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Grant Shapps, energy minister, has insisted that the government will “max out” the UK’s remaining reserves of North Sea oil and gas, arguing this is compatible with Britain’s pledge to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Labour leader Keir Starmer has said the UK will grant no new North Sea licences if his party

Spaniards go to the polls on Sunday with the choice of re-electing Pedro Sánchez and his fractious leftwing alliance or letting conservatives reverse the prime minister’s reforms in a possible pact with the hard right. Most polls suggest the opposition People’s party will win the snap general election but fall short of an outright majority.

“Marketa parties in a gown . . . but keeps her trainers on,” marvelled a headline in the Daily Mail last week about Markéta Vondroušová, Wimbledon’s new women’s tennis champion. A photo with the report confirmed that the 24-year-old Czech had gone to a celebratory ball on Sunday night in a strapless black gown and a pair of white

EY has hired a leading adviser to crisis-hit companies to conduct a review of the failed attempt to split its audit and consulting businesses.  The Big Four firm has engaged Lord David Gold to examine the process behind Project Everest, which collapsed in April after leaders of its US business blocked the global break-up, according

The writer is a professor at Cornell, senior fellow at Brookings and author of ‘The Future of Money’ With cash on its way out, many central banks around the world are experimenting with — or in some cases rolling out — retail central bank digital currencies. Their time may have come and they have many

An influential early warning system for identifying emerging infectious diseases is in danger of financial collapse, raising concerns over experts’ capacity to track future pandemics despite pledges by policymakers to learn lessons from Covid-19. The Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED) was among the first to detect viral outbreaks including Sars, Mers and Covid-19, which

Like many breakthroughs in scientific discovery, the one that spurred an artificial intelligence revolution came from a moment of serendipity. In early 2017, two Google research scientists, Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, were in a hallway of the search giant’s Mountain View campus, discussing a new idea for how to improve machine translation, the AI

Top US consultancies are struggling to attract business in China as Beijing’s national security raids scare away local clients and global investors pull back from dealmaking in the country. Management consultancy Bain is telling new China hires to wait until as late as 2025 to start their jobs, while roughly half of McKinsey staff do

One of India’s best-regarded public policy think-tanks is struggling to continue its work after authorities stripped it of its tax-exempt status and permission to raise foreign funds as part of an intensifying crackdown by the Modi government on civil society.  The New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, which conducts grassroots data collection, publishes research and

Oilfield services groups are feeling the squeeze from a slowdown in activity in the US shale patch as companies scale back on oil and gas drilling. The world’s biggest oilfield services providers, responsible for the industry’s grunt work from drilling wells to building roads, reported a hit to North American revenues this week amid dwindling

UK stocks this week staged their biggest rally since early January, as investors warmed to a market that has missed out on global gains this year.  A bigger than expected drop in UK inflation in June helped London’s FTSE All-Share index rise 3.1 per cent in the week to Friday, its best run since notching

London “stands ready” to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games with an estimated cost of £500mn from central government, according to City Hall officials, as organisers rush to find a new home for the competition. The nearly 100 year-old games, staged every four years, involve nations from the Commonwealth — made up largely of states with