Even when you’re short on time, delicious and warming oven recipes with seasonal vegetables like pumpkin or kale are a must in autumn. But it’s even better when they require minimal effort and come together quickly.

When I stumbled upon this recipe on Freundin, I knew I had to share it.

It ticks all the boxes: autumnal pumpkin—check, aromatic kale—check, creamy, tangy goat cheese—check, and a simple egg mixture that’s quick to whip up and satisfying. This seasonal frittata is perfect after a long day at work or a beautiful autumn walk that leaves you hungry.

I can’t wait to make this recipe myself — how about you?

The businesses of the biggest tech companies are like fortresses, flanked by high walls and encircled by moats. Their platforms are cornerstones of digital life that support billions of users. At the same time, their business ecosystems, the networks of partners and tech allies that circle in their orbit, make them hard to unseat. Since the pandemic, the profits and growth of Big Tech have lifted the entire US stock market.

All of this makes the US Department of Justice’s attempt to crack open Google’s core search business a seminal moment for the tech industry. This week, the US trustbusters followed through on a landmark antitrust court victory against Google in August with a wide-ranging proposal to shake up its business.

So far, this has only taken the form of a broad outline of the sort of sanctions the US government is considering asking a court to impose, as a way to deal with Google’s anti-competitive behaviour. It will present a firm proposal to the court on November 20.

But as the opening shot in the battle over a search business that produced $175bn in revenue last year, it points to a potentially historic upheaval in the tech world with a wide range of winners and losers.

The end result, for instance, could be to redirect the billions of dollars that Google pays other tech companies for their role in putting its search service in front of hundreds of millions of users. It could bring down prices for millions of advertisers, who a US judge has said are overpaying because of Google’s practices. And it could end the free availability of important pieces of Google technology, like its Android mobile operating systems and Chrome browser, which many software developers and gadget makers have come to rely on.

Most significantly, the changes could open the door to real competition in internet search for the first time since Google rose to prominence. And they could smooth the way in particular for a new generation of start-ups that hope to use generative artificial intelligence to loosen Google’s dominance, ranging from search engines such as Perplexity and You.com to pure-play AI companies like OpenAI.

The share price of Alphabet, Google’s parent, fell only 3 per cent on the news this week. For most investors, the effects of the antitrust case are still too distant and uncertain to factor into current valuations. But as the potential repercussions from the court loss loom larger, some investors are starting to pay more attention.

“It’s like the Roman empire: the government barbarians are at the gates,” says David Wagner, head of equities at Aptus Capital Advisors. He sold a position in Alphabet in August out of concern about the antitrust case, even if it is not clear yet exactly how things will end. “It’s hard to see [Google] escaping all of this unscathed.”

For all the potential impact, the DoJ still has a mountain to climb. Besides persuading a court to back the remedy proposal it eventually comes up with, it has to carry its case on appeal and, potentially, before the Supreme Court. And even then, most legal observers and Google rivals say there are no easy or straightforward ways to ensure greater competition.

“Monopolisation cases are difficult to win, but even harder to remedy,” says David Balto, an antitrust lawyer and former Federal Trade Commission official. “It’s very, very hard to change the nature of a market.” That is particularly the case, he adds, in businesses with network effects, where “there are natural reasons why you end up with dominant firms” — something common to many tech markets. 

To prevail, the DoJ will have to persuade the courts not only to block the specific Google practices that were judged illegal, but to adopt a package of sweeping changes that go well beyond the behaviour that was at the centre of the case.

This week’s filing from the DoJ follows a ruling in August by a federal judge, Amit Mehta, who sided with an argument by the US government and several US states. For more than a decade, he concluded, Google had used a series of exclusivity deals with other companies to ensure its search engine was given prime position in front of consumers on handsets and other devices, illegally squeezing out competitors.

The search giant has said it will appeal against the ruling. But it also says that if Mehta’s decision is upheld, there would be a simple — and limited — solution to right the alleged wrong: ban the sort of exclusive contracts that were at the heart of the case.

That in itself could have big financial consequences. It could end the $20bn a year that Google pays Apple for preferential access to iPhone users, part of the $26bn in all that it pays to guarantee distribution for its search engine. Ironically, Google itself could be a winner if these payments are blocked, since it claims that most users of devices like the iPhone would still opt to use its search engine.

If the court broke up Google, it wouldn’t change these monopolistic conditions

Yet while the DoJ has taken aim at these exclusive deals, it says it also plans to push for a much wider range of actions. Google has attacked this broader plan as “radical” and part of a “sweeping agenda” that goes far beyond the terms of the antitrust case. But its rivals say that if the courts truly want to bring about more competition, they have no choice but to back the kind of actions the DoJ is pitching.

In ruling against Google, the judge has already pointed to the self-reinforcing advantages it has gained as a result of its illegal behaviour. These include the massive data superiority that comes from being the clear market leader, enabling it to refine its search results more accurately than rivals. It has also been able to generate higher prices from its search advertising, hampering rivals that cannot monetise their search traffic at the same rate. To truly open up search, according to the DoJ, the courts need to pick away at these and other advantages that have entrenched the tech giant.

A potential break-up of the company has been the most eye-catching — and controversial — aspect of the DoJ’s suggested remedies. The authorities pointed to the Android mobile operating system, Chrome web browser and Play mobile app store, suggesting a break-up would be limited to stripping Google of important channels that currently guarantee wide distribution for its search engine.

On its own, however, a break-up along these lines might have little direct effect on competition. Android and Chrome themselves have strong network effects that make them more attractive, the more people use them. Also, as standalone companies, they would have strong incentives to continue contracting with Google to carry its search engine.

“If the court broke up Google, it wouldn’t change these monopolistic conditions,” says Michael Cusumano, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A break-up would also be an overly harsh punishment for a company that has achieved much of its success through its search innovations, he adds.

If the DoJ were to press ahead with the idea and prevail, forcing Google to spin off Android and Chrome could cause upheaval in the wider tech world. Many hardware makers, from smartphones to televisions, have been able to use Android and Chrome free of charge, something that might change under a new owner. According to Google, the dislocation this would cause in the tech world should make any court reject the idea out of hand.

The company’s critics, however, say that such side effects are sometimes a necessary part of fixing a market distortion. According to Megan Gray, who was a FTC lawyer and is former general counsel at search engine DuckDuckGo, the sheer scale of Google’s wrongdoing and the long period of its anti-competitive behaviour make the likely “impact zone” of remedial action across the tech industry particularly large. But any negative effects should be balanced over time, she adds, by consumer benefits stemming from “better search, more start-up companies, more employment opportunities, more innovation”.

A second DoJ suggestion — that Google should be forced to give its rivals access to the core data on which its search business runs — has attracted less public attention, but could have a profound impact.

The data would include all the search queries entered into Google and the results the company returns, as well as the various factors it takes into account — known as ranking signals — when deciding how to respond to a query. Essentially, this would prise open its search engine “black box”, enabling others to reproduce its results or make their own adjustments to refine the service. 

I almost feel bad for [Google] if they have to reveal all the things they do on the AI training side

According to Google, handing over search queries would jeopardise the privacy of its users, making the idea a non-starter. Rivals such as DuckDuckGo, however, point out that no directly personal user data would be involved, and claim that there are ways to weed out search queries that might accidentally serve to identify a user.

Google also complains that the data-sharing proposal would expose some of its most important trade secrets and other intellectual property, undermining one of its most important competitive advantages. That gets short shrift from rivals, who say that courts have not held back from forcing infringing companies to open up their IP in the past. After losing a landmark antitrust case nearly 25 years ago, for instance, Microsoft was forced to disclose proprietary technical information to rivals so that they could interconnect more easily with its software.

Besides sharing data, the DoJ has also suggested that Google should give rivals access to its advertising network, potentially enabling them to generate as much money on their own search traffic as Google itself does.

“The problem at the moment is, even if you build a better search engine, you can’t monetise it without advertising on top,” says Richard Socher, chief executive of search service You.com. “The ad part [of the DoJ’s remedies] will give more people conviction to try and break it [Google’s monopoly].”

Potentially, one of the biggest impacts of the DoJ’s proposals could be felt in generative AI. The case could become the first regulatory skirmish over the outlines of the emerging AI market and helping upstarts make bigger inroads into Google’s markets.

“The DoJ has a decent chance of chipping away at Google’s search by aligning itself with genAI start-ups,” says Paul Gallant, an analyst with Cowen in Washington.

The Big Question

This week, the FT asks readers whether it is time to bring the search giant’s monopoly to an end. Share your view in our poll

One proposal, for instance, would prevent Google gaining the same kind of unfair distribution advantage for its AI services that it has achieved for search. Concern about a restriction like this has probably already caused Google to hold back from reaching a distribution deal to put its Gemini AI service on Apple’s iPhones, says Gallant.

The DoJ also says the company should be forced to give competitors information about the design of its AI-powered search features and other services.

“I almost feel bad for [Google] if they have to reveal all the things they do on the AI training side,” says Socher at You.com. Such a move would “unlock” considerable value for many other companies.

These proposals amount to “a pretty comprehensive game plan to help” the new generative AI start-ups, says Gallant. But even some Google rivals question whether the courts would go so far. “Those are some big swings [from the DoJ],” says Socher. “I will be surprised if all of those land.”

THIS is the exact date Aldi’s much-anticipated winter gadget returns to stores after selling out – and only costs 6p to run.

The German discounter’s heated airer is set to land in middle aisles up and down the country on Sunday, October 20.

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In recent years the device, that lets you dry your clothing without turning on the central heating or using a tumble dryer, has flown off the shelves.

Brits have also praised the device for helping them warm up their home without breaking the bank.

It comes as many homes across the UK are bracing themselves for another winter of misery, with energy bills set to rise by £149 annually.

Heated airers can save money on your energy bill as it offers a cheaper alternative to drying your clothes on the radiator.

This method can become costly as it requires you to turn on the central heating.

Heated clothes airers are like traditional ones, but you plug them in, with the bars of the dryer heating up.

You can buy covers for some as well, which speeds up the time it takes to dry your clothes.

Aldi‘s heated airer costs could offer a solution for many families as it costs just 6p to run and will set you back £34.99 when it lands in stores.

The large 230W drying device can hold 10kg of washing, including towels and bedding.

You have to plug it in to get the heating effect from the product.

It costs less than 50p for eight hours, this is compared to a 2500W tumble dryer costs which costs about 85p to use for just one hour.

Aldi calculates that under the current price cap where electricity costs on average 22p per kwh, it costs around 6p to run, though the exact cost can vary depending on where you are and how you pay your bill.

If you want to get your hands on one you will have to act quickly, as this product is an Aldi Specialbuy and once it is gone it is gone.

Aldi does not have an online store so you will have to shop in person if you want to get your hands on one.

You can find your nearest Alid by looking at the company’s store locator online.

How does it compare?

Other retailers such as Dunelm and John Lewis sell similar products but they can cost upwards of £100.

If you do not manage to get your hands on one from Aldi do not worry, as The Sun found a very similar product from Amazon for the same price.

The Highlands Electric Heated Clothes Dryer Folding Energy-Efficient Indoor Airer Wet Laundry Drying Horse Rack costs £34.99 and has a 4.3 star rating out of five.

However, you will have to factor in delivery costs as you can only shop for Amazon products online.

How much does it cost to run a heated air dryer?

Aldi claims that this heated airer costs up to 6p to run for an hour.

So if you use it three times a week and keep it on for four hours, that costs just £37.44 over the year.

However, the price of using this device can vary depending on the individual’s usage and the model you have.

You’ll need to consider the specifics of the item, such as the wattage, how much you use it and then the cost of energy at the time.

But the higher the wattage, the more expensive it will be to run.

The cost is also based on the current Ofgem price cap, which currently sits at £1,568.

But it’s set to rise to £1,717 a year, for the average dual fuel bill and based on typical usage, from October 1.

That means there may be a very small increase to the cost. The price will also be different if you’re not one of the 28million on a tariff that’s subject to the price cap.

The equation you need to work out how much a device is costing you to run is: Cost = power (kilowatt) × time (hour) × cost of 1 kWh (pence).

How to save money at Aldi

Unlike other major grocers, Aldi does not have a rewards or point card system but that does not mean you cannot save on your shop. 

Every week the store releases a list of special buys, which are unique bargain products you find online at Aldi and in-store. 

The store releases a fresh range of deals every Thursday and Sunday, so be sure to check regularly to see what’s new. 

Meanwhile, the store also regularly sells fruit and vegetables at highly discounted prices, as part of its ‘super six’ deal.

It also does weekly saving offers on typically pricey items such as meat and fish.

As the Israeli security cabinet authorises air strikes on Iran, Israel’s war aims are broadening and include the risk of a regional war against Iran in order to radically reshape the political landscape of the Middle East in Israel’s favour.

This ambitious, even fantastical, goal is fraught with danger for the region and the world. Israel cannot achieve it without the full and undisguised backing of the US. Despite President Joe Biden’s claim that he has fruitlessly urged a ceasefire on Benjamin Netanyahu, he has subsequently always endorsed every Israeli escalation. It is reasonable for Israel to conclude that it can attack Iran with impunity, since, if anything goes wrong, it will have the backing of the US armed forces.

Historians may one day reach a conclusion about how far the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog, taking advantage of Biden’s feebleness to lure the US into another reckless military adventure in the Middle East.

It is too easy to blame America’s feckless and ineffectual diplomacy on Biden’s cognitive decline over the past three years. But, if it is not Biden, it is unclear who are the real decision-makers in the White House and the upper reaches of the administration.

Judging the White House by its actions rather than its words, it sees a geopolitical advantage in defeating Iran – an ally of Russia and China, albeit a distant one – and its allies.

Wishful thinking probably plays a role. Israel has been far more successful in killing Hezbollah leaders and mid-level commanders than had been expected, so might not an aggressive attack on Iran and its “Axis of Resistance” produce similar victories?

It is an alluring prospect, although US military interventions – from Somalia in 1992/93 to Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 – failed in large measure because of hubris and underestimating the enemy.

Uniquely dangerous

Israel’s track record is somewhat similar when it comes to arrogantly overplaying its hand in the West Bank after defeating Egypt and Syria in 1967, and invading Lebanon in 1982. Yet decades later the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are still fighting in both places.

These historic analogies are often cited by Western commentators as ominous warnings about what can go dreadfully wrong for the US and Israel when they rely solely on force. Yet, the comparisons are a little misleading as the political landscape, both in Israeli domestic politics and the region as a whole, has been transformed in the past 20 years. It is these changes that make the present crisis far more dangerous than its predecessors.

The Israeli government formed by Netanyahu after winning the general election in November 2021 was immediately recognised as being the most fanatically right-wing and ultra-nationalist in Israel’s history.

Read Next

To give but one example, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the Jewish Power party, became the national security minister – a newly created post placing him in charge of the national police force. A religious settler from Kiryat Arba, close to the West Bank city of Hebron, he had been convicted in the past on charges of inciting racism and supporting terror. He threatened Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on live television, and had hanging in his home a photograph of Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians as they prayed in the mosque in Hebron in 1994.

Given the ideological make-up of the Israeli cabinet, it is scarcely surprising that Israel’s objectives in Gaza and the West Bank seem now to have expanded to include ending all normal life for the five million Palestinians who live there. An air strike on a school in central Gaza on Thursday killed 28 people, many of whom Unicef says were women and children lining up for malnutrition treatment.

The IDF justified the strike by claiming that the school housed a Hamas command post. Even supposing this to be true, in its bid to justify itself, the IDF is making a confession that Hamas is present everywhere in Gaza a year after the Israeli invasion.

Israel contends that the figure of 42,000 dead in Gaza is exaggerated by the Palestinian health ministry, but precisely the same pattern of air strikes conducted regardless of civilian casualties is taking place in Lebanon. A strike on Beirut, on the same day as the one in Gaza, killed 22 people including three children from a family of eight, who had fled from south Lebanon.

The new elite

What makes the present crisis doubly dangerous is that it is not just that Israel has an ethno-nationalist political leadership. A parallel development has taken place among the elite leadership of the Israeli state – civil service, police, judiciary and, increasingly, the IDF – who are drawn from the fundamentalist and messianic wing of Israeli society.

This new elite is less sophisticated than its predecessors (though these, too, were often hardline), more prone to seeing Israel’s enemies as both demonic and threatening, yet vulnerable when confronted with the unrelenting use of force.

The course of the war so far in Lebanon would tend to confirm this and there are other powerful arguments on their side. The US is giving Israel carte blanche in an unprecedented way and is unlikely to resist an aggressive Israeli strategy towards Iran.

Looming threats

Arab nation states once hostile to Israel, including Syria, Iraq, Libya and Sudan, have all gravely weakened by civil wars in the past 20 years. Arab leaders are mute or ineffective about Gaza and Lebanon. Iran is more isolated than it has been since the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988.

Yet the vulnerability of Iran and its allies may be a little deceptive. A band of Shia Muslim-dominated states stretching across the north of the Middle East – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – are not going to disappear.

Israel and the US might try to stir up religious and ethnic conflicts in countries such as Lebanon, which witnessed a murderous sectarian civil war between 1975 and 1990. Already there are reports of Shia Muslims in flight from Israeli bombing being regarded with hostility when they seek refuge in non-Shia areas.

As for Iran, it may conclude that it cannot deter Israel, which is prepared to risk a regional war, but that it might do better to broaden the conflict by attacks on the oil trade, US allies or US bases. Its aim would be to force the US to restrain Israel – the claim by Washington that it cannot do this is universally disbelieved in the Middle East.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to see how a regional war can be prevented – and even more difficult to see how it can be brought to an end.

Further thoughts

“If you choose to stay… you are going to die,” said Tampa mayor, Jane Castor ahead of Hurricane Milton.
At least 16 people have sadly died, and many have needed to be rescued. But the great Tampa Bay storm surge never happened, and Hurricane Milton was not the apocalypse predicted by US politicians and the media.

Potentially catastrophic weather brings out the worst in politicians and news outlets. It provides both with an irresistible temptation to grandstand before a mass audience. President Joe Biden spoke of the worst storm in a hundred years and denouncing Donald Trump for telling lies about it. Small town politicians will briefly command an audience from coast to coast for perhaps the only time in their lives. They likely believe what they are saying, caught up in the hysteria of the moment.

The news business loves big weather disaster stories because they provide melodrama and mass appeal. Storms provide dramatic pictures with rain-soaked correspondents telling of the terrible things racing towards them just over the horizon. And if the disaster fails to live up to their dire warnings, nobody ever lost their job for saying what might have happened – even if their tone of voice at the time suggested that fate was knocking at the door.

My cynicism about weather disasters stems from my experience of reporting them when based in the US as a correspondent. Once, when the Mississippi and Missouri rivers were in flood, I visited a small town that was supposedly in danger of being engulfed by the rising waters. When I got there, I found just a single wooden cabin tipping picturesquely into the flood, its destruction guaranteed by the number of heavily built television crews who had crowded onto its veranda, to get a better shot.

In 1992, I reported on Hurricane Andrew which had been expected to hit Miami fair-and-square and, as a result, had for a few days received national coverage. In the event, the hurricane had diverted about 20 miles south of Miami and destroyed a town called Homestead, consisting mostly of wooden houses lived in by cleaners, waiters and hotel staff working in the big luxury hotel and restaurants of Miami. I arrived there about 10 days after the disaster and got a big welcome from the townsfolk because they hoped at first that I might be an insurance adjustor or a government official bringing them help. But they had not seen many journalists either, so they were happy enough to describe what had happened to them. Another aspect of weather disaster reporting is that over-coverage is normally followed by no coverage at all.

Beneath the radar

In the run-up the US president election, it is fascinating to see how the anti-Trump media steers clear of any reference to Biden’s cognitive difficulties. They were happy to publicise this in July when pressing Biden to drop his candidacy for re-election, but after he finally did so on 21 July there are few references to the fact that the man supposedly in charge America’s slide into war in the Middle East cannot think straight.

On occasion, there is visible evidence of this when Biden breaks free from his handlers as he walks towards the presidential helicopter and talks to reporters. When his words are at all coherent, they may tend to cause fear and panic – as when he mumbled that the US was talking to Israel about attacking Iranian oil facilities.

In the 80s, President Ronald Reagan’s aides had a similar problem with their boss, who may already have been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease that was publicly admitted several years later. Knowing the risk of Reagan hearing and replying to reporters’ questions – and thereby revealing his deteriorating mental health – on his way to the presidential helicopter, they told the pilots to switch on the engines early so all words would be drowned out by the noise.

Cockburn’s picks

American politicians talk up weather calamities, while their British counterparts overstate the disaster facing the NHS. Both exaggerate to an absurd degree. Incoming Labour Party leaders are understandably eager to fix in the public mind the belief that Labour inherited a poisonous legacy. Fair enough: it is to their advantage to say that the NHS, and the ship of state in general, is in a bad way thanks to the Tories. But it is not a good idea to say the NHS is “broken” and that the ship of state has a large hole its bottom and is sinking, claims that are not only false but likely to cause anger and demoralisation.

Andrew Seaton has a lucid and convincing account of what is really going on in the NHS in his blog for the London Review of Books in which he cites a typical piece of ministerial exaggeration from the health secretary Wes Streeting, “who told the BBC that if healthcare spending kept increasing then Britain was in danger of becoming ‘an NHS with a country attached’. Given that the UK allocated only 10.9 per cent of GDP to healthcare in 2023 (a whole percentage point lower than France or Germany), there is a fair way to go before that happens.”

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British Airways has said it plans to cancel hundreds of long-haul flights from its winter schedule as it suffers aircraft shortages caused by delays in receiving spare parts.

The airline on Friday said it was delaying the launch of a new Heathrow to Kuala Lumpur route, and suspending one flight a day between London Gatwick and New York and between London Heathrow and Doha.

The UK flag carrier, part of International Airlines Group, blamed the wave of cancellations on “delays to the delivery of engines and parts” from Rolls-Royce, the aero-engine maker. The problems were particularly related to the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines fitted to its long-haul Boeing 787 aircraft, it added.

The disruption represents the latest problem for an airline that has struggled with its operational performance since the end of Covid-19 pandemic travel restrictions in 2022.

Flight delays and cancellations to and from the airline’s London hub at Heathrow have doubled since the pandemic, a Financial Times analysis of data from the UK aviation regulator has shown.

BA bosses accept that the airline must improve its reliability. But the carrier has also said it has little direct control over many of the problems that have combined to knock its operations. 

These also include air traffic control delays, which have shot up since the pandemic.

The latest supply chain problems have left about five of BA’s 40-strong fleet of 787s grounded, meaning it does not have enough aircraft to fly its published schedule.

On top of delayed deliveries from Rolls-Royce, some engines have also needed to be replaced more quickly than expected.

BA had been using standby Boeing 777 aircraft to fill the gaps, but these now need to receive routine maintenance, further adding to the operational disruption.

“We’ve taken this action because we do not believe the issue will be solved quickly, and we want to offer our customers the certainty they deserve for their travel plans,” BA said in a statement.

The airline added that it had ensured Rolls-Royce was “aware of the impact” its issues were having on the airline’s schedule and customers.

It said it was seeking “reassurance of a prompt and reliable solution”.

The engine maker said last month that it was continuing to work with BA and all of its customers to “minimise the impact” of the limited availability of spare parts, caused by supply chain constraints.

“Unfortunately, this is an issue affecting the whole aerospace industry,” the company said.

Rolls-Royce said earlier this year that it would spend £1bn over the next five years on a series of improvement upgrades across the Trent family of engines to improve fuel burn and durability.

A RARE 50p coin in your change could be worth twenty times more if it has this specific sketched phrase.

The valuable piece was released in 2020 to commemorate the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union.

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The 2020 Brexit EU Withdrawal Fifty Pence Silver Proof Coin is the “ideal addition” for any coin collector and is worth far more than its face value.

One of the pieces is currently listed on eBay for £12, with bids still open until Monday afternoon.

That makes it worth more than 20 times its face value.

In September, one of the coins was sold for £10.50.

A month before that, the piece was purchased for £11.50 on eBay.

The special commemorative coin was ordered to mark the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union.

Over 10 million were minted by The Royal Mint, stamped with the date of 31 October 2019, which was the planned day of official withdrawal.

However, by late October, minting was paused and subsequently that set of coins were recycled as the leaving date was delayed.

In January 2020, a new series of ‘Brexit’ Fifty Pence coins was released to mark the actual withdrawal date of the UK from the EU with the triggering of Article 50 on 31 January.

However, just 47,000 were made in the special proof presentation.

These 50ps were struck in .925 sterling silver in proof standard, giving it a higher quality finish and greater definition than the normal coins in your change.

Both types of the coin feature a design from The Royal Mint which is inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address.

It reads ‘peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations.’

The head side of the coin features Jody Clark’s official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, according to The Britannia Coin Company.

This is not the only rare coin out there, however.

Last week, an online coin enthusiast spotted an erroneous £1 coin that could be worth thousands of pounds.

“Bee” £1 coins were first put into general circulation in August this year with three million making their way into tills and pockets.

But an error version of the coin appears to have also entered circulation.

Instead of having an exterior of nickel brass and an interior of nickel-played brass alloy, the rare £1 piece is all one colour.

Change Checker, which writes blogs on rare coins in the UK, said it had not seen the coin previously.

However, it said a similar error coin was released in 2017 that sold for £2,375.

Other £1 error coins have been known to sell for up to £2,500.

Another rare coin, a 2023 50p coin, was recently sold for more than 280 times its face value.

The Atlantic Salmon 50p is the rarest of its type in circulation, with just 200,000 ever being minted.

Yesterday, one of the pieces sold for £142 after an intense 23 bid war on eBay.