News

Protests in Shanghai escalated on Sunday evening as police struggled to disperse large crowds who gathered in the city, part of a nationwide movement that poses one of the most brazen challenges to the Chinese Communist party’s authority in decades. The unrest began on Saturday night and centred on a road named after the Chinese

Qatar has launched a review of its investments in London after the city’s transport authority this week banned the Gulf state’s advertisements on the UK capital’s buses, taxis and underground train system. The move by Transport for London was prompted by concerns about Qatar’s stance on LGBT+ rights and its treatment of migrant workers. It

EU ministers say that time is running out to resolve the worsening dispute with the US over Washington’s $369bn of green subsidies as they seek to head off a transatlantic trade war. Brussels and Washington have set up a taskforce to address the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and its “buy American” provisions,

Net migration to the UK rose to a record high of more than half a million people in the year to June 2022, according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics on Thursday. The surge in long-term arrivals to the UK was driven by a post-pandemic rebound in international study and by inflows

The UK Supreme Court has ruled that the Scottish government does not have the legal authority to hold an independence referendum without agreement from Westminster, scuppering Edinburgh’s plan to hold a vote next year. The ruling cuts off the legal route for Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, to unilaterally hold a rerun of the 2014

The UK economy is set to be the worst performer in the G20 bar Russia over the next two years, the OECD said on Tuesday, underlining the lasting impact of high energy prices on Europe as a whole. The OECD said in its latest economic forecasts that UK gross domestic product would fall 0.4 per

A bid by European teams to promote inclusion during the World Cup collapsed on Monday, after the Netherlands, England and Wales said threats from Fifa had forced them to abandon plans to wear rainbow-themed captains’ armbands. The captains of the three countries had said at the weekend that they would wear the One Love armbands

The UN climate summit has agreed to establish a historic fund to pay for climate-related damage in poorer countries after working beyond sunrise in Egypt on Sunday, but backed down on greater cuts to greenhouse gas emissions and an end to fossil fuel use. Almost 200 countries at the summit achieved a breakthrough for a

Collapsed crypto exchange FTX will attempt to sell or reorganise its businesses, its new chief executive said on Saturday as the company prepared to appear before a US bankruptcy court. “Based on our review over the past week, we are pleased to learn that many regulated or licensed subsidiaries of FTX, within and outside of

Jeremy Hunt pushed back on Friday against criticism that his £55bn fiscal squeeze unfairly targets middle earners, as new data indicated that UK workers will endure the longest period of wage stagnation for almost 200 years. Hunt’s Autumn Statement on Thursday included £30bn of spending cuts and £25bn of tax rises in a bid to

Jeremy Hunt, chancellor, will on Thursday seek to restore Britain’s tarnished economic reputation with a £54bn package of spending cuts and tax rises intended to repair the public finances and tame inflation. “We will face into the storm,” he will say. Hunt’s Autumn Statement will intensify the financial hardship facing millions of Britons and begin

The UK’s rate of inflation hit a fresh 41-year high in October, accelerating to 11.1 per cent on the back of rising energy and food prices. The Office for National Statistics said the rate rose from 10.1 per cent in September, putting inflation at its highest level since October 1981. Economists polled by Reuters had

World leaders will state at the G20 summit in Bali that today’s era “must not be of war” and will condemn threats to use nuclear weapons, reflecting rising global anxiety around Russia’s war against Ukraine. A draft communiqué agreed by diplomats, seen by the Financial Times and confirmed by two delegations, said: “Most members strongly

Joe Biden and Xi Jinping began their first face-to-face talks as heads of state on Monday, raising hopes that the two presidents could at least begin to stabilise US-China relations. The meeting is being held in Bali, Indonesia, on the eve of the G20 summit hosted by Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s president. It is the first

Democrats will retain a majority in the US Senate in a big boost to Joe Biden’s presidency after Catherine Cortez Masto won re-election in Nevada. According to the Associated Press, Cortez Masto is projected to win her contest against Republican candidate Adam Laxalt, in one of the most competitive races of the midterm elections. Cortez

FTX is investigating abnormal transactions as analysts said hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets had been withdrawn, in the latest blow for Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire following its collapse into bankruptcy. The potential hack is the latest blow for FTX, the cryptocurrency empire formerly controlled by 30-year-old entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried and until recently valued

Global regulators are closing in on embattled crypto exchange FTX as fallout spreads in digital asset markets and founder Sam Bankman-Fried pursues a last-ditch effort to raise up to $8bn in fresh funds. Authorities in Japan, Australia and the Bahamas, where FTX is based, have all taken actions as worries mount that customers in one

FTX is on the brink of collapse as chief Sam Bankman-Fried races to secure billions of dollars to salvage his empire after Binance ditched an eleventh-hour rescue of one of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges. Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital said it would mark down its $214mn investment in FTX to zero after a run

Democrats put up an unexpectedly strong fight as results rolled in from US midterm elections that will decide which party controls Congress, even as Republicans led by governor Ron DeSantis notched up a string of convincing victories in Florida. The early tallies from the midterm elections on Tuesday showed many battleground races across the country

A plan by ministers to review or repeal all EU laws on the UK statute book by the end of 2023 has suffered another setback after the discovery of 1,400 additional pieces of legislation. Rishi Sunak has started backing away from his ambitious proposals to scrub Britain’s statute book of unwanted EU laws, by abandoning

The US is working on a plan to harness cash from the world’s largest companies to help developing countries cut their use of fossil fuels, an idea it aims to unveil at the UN climate summit this week. US president Joe Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry is trying to marshal support from other governments, companies

US oil producers have raked in more than $200bn in profits since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as they cash in on a period of geopolitical turmoil that has shaken up the global energy market and sent prices soaring. Aggregate net income for publicly listed oil and gas companies operating in the US came to $200.24bn

Elon Musk has begun to slash Twitter’s 7,500-strong workforce as the social media platform’s new billionaire owner warned of a “massive drop in revenue” following his contentious $44bn buyout of the group. As Musk embarks on the cost-cutting cull, he claimed on Friday that Twitter “has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist

Banks and building societies will cut the costs of UK fixed-rate mortgages after financial markets pared back their expectations of future rises in the Bank of England’s main interest rate, brokers and lenders have predicted. Mortgage brokers said the current high costs of fixed rates were set when markets had expected aggressive future rises in

Elon Musk has drawn up plans to fire as much as half of Twitter’s 7,500-strong workforce, according to people familiar with the matter, in a major cost-cutting overhaul that could come by the end of the week. The billionaire is looking to cut around 3,700 jobs at Twitter after his $44bn buyout of the social

Israel’s former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in pole position to emerge victorious from Tuesday’s parliamentary elections, according to exit polls that put his rightwing bloc on course for a razor-thin majority. Polls by Israel’s three main television channels, released after voting closed, forecast that a bloc combining Netanyahu’s Likud party, the extreme-right Religious Zionism

UK home secretary Suella Braverman was fighting for her political life on Monday as she was accused of breaking the law over the government’s treatment of asylum seekers. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, was coming under increasing pressure to fire Braverman, who admitted earlier she had used her personal email seven times to handle documents

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva claimed a nail-biting victory in Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday, defeating incumbent rightwing leader Jair Bolsonaro by less than two percentage points and setting the stage for a return to leftwing governance in Latin America’s largest nation. The tight result tops off a dramatic comeback for the 77-year-old opposition leader,

Moscow has suspended its participation in a UN-backed deal with Kyiv that unblocked the movement of Ukrainian grain out of its southern ports, threatening to deepen the global food crisis. Russia linked its decision to pull out of the deal to an attack on Saturday on ships in the port of Sevastopol in the Crimean

Elon Musk has joined the elite club of social media barons after clinching a $44bn takeover of Twitter in the same week that investors wiped hundreds of billions of dollars from Big Tech valuations. Musk’s drawn-out acquisition of Twitter, which he launched in April but attempted to abort in July, has closed just as a