If you’ve pre-ordered the new Call Of Duty through the Xbox or Microsoft store, you’re eligible to receive a gift card a month after launch.

After last year’s Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 flopped hard enough for Activision to publicly apologise for it, there is undoubtedly a lot of pressure to ensure this year’s follow-up, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, regains player trust in the franchise.

Unfortunately for Activision, there’s very little it can meaningfully address in just a year and Modern Warfare 4’s beta has done little to raise excitement, especially given the poor reception to the story campaign teaser.

So, it’s perhaps not surprising to see Microsoft offer a new incentive on Modern Warfare 4 pre-orders, although the option they’ve gone for is pretty bizarre – especially as its only for Xbox.

If you pre-order any edition of the game on Xbox Series X/S or on PC via the Microsoft store, you will receive a digital Xbox gift card worth £4.

This is also in conjunction with a loyalty discount on Modern Warfare 4’s Vault Edition, which is 10% cheaper if you’ve purchased any Call Of Duty game since 2019.

The offer was quietly made over the weekend, on the Call Of Duty X account, to coincide with Modern Warfare 4’s open beta, which suggests Microsoft only came up with the idea recently – especially since it’s already set to expire tomorrow morning on September 2 at 4:59am.

However, according to Microsoft’s website, the offer applies to any pre-orders made since May 28, so if you’ve already pre-ordered Modern Warfare 4 through either the Xbox or Microsoft store, you’re eligible to receive the gift card.

You’ll receive a pop-up notification either on your Xbox console or via the Xbox app on PC to let you know when you’ve received the gift card, within 35 days after Modern Warfare 4’s launch on October 23. So, late November is the absolute latest it’ll arrive.

While this is Microsoft taking full advantage of its ownership of Activision, it also reads as Microsoft trying to discourage people from pre-ordering the game on PlayStation 5 and bumping up Xbox pre-order numbers.

Considering the company’s returned to embracing console exclusives again, maybe it’s kicking itself a bit for agreeing to keep Call Of Duty multiplatform.

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Even after the buyout, Call Of Duty remains most popular on PlayStation 5, simply by virtue of there being more PlayStation consoles in the world than the Xbox Series X. Also, Microsoft’s ploy to raise Xbox player numbers by bringing new Call Of Duty games to Xbox Game Pass at launch backfired so badly that it’s since sworn not to do it again.

It’s not just Call Of Duty that’s taken a hit popularity-wise, though. Microsoft has been running out of good will for years, thanks in part to regular layoffs. Just this summer, a further 3,200 employees have been affected, with Doom developer id Software reportedly gutted in a manner that can only be described as vandalism.

Just recently, id Software producer Andrew Willis told Insider Gaming how he and his team went through a ‘brutal’ crunch period to get Doom: The Dark Ages | Revelations out the door and despite it being a fantastic DLC expansion, most of the team was rewarded by being let go.

‘We had people that worked in Hollywood for 20 years and game development for 10 and said that this was the worst crunch they’d been a part of,’ said Willis.

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Warrenpoint Harbour Authority has been at the centre of a controversial odour with residents’ complaints leading to a community forum to resolve the stench issue.

One of Northern Ireland’s busiest ports has failed to attract any councillors to its board amid a long running Co Down stink problem.

Warrenpoint Harbour Authority has been at the centre of a controversial odour with residents’ complaints leading to a community forum to resolve the stench issue.

However, all councillors have now resigned from the harbour board with a deadline from the Department for Infrastructure for new applicants now closed.

READ MORE: Council refuses to reveal CCTV monitoring details despite ‘grave concerns’.

READ MORE: Newry parklet scheme delays causes eyesore concerns amid imminent launch.

A DfI spokesperson said:“The closing date for applications from councillors was 12noon on Friday 28 August 2026. No applications were received.”

All political parties on the council also confirmed to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) that they had not put any councillor forward to the board.

WHA is the third largest port in Northern Ireland and became a trust in 1971, before new legislation in 1974 allowed for council representation on its board.

DfI added:“There is no statutory requirement for councillors to serve on the board.

“While the legislation permits up to three commissioners to be council members, it does not state a minimum number.

“The board remains properly constituted and can continue to operate effectively even in the absence of any councillors serving as commissioners.”

Environment groups and local residents have raised concerns for the last three years over a perceived stink at the port, they claim is linked to waste bales at the harbour to be shipped for Newry recycling company Re-Gen.

The bales are exported to be incinerated in Scandinavian areas.

Former WHA board members, councillors Jim Brennan ( Sinn Fein ) and Laura Devlin ( SDLP ) resigned last year in solidarity with local people complaining of the bad smell.

The last councillor on the board, independent Crotlieve elected member Jarlath Tinnelly has now also confirmed his resignation in early August.

The LDRS has contacted WHA over the councillor resignation, which has left the board completely empty of elected Newry, Mourne and Down District Council members.

The councillors had been appointed for terms of four years back in 2024, with a potential situation now presenting itself of all three board seats remaining vacated indefinitely.

Councillors appointed to the board by the DfI minister can expect to be paid “£8,772 per year for up to two business days per month” according to a DfI letter presented to the council.

In September (2025), WHA stated that it had extensive engagement with Re-Gen, with the Newry company agreeing to remove all RDF (refuse derived fuel) bales from the port, with a proposal to no longer store the waste there, but instead transport it directly to ships for export.

Only SRF (solid recovered fuel) bales were to be stored in future on the site, which the WHA was told should be non-odorous.

As a result of extensive talks and an independent environmental audit report, the WHA set up the community forum to provide a key communication basis on potential bad smells from the port located in the centre of the town.

However, in April this year, forum member Fionnuala McKinley, who lives just yards from port, stepped down and called for an independent environmental impact study.

For all the latest news, visit the Belfast Live homepage here and sign up to our daily newsletter here.

Grosvenor Casino closed its doors on Sunday, August 30, leaving its staff looking for new jobs

Grosvenor Casino in Swansea has closed its doors for good, with employees claiming terms have been changed in their redundancy agreement.

The venue stopped trading on Sunday, August 30. WalesOnline previously reported that the firm blamed “significant and sustained financial challenges” at its High Street casino, with an operating loss of £73,000 during the financial year ending June 28 and a revenue performance £635,000 below budget.

The casino also explained how operating costs had increased by 11% in the last three years, and that profitability had declined by 107% in the last ten years. Never miss a Swansea story by signing up to our newsletter here.

A letter, seen by WalesOnline, updating employees on the results of the consultation process, reads as follows: “The consultation process has now formally concluded and Grosvenor Casino will close at the close of business on Sunday, August 30.

“A redundancy payment will be made on termination of employment and should be free of tax and national insurance deductions.

“This will be paid by BACS transfer in the October payroll.”

However, an employee has claimed that it was agreed in employees’ collective constitution process that their redundancy pay, and any further amounts the company still owed employees, would get paid on their last payday, September 8.

He described news that they would not be paid until October as “really unfair”, and claimed the date of payment had been changed “without their knowledge and after consultation meetings.”

WalesOnline put the claims to Grosvenor Casino. A spokesman said: “After a thorough consultation process we have made the difficult decision to close Grosvenor Casino Swansea.

“This is not a decision that we have taken lightly but we need to remain focused on the longer-term health of the business.

“We sincerely thank our colleagues for their professionalism, dedication and contribution to Grosvenor Casinos over the years especially during this difficult period.”

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Martin Greensmith saw his biological father for the first time when Steven Shevels turned up at the Queen’s Head in Willington on Christmas Eve last year.

Mr Shevels, 61, was causing a nuisance in the bar before he was asked to leave by the barman, Teesside Crown Court heard.

Moments later, 37-year-old Greensmith pushed over his dad in the beer garden after he claimed he tried to block his way back into the pub, the jury was told.

The jury heard how Mr Shevels was annoying members of his son’s family, including his mother Angela, and his nanna, after sitting next to them.

Jolyon Perks, prosecuting, said the fatal push was unlawful because it was born out of frustration.

He said the defendant was not acting in self-defence and urged the jury to consider that a reasonable and sober person would realise that the push would result in some harm.

“It does not matter whether the defendant thought he was acting legally at the time,” he said.

Paul Rooney, representing Greensmith, reminded the jury that the defence do not have to prove anything and that it is down the prosecution to prove that he did not act in self-defence.

He said that Christmas Eve was the first time that Greensmith had encountered his ‘dad’ who was acting bizarrely after drinking at least 13 pints.

He added that Mr Greensmith didn’t punch or slap Mr Shevels, he pushed him.

Police outside the Queen’s Head in Willington on Christmas day (Image: THE NORTHERN ECHO)

The CCTV shows the defendant was simply trying to walk back into pub and get away from this “drunken and aggressive man”, he said.

CCTV captured Mr Shevels hitting his head on the concrete surface in the beer garden of the Willington pub on Christmas Eve.

Paramedics spent an hour trying to revive the 61-year-old, but he was declared dead at the scene.

Pathologist Jennifer Bolton told the court that Mr Shevels suffered a cardiac arrest while unconscious and never recovered.

She said the cause of death was triggered by the fall and not an underlying heart condition he had.

Greensmith, of Rockingham Road, Sunnybrow, Willington, denies a charge of manslaughter and maintains that he acted in self-defence.

The trial continues.

More than 3,000 scallop-shaped embankments have been built across Holcombe Moor in a National Trust-led scheme to restore degraded peatland and boost resilience to wildfire and flooding.

The semi-circular “scallop bunds” are made of peat and covered with vegetation. They trap rainwater across thousands of spots, creating pools and boggy ground that support wildlife and help re-establish water-holding sphagnum moss.

The National Trust has planted around 1.5 million clumps of sphagnum so far as part of the restoration.

Nik Taylor, area ranger and supervisor for the project, said: “We’ve proven that actually on the ground, it doesn’t make a massive difference to the landscape characteristics, the aesthetics of the place.

“But it can create so many benefits, one of which is wildfire resilience.”

Restoration work has also taken place on the charity’s Stubbins Estate.

This has included damming gullies, installing “leaky dams” lower down the hillside, and protecting exposed peat.

The project serves multiple purposes: rewetting peat to store carbon, supporting rare moorland wildlife, and slowing water flow to reduce flooding in the River Irwell catchment.

Holcombe Moor, like much of the UK’s uplands, has suffered from centuries of burning, drainage, grazing, and pollution.

This has left deep, damaged peat—up to 4.5 metres thick in places—cut through with gullies and “weather edges” where erosion exposes the peat to further damage.

While traditional peatland schemes often focus on damming gullies to allow water to spread more slowly across the moor, the scallop bunds accelerate the process by holding water in thousands of small pools.

Mr Taylor said: “First of all trying to stop the rot, stop the degradation.

“Then we rewet and plant sphagnum that in time allows us to accumulate peat, that’s a millennial process, but at least it means it’s not deteriorating, so we start to sequester, not lose (carbon).”

He estimates the landscape is about three-fifths restored, but that full recovery could take up to 50 years.

The National Trust has worked closely with commoners who have grazing rights, bringing them into a Countryside Stewardship scheme that rewards reduced livestock and supports the peatland work.

Other project partners include the Environment Agency, Defra, Natural England, the Ministry of Defence, United Utilities, and tenant farmers.

Ben Eardley, nature recovery project manager at the National Trust, said: “With climate change, these extreme weather patterns are locked in now; it’s the new normal, so we need to rethink our relationship with rivers in these catchments.

“With peatland restoration, what you’re doing is trying to restore ecosystem function to a whole habitat, so then you get multiple benefits, during all weather conditions.”

On Holcombe Moor, the ground remained wet even during a recent dry summer that saw wildfires break out elsewhere.

Mr Taylor demonstrated the impact by driving a stick into the peat and finding it damp just below the surface.

He also squeezed water from a handful of sphagnum moss.

The newly created wet conditions have already benefitted wildlife. Dunlin, a bird species that was “just hanging on,” has seen its numbers increase.

Communities downstream have also noticed changes, with no flooding reported during a recent storm, just weeks after a new set of leaky dams was completed.

The wet ground conditions have also improved wildfire resilience.

Mr Taylor said: “It’s stayed wetter in the areas where we’ve done the scallop bunding on deep peat.

“It stays wetter for longer, and the groundwater level rises closer to the surface for longer, and that makes the ground more resilient to those deep fires that can get into the peat.”

The Pantone colour of the year for 2026 is white. It’s called Cloud Dancer, which is described as a “lofty white”. This choice reflects a growing trend away from colour in our visual world.

You might have noticed this yourself. Where an area once had a distinct sense of place we are seeing more cookie cutter developments popping up. Take the London borough of Elephant and Castle, which has seen billions of pounds of development in recent years. The area has gone from a Latin American enclave full of distinct and varied buildings to what Oli Mould, professor of social, cultural and historical geography, has warned is an “identikit homogeneous gentrified place”, which risks “destroying the very thing that makes a community thriving and beautiful in the first place”.“

There is a similar increasing sense of uniformity and sameness in urban design around the world. In 1993, architect Rem Koolhaas travelled 360,000km around the world, observing the rationalisation of urban design (the movement towards efficiency rather than creativity in the process) through what he termed the “generic city”. Functional, efficient, but colourless.

Algorithms of taste

This trajectory towards blandness is reinforced and sustained by the increasing tendency to allow algorithms to mediate the choices we make. This has the effect of
training perspectives to converge in “a strong pull toward sameness”.

Algorithms make predictions based upon our choices, from music to home furnishings. The algorithm takes that choice and suggests similar products based upon it, ultimately reinforcing and producing a monotonous and generic aesthetic taste. For instance, like a pop song by Sabrina Carpenter, you will then get served a lot of songs exactly like it until you find your Spotify Wrapped says that you are in the top listeners of something they’ve bafflingly called “Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop”.

These sorts of algorithms in turn reinforce the production of products to meet those generic tastes, ultimately flattening the diversity of creative work, in everything from the songs we listen to to the urban surroundings in which we live.

Algorithmically driven taste results in a monoculture where art, pets and everything in between are chosen to match the generic palette of an algorithmic world.

This generic algorithmic taste is also having an impact at the design stage, particularly where metrics and investment desires overwhelm other considerations. Environments are increasingly considered by key decision makers like developers not in terms of their contribution to lived experience and cultural life, but as investment objects or financial assets, readily translated and transacted. The result is a flattening not only of our visual environment but also our engagement with that environment. And this loss is significant for our social wellbeing.

Back in 1983, the American sociologist George Ritzer introduced the concept of the “McDonaldization” of society to explain the business rationalisation of moving the design process towards faster, easier to manage, cheaper and more predictable outcomes. Like a McDonald’s burger, the production process becomes standardised. The burger is the same no matter where in the world you have one. Ritzer describes this happening in environments across a range of examples from restaurants to hospitals.

Ritzer acknowledged some of the advantages, like cost saving and customers knowing what to expect. However, the main problem he identified with this streamlining is there is no space for experimentation or personality because creativity and design are organised around efficiency. In this control of process we paradoxically lose control because we lose choice and creativity.

Living in colour

The issue goes beyond a loss of control of our spaces. The loss of colour is also a loss of expression. My work in law and aesthetics includes exploration of aesthetic welfare and the link between aesthetic experience and wellbeing. This includes how colour and expression in our built environment and surrounding spaces affects people.

Over 50 years ago, the American philosopher Monroe Beardsley introduced the concept of “aesthetic welfare” to explain the quality and availability of aesthetic experience through our environment, including colour and the impact it has on social and cultural wellbeing and resilience.

Attention to colour in our surroundings is linked to environmental enrichment as well as social and cultural participation through that environment. One study observed that students exposed to art under controlled experimental conditions expressed and engaged with colour differently from those without such experiences, consistent with the “pivotal role” of colour “in visual communication and emotional expression”.

Lack of opportunities to engage with colour and contrast in our environment risk making us less able to understand, appreciate, and use colour effectively. And this is particularly concerning if the primary way in which colour is otherwise delivered into our lives is through screens.

It is perhaps no coincidence that an idiom for malaise is to be “off-colour”. We need to move away from rational design and stop letting algorithms make our choices. We need to live in more colour.

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Finally, for the chance to choose something you really want, enter to win a £150 Curry’s eGift voucher. From headphones, game consoles and smart devices to laptops, kitchen appliances and home entertainment, the winner will have plenty of options to choose from.

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The Trump administration is set to host its own Shark Tank-style competition later this month, with rapper Nicki Minaj and Superman actor Dean Cain as judges.

Minaj and Cain, both ardent supporters of President Donald Trump, are two of the celebrity guests who will feature in the Small Business Administration’s “Million Dollar Pitch Competition,” where five entrepreneurs will compete to win a share of the $1 million prize.

Airbnb co-founder and U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia will join Minaj on the judging panel, along with private equity fund manager Grant Cardone.

The agency’s administrator, Kelly Loeffler, said the Trump-supporting stars “will only add to the excitement of this historic celebration of free enterprise” in a news release.

“From building globally recognized personal and business brands and multibillion-dollar portfolios to launching innovative wellness solutions and digital platforms, each brings a unique, real‑world perspective on business growth and impact,” Loeffler said.

“Their presence will be invaluable in highlighting the unique and inspiring stories of the five finalists competing for $1 million in growth capital, and the importance of Main Street businesses in powering American strength,” Loeffler added.

The competition’s format is similar to the hit TV show Shark Tank and the president’s former reality show The Apprentice, which aired on NBC from 2004 to 2017.

Minaj has become one of the president’s most vocal allies in the music industry and has been hosted by Trump at the White House several times. She helped the president to launch the administration’s “Trump Accounts” earlier this year.

The 43-year-old rapper previously opened up about her support for Trump. “When I saw how he was being treated over and over and over, I just couldn’t handle it,” she said on The Katie Miller Podcast earlier this year. “I felt that…a lot of that bullying, and the smear campaigns and all of the lying, I felt that that had been done to me for so many years.”

Cain similarly declared his “love” for Trump in a 2025 interview and endorsed the president during the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections. “Trump is actually one of the most empathetic, wonderful, generous people you’ll ever meet,” he told Variety.

The former Superman star attended a Trump administration event in August to promote the president’s “No Tax on Tips” policy.

The competition is part of the Freedom 250 celebrations marking America’s birthday. The White House-aligned group was also behind the Great American State Fair, marked by several controversies, including cancelations from musicians and weather-related closures, and the Freedom 250 Grand Prix in Washington, D.C.

According to the agency, the $1 million cash prize is being funded by Clover Network, Inc, a payments processing platform.