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The Russian army is suffering huge losses in Ukraine, shows no sign it has improved its “meat grinder” tactics and is struggling to sustain a stuttering offensive that is “advancing, if at all, in metres not kilometres”, Britain’s defence secretary Ben Wallace said on Friday. Despite fears that Russia is poised to launch a huge

Rishi Sunak has launched a high-stakes gamble to seal a deal with Brussels over Northern Ireland, making a surprise visit to Belfast as Tory Eurosceptics warned he was going too far to accommodate the EU. The UK prime minister is seeking to win backing from Northern Irish parties for an outline deal with the EU

Nicola Sturgeon announced her resignation as Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National party on Wednesday after a backlash over her strategy for securing independence and controversy over proposed gender laws. A thorn in the side of UK prime ministers for almost a decade, Sturgeon led the pro-independence SNP to repeated electoral success

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and chancellor Jeremy Hunt are exploring a pay offer to try to end the wave of public sector strikes that would backdate next year’s wage award for NHS staff and other key workers. After weeks of deadlock, Sunak and Hunt are considering giving workers a lump sum by backdating next year’s

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy has vowed to double down on the company’s struggling grocery store business, despite recently announcing that its growth plans were on hold. Jassy told the Financial Times that the ecommerce giant was ready to “go big” on bricks-and-mortar stores, blaming a lack of “normalcy” during the pandemic for a series

Taiwan has observed dozens of Chinese military balloon flights in its airspace in recent years, far more than previously known, adding to concerns that Beijing could be preparing for an attack on the country. “They come very frequently, the last one just a few weeks ago,” said a senior Taiwanese official. Another person briefed on

Turkish authorities have launched a crackdown on developers connected to buildings that were toppled by this week’s devastating earthquake as president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan faces growing discontent over the quality of construction in the stricken region. The justice ministry has authorised almost 150 local prosecutors’ offices to set up earthquake investigation units to probe contractors,

Gillian Keegan, UK education secretary, has signalled she will fight any Home Office attempts to cut migration into Britain by driving away overseas students, saying universities were a “hugely valuable” export success. Keegan, in an interview with the Financial Times, said she wanted to build on the UK’s booming export market in university education, and

Nelson Peltz has called off his fight against Walt Disney a day after the company unveiled a restructuring plan involving the loss of 7,000 jobs, ending one of the biggest corporate battles in recent years. The end of the activist investor’s push removes a distraction for chief executive Bob Iger, who is seeking to steer

Walt Disney chief executive Bob Iger announced plans to cut 7,000 jobs, about 3 per cent of the company’s workforce, as part of a broad restructuring that he said would save $5.5bn over the next few years, revive its creative output and make its streaming business profitable. Investors have been waiting to hear Iger’s strategic

Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell has warned that the US central bank might have to raise interest rates more than investors expect because it will probably take a “significant period of time” to tame inflation given stronger labour market data. Powell’s comments to the Economic Club of Washington on Tuesday were his first since data

Turkey was battling to respond to a historic natural disaster after its biggest earthquake in almost a century flattened neighbourhoods across the country’s south-east and northern Syria, killing more than 3,000 people. Monday’s 7.8 magnitude quake destroyed thousands of buildings when it hit shortly after 4am local time, sending people fleeing into the streets in

For some time, American officials have talked about the need to “put a floor” under the sharp deterioration in US-China relations. But the controversy surrounding the Chinese spy balloon (which Beijing insists was a “civilian” vessel blown by accident into American airspace) has dashed efforts to gradually improve relations between the two countries. A visit

Beijing has lashed out at the US decision to shoot down a Chinese balloon that flew across North America this week, accusing the Biden administration of “seriously violating international conventions”. In a statement posted by the Chinese embassy in Washington on Saturday evening, the foreign ministry said it had “repeatedly informed” the US that the

The UK’s FTSE 100 hit an all-time high on Friday, as the blue-chip index dominated by multinational companies overcame the drag of a domestic economy headed for recession. The FTSE added as much as 1.1 per cent on the day to trade at 7906.58, eclipsing its previous peak in May 2018, before closing at 7902.

Apple posted a decline in quarterly revenues for the first time in three-and-a-half years after “significant” supply chain disruptions in China delayed deliveries of iPhones during the important holiday period. The worse than expected performance highlighted Apple’s dependence on China for manufacturing and came after shipments of its high-end iPhones were hit by an outbreak

Adani Enterprises has called off its $2.4bn equity fundraising in the latest blow to Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who has seen shares in his industrial empire tumble after a short seller made allegations of fraud and stock manipulation. The decision to pull the share sale and refund investors marks an abrupt turn after Adani Enterprises’

Rishi Sunak is facing a big test of his authority as he agonises over whether he can sell an outline deal on the Northern Ireland protocol to pro-UK unionist politicians in the region and Eurosceptic Tory MPs. After months of talks, negotiators have briefed Sunak, the UK prime minister, that a deal is taking shape

Britain is the only leading economy likely to slide into recession this year, the IMF said on Tuesday, predicting that UK household spending would falter under the weight of high energy prices, rising mortgage costs and increased taxes. The fund upgraded its forecasts for most leading economies and said the global outlook had brightened. But

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has sacked Nadhim Zahawi as chair of the Conservative party after his ethics adviser found he committed “serious breaches” of the ministerial code by failing to be transparent about his tax affairs. Sunak finally jettisoned Zahawi on Sunday after weeks of negative coverage in the latest political scandal to hit

In politics, they say, the cover-up is often worse than the crime. Nadhim Zahawi’s “error” in overlooking millions of pounds he owed in tax is gobsmacking enough, to those of us who are slogging to file our own returns by next week’s deadline. But his denials of what turned out to be true should have

The UK tax authority has admitted that it gave misleading information last summer when it said no government minister was being investigated, even though Nadhim Zahawi was the subject of a probe. HM Revenue & Customs has now apologised for wrongly stating last June that no ministers were under investigation — mistakes it blames on

The new chief executive of Rolls-Royce has given a brutal assessment of Britain’s flagship engineering group, telling employees it must transform the way it operates or it will not survive. In a global address broadcast to staff, parts of which were shared with the Financial Times, Tufan Erginbilgic warned investors were losing patience with the

The US and Germany will send main battle tanks to Kyiv, a significant increase of western military aid that was condemned by Russia and prompted cheers throughout Ukraine. The US will be sending 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine — or the equivalent of one Ukrainian tank battalion, senior Biden administration officials confirmed on Wednesday.

The US and Germany are planning to send advanced tanks to Ukraine, in a move that marks a significant breakthrough in western efforts to bolster Kyiv’s fight against the Russian army. People familiar with the matter said on Tuesday that the US was preparing to announce that it would deliver M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine,

Nadhim Zahawi was fighting for his political life on Monday after prime minister Rishi Sunak ordered an ethics inquiry into the tax affairs of the Conservative party chair. Sunak’s support for Zahawi was highly conditional, after he declared that “there are questions that need answering” over Zahawi’s dispute with HM Revenue & Customs. Downing Street

Britain must launch a new green strategy to prevent business investment from haemorrhaging to the US as a result of Joe Biden’s huge green stimulus package, the boss of the UK’s largest employers group has urged. Tony Danker, director-general of the CBI, warned that the world had entered a subsidy arms race which could damage

Banks are gearing up for the biggest round of job cuts since the global financial crisis, as executives come under pressure to slash costs following a collapse in investment banking revenues. The lay-offs — which are expected to be in the tens of thousands across the sector — reverse the mass hirings banks made over

Germany dashed its allies’ hopes that it would approve the dispatch of battle tanks to Ukraine on Friday when a high-profile defence ministers meeting failed to reach an agreement. Many western countries argue that the German-made Leopard 2 battle tanks would greatly help Kyiv mount a counteroffensive against Russia, but Berlin has yet to agree,

Reed Hastings is stepping down as chief executive of Netflix, the company he co-founded 25 years ago, in a shake-up at the top of one of the most powerful studios in Hollywood. Hastings, who launched Netflix in 1997 as a DVD-by-mail service, wrote in a blog post that he has been increasingly delegating management in