Category: General Interest

The Merkur supermarket chain will become part of the Billa family! The new name of the stores and what the customers expect will be known in April. According to the Austrian free newspaper “Heute” the Austrian supermarket chain, which belongs to the German Rewe Group and has been operated by Billa AG since August 2020, will become part of the Billa family. From April, the stores will be renamed “Billa Plus”. “Two strong sales formats that have been successful for decades are now moving even closer together, can support each…

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Car drivers will pay a fine of 120 euros for missing the 2021 vignette. Neither excuses nor ignorance will protect you from a fine as of February 1 if you have not yet obtained a new vignette by that time. The annual freeway vignette for 2020 will lose its validity at the end of January. As of February 1, only the new adhesive version in the color “apple green” or the digital vignette 2021 is permitted. Excuses or ignorance do not protect against a “substitute toll” – i.e. a fine…

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German vaccine manufacturer Biontech wants to supply the EU with as much of its product as possible than was actually planned. “Of course, we are working to also make up for the reduction in deliveries of ampoules and even deliver more than 100 percent of the doses in the first quarter,” CFO Sierk Poetting told the Stuttgarter Zeitung and Stuttgarter Nachrichten newspapers (Thursday editions). Biontech and its U.S. partner Pfizer are currently supplying less vaccine to the EU than planned because of rebuilding work at a Belgian plant. However, the…

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Over 80-year-olds can now be vaccinated by their family doctor, and over-65s will also be able to do so from February 1. The Ministry of Health on Wednesday published the long-awaited regulation for Corona vaccinations by general practitioners. This means that people over 80 may be vaccinated as of the regulation’s entry into force, and over-65s as of February 1. The fee is also regulated: the responsible health insurance provider must transfer 25 euros to the doctor for the first partial vaccination and 20 euros for the second. The vaccination…

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An adapted version of the Austrian Immunization Dashboard will be rolled out Wednesday evening. The Ministry of Health will then also present the number of partially and fully immunized individuals according to the e-vaccination passport, as announced during an online presentation to media representatives this morning. So far, the ministry’s overview of figures at info.gesundheitsministerium.gv.at shows the doses requested by vaccination centers and the vials of serum delivered to them; a theoretical number of vaccinated persons was last calculated from the second figure. This estimate of just under 190,000 persons…

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The Austrian Car and Motor Touring Club (ÖAMTC) reports that for some time now there has been an increase of online providers offering digital freeway vignettes for Austria and other European countries at considerably higher prices. Vignette 2021 apple green and more expensiveAnyone who needs a vignette should pay close attention to where they purchase it. Because there are expensive online portals that offer them, where the customer pays considerably more: up to 67 percent more can make up the price difference here. “The sites basically do not sell the…

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The number of confirmed Corona infections worldwide has risen to more than 100 million. This is according to a data analysis by Reuters news agency on Wednesday. Covid-19 has now been detected in nearly 1.3 percent of the world’s population. Some 668,250 cases have been reported daily since the beginning of the year. The worst-affected countries – the U.S., India, Brazil, Russia and the U.K. – together account for more than half of all cases, but represent only 28 percent of the world’s population. The hardest-hit region is Europe, which…

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The US company Apple is the most valuable brand in the world. This is the result of a study published on Tuesday by the brokerage firm Brand Finance. According to the study, Amazon and Google, also based in the U.S., follow in second and third place. “A brand is first of all an intangible asset, we try to give it a value,” the director general of Brand Finance, Bertrand Chovet, told the AFP news agency in this regard. The basis for this, he said, is on the one hand the…

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Early next week, the extension of the hard lockdown could be announced. After a marathon discussion by the federal government on the Corona situation on Monday, a decision on when the lockdown should really end was postponed. Only in the coming week they want to announce a decision. According to the Austrian free newspaper “Heute”, the decision will be made on Monday – at the same time as the first day of the semester break in Vienna and Lower Austria. It will then be clear whether the lockdown will remain…

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