regulation can keep up, it may be a key part of the fintech future, especially for cross-border payments. Peer-to-peer financial platforms are another growth area.
Many fintech operations are also looking to AI-based technology to shape the future. These are expected to cut banking operational expenses, as well as reduce the risk from cybercrime in the digital market. Its biggest value lies in allowing effective customer service, while still accurately recording every aspect of a digital transaction. We can add biometric security solutions to this avenue of the fintech world. While biometrics is seen with some skepticism in a world also becoming more aware of misuse of gathered data, it’s definitely an interesting field, and one with growth potential.
Lastly, we’re seeing an interesting dichotomy brewing. Open banking forces financial institutions to use secured, standardized data and share information between authorized organizations. This makes financial monitoring easier, as well as making it simpler for clients to access the support they need across a wealth of organizations. However, Regulatory Technology, or Reg-Tech, covers the idea of better managing regulatory processes throughout the financial industry through the introduction of software-based technologies. This tightens the compliance and reporting nets and is also hoped to better tackle issues like money laundering, hacking, and data breaches.
The fintech world is an ever-evolving space, and one with great potential for the wider digital sphere, too. Where to from here? Many of these developing technologies are likely to set the future of fintech, so keep your eye on them.
Readers of the Daily Mail newspaper believe refugees caught crossing the channel will enjoy being sent to the Rwanda Valley in South Wales.
They can’t see why so many people think deporting them to Wales is a bad thing.
It’s not like we’re dispatching them to Africa, after all.
Tory supporter Lorraine Fisher, 34, said: “What’s all the fuss about? The Rwanda Valley is lovely and peaceful, just what these poor people need while their asylum cases are determined.
“The Welsh are very welcoming people.
“It’s typical of the liberal elite to try to find blame in everything this Government does.”
Home Secretary Priti Patel and Boris Johnson will today unveil their controversial plan to deport refugees to holding camps in Rwanda. They believe it will deter human traffickers from sending them across the Channel.
So we’ve all made it to the year 2022! For those of us who grew up in the late 20th century, we were pretty sure that by the year 2022, we’d all be driving flying cars and taking regular holidays to the moon.
While space travel isn’t quite within the reach of the vast majority of the earth’s inhabitants, we have, nevertheless, seen some pretty futuristic technological developments over the past few decades, particularly in the realm of gaming. Now more immersive than ever before, video games have come on in leaps and bounds, and it’s all thanks to technology.
In this article, we’ll be taking a look at five of the biggest trends in gaming that we simply cannot live without.
As content as we are to play games with all the technological bells and whistles, nothing compares to playing a game with an engaging storyline. Luckily, the past decade or so has seen a wealth of games featuring epic storylines hitting our small screens.
Today’s video games evoke a wide range of emotional experiences in gamers through a clever mix of impactful storylines and immersive gameplay.
2013’s The Last Of Us is one such game, which also turns the zombie video game trope on its head. Set 20 years after a zombie apocalypse has taken place, the game follows the perilous journey of Joel and Ellie as they head out to save the human race.
Who needs to travel to a brick-and-mortar casino to play slots games when you can open up your laptop and access a wide range of all-star titles available in many different versions?
Poker- and casino-themed video games date back to gaming’s early days, but the segment really came into its own with the advancement of gaming tech.
Today’s operators provide immersive real-money gaming experiences in everything from online slots to poker, roulette and blackjack. iGaming is such a staple trend of the gaming industry that it is well on the way to being a market worth over $120 billion by 2027
With the explosion of social media in the 21st century, it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that social gaming has become a top trend in recent years.
While some video games will always feature elements of competition and challenging gameplay, social gaming is geared more towards bringing players from across a broad spectrum of demographics to simply enjoy hanging out in the virtual realm.
The success of Fortnite has proven that even a battle royale game can be a fun, social affair. Consequently, the game is now enjoyed by millions of people all over the world, many of whom aren’t playing the game the way it’s intended to be played but are instead hanging out in the game environment with their favourite people.
Content on demand is one of the biggest trends in the entertainment industry. Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO Max are just a handful of the platforms that make watching on-demand a possibility, so gaming on demand is just a natural progression of this.
While it’s still very much an emerging sector, cloud gaming is nevertheless having a noticeable impact on the way we play and consume video games.
In many ways, gaming on the cloud democratises the industry. Instead of having to spend top dollar on a gaming PC or purchase expensive titles month after month, cloud gaming is subscription-based, meaning that for a small fee, players can access vast gaming libraries that they can play on any connected device.
Now firmly established as a core gaming trend, even major companies like Microsoft and Sony are taking cloud-gaming innovations much more seriously than in previous years.
More than just a trend, mobile gaming is quickly shaping up to be the future of the gaming industry. The market has expanded massively over the years – in 2021 it accounted for 52% of the entire gaming industry with revenues of $93.2 billion (according to Newzoo) and it’s only going to continue to grow with the rollout of 5G.
As for the notion that mobile gaming is inferior to console or PC gaming, you only have to look at the mammoth success of the premium-quality games that have been released on mobile to date for evidence to the contrary.
Take PUBG Mobile – year after year it’s smashing its own records in terms of downloads and revenues. In 2020 alone, it was downloaded a total of 730 million times.
Mobile gaming is here to stay, and it’s the number one gaming trend that we just can’t live without.
Complying with money laundering detection rules can be difficult. Every regulated entity will need to deal with various risk factors. It will be in line with the business model, the product range, and the type of customer that they are dealing with.
Although it will differ from business to business, there are some fundamental anti-money laundering (AML) policies. They protect your organization from the most common money laundering schemes. Let’s take a look.
Structuring transactions is a money laundering process to bypass reporting regulations. It breaks down large transactions into smaller, mini transactions.
Your system should detect several transactions below the reporting threshold, and whether these transactions have taken place within a certain fixed period.
Let’s say the reporting threshold is $15,000. Your system can search for transactions between $10,000 and $15,000 in 60 days to identify any red flags.
If personally identifiable information is changed before making a major debit, your system should detect it. Personally identifiable information is any data that can identify a particular person.
An activity like this can indicate an account takeover. It could indicate that money launderers have gained access to a dormant account and are preparing it.
Also, layering activities could be taking place, and they are trying to hide the route of cash inflow.
Compliance readiness solutions like au10tix.com come in handy during customer onboarding and help you detect fraudulent activities. Know your customer and anti-money laundering screening happens instantly and is automated.
With this analysis, you could determine whether the account takeover has happened. It will let you detect transactions that seem suspicious based on the customer’s previous activities.
If the spending pattern does not match the customer’s income level, it should be cause for suspicion. Let’s say a customer is currently unemployed, and spending money on 5-star hotel bookings and luxury apparel. It should be a red flag.
If a merchant is selling only to a small number of customers, this could signify collusion. It is especially true on platforms where you would typically see a large number of buyers engaging with a seller. In this type of money laundering, illegal money is disguised as legitimate payment for goods and services.
You need to be careful when you implement this rule. Before implementation, allow new merchants to increase their business activities. Alternatively, make the rule applicable to merchants who have been on the platform for a certain period.
If the total value of credits in a short period is equal to the debits in that same period, it should raise some red flags. It is highly applicable to business accounts that are a marketplace platform. These types of marketplaces collect payments from their merchants, and thus, it does not make sense if their credits and debits are the same.
Transactions in and out of countries that are classified as high risk should be flagged. These are countries with a high level of banking secrecy or ones that have significant financial crime.
These countries could also be recognized as tax-havens. Geopolitical situations are always changing, and for this list to be effective, it needs to be updated as well. New countries are added to the surveillance list while others are removed.
If you see accounts where money is deposited and immediately withdrawn, you need to take notice. For example, if there is an account where large deposits take place every two days, and the money is withdrawn the next day, it could be a cause for concern. These accounts maintain a near-zero balance but have a very high turnover.
Cash is the most favored medium for criminal and terrorist activities. High-value transactions should be critically monitored in your organization. The expected behavior of the account holder needs to be considered.
A student will not deposit or withdraw $40,000 every month. A businessman who has an e-commerce business will not need to make a lot of cash deposits. Most of the payments he will be receiving will be in the form of electronic payments.
These are some of the basic high-level AML red flags that should be implemented in your organization. Apart from deploying these measures, employee education is needed. It is also important for you to stay up to date with new money laundering techniques such as crypto-fiat conversions.
By Peter Grimes, Aldeburgh Correspondent
Traffic wardens will use a helicopter to remove cars parked illegally in Aldeburgh this Easter weekend, we can reveal.
East Suffolk Council has taken delivery of a Chinook, which hauls offending vehicles into the air and leaves them in a special compound outside the genteel resort.
Parking in Aldeburgh is especially difficult during holiday periods, with many visitors resorting to leaving vehicles where they shouldn’t.
Now, instead of a traditional ticket on the windscreen, wardens call in for air support.
Head of council parking enforcement Lorraine Fisher, 34, explained: “The Chinook is kept nearby and one of our wardens has retrained as a pilot. It can be on the scene within five minutes.
“It hovers over the offending vehicle and drops down a rope for the traffic warden below to attach to the vehicle.
“Then it simply lifts the car or van into the air and heads off to our compound near the golf club.
“The response has been mixed. While the system undoubtedly clears problem parking areas and acts as a deterrent, some owners are not keen on their vehicles going on a flight.
“There was one early incident when we accidentally dropped an Audi estate from 140 foot because the harness was not secured correctly.
“But the warden has undergone more training and we have not seen any more incidents like that.”
Owners whose cars are taken away by the Chinook are charged £700 as a release fee, which helps pay for the cost of the helicopter hire from the Army Air Corps at Suffolk’s Wattisham airfield.
Driver Steve Walshe, 43, from Woodbridge was one of those caught out yesterday.
“I was sitting on the beach enjoying the sun when I saw this helicopter coming over the treeline from the Thorpeness area.
“It was like something from a Vietnam war movie.
“Imagine my surprise when it came towards us and then left after a few minutes with my Land Rover dangling underneath.
“I had to pay £700 to get it back. I was fuming.”
The Chinook is a heavy lifting specialist that has been in service since 1962. Other local authorities are now looking to follow the lead from the East Suffolk Council pilot scheme.
