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I grew up hearing stories of life on the wards. My beloved great-aunt was a nurse in the era when there was camaraderie, heroic doctors, and everyone was scared of matron. No question of contracting out cleaning: you did it yourself, with matron hovering over you to check there wasn’t a smidgen of dust. Tea

As an all-out struggle for AI dominance breaks out in the tech industry, Wall Street has placed an early bet on who the biggest winners will be: the companies that make the weapons that will be used by all combatants. That means specifically, the advanced chips needed for “generative AI” systems such as the ChatGPT

When US short seller Nathan Anderson decided to take on Indian conglomerate Adani Group, he faced the ultimate challenge for someone in his line of business: India’s anti short selling rules. The founder of New York-based Hindenburg Research has not detailed how he structured his financial bet against the infrastructure group, which he has accused

DoorDash enjoyed an after-hours trading bounce after reporting stronger-than-expected earnings for last year’s fourth quarter, showing signs of healthy post-lockdown growth for the food delivery business. DoorDash, the market-leading food delivery group in the US, ahead of Uber Eats, grew its monthly active user base to 34mn, up 28 per cent on the same period

Portugal has become the second EU country this week to scrap “golden visas” for wealthy non-Europeans, joining Ireland in abolishing a programme that helped pull in foreign investment but sparked controversy. António Costa, Portugal’s prime minister, said on Thursday that his government would stop issuing new golden visas in order to “fight against price speculation

The Pentagon’s top China official is to visit Taiwan in the coming days, a rare trip to the island by a senior US defence policymaker that comes as relations between Washington and Beijing are mired in crisis over a suspected Chinese spy balloon shot down two weeks ago. Michael Chase, deputy assistant secretary of defence

Tesla is recalling nearly 363,000 of its electric cars because flaws in a version of its full self-driving software could cause crashes, according to a US government regulator. The recall covers certain Model S and Model X vehicles manufactured between 2016 and 2023, as well as Model Ys made since 2020. Tesla sold 1.3mn vehicles

US President Joe Biden plans to talk to Xi Jinping, his Chinese counterpart, to “get to the bottom” of the situation involving the suspected Chinese spy balloon that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina two weeks ago. Biden said he gave the order for a US fighter jet to shoot the balloon,

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

A group of Tesla workers say the electric-car maker fired employees a day after the start of a union organising drive and asked a US regulator to intervene. Workers United on Wednesday announced an effort to form Tesla’s first labour union at the company’s Gigafactory 2 plant in Buffalo, New York. On Thursday, the union

Derivatives traders tend to watch the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission closely on a Friday. This is the day the CFTC normally releases its weekly “commitments of traders” report showing overall positioning in derivatives markets, such as oil futures. This month, however, the data has been missing in action because a small, publicity-shy data group

Switzerland has said it is legally impossible for it to confiscate the assets of sanctioned Russians held in the country, dealing a blow to European efforts to use that wealth for Ukrainian postwar reconstruction. Until now, Bern has moved in line with the EU in freezing the assets of high-profile Russians connected to the regime

Emails exchanged by former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley and the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have been revealed in greater detail in a lawsuit filed by the US Virgin Islands against JPMorgan Chase. Newly unredacted portions of a complaint brought by the government of the Virgin Islands, where Epstein had a home, contains

The UK government’s decision to drop a court case over the rights of Europeans to remain in the country has been welcomed by the bloc’s watchdog for citizens’ interests. The Independent Monitoring Authority for the Citizens’ Rights Agreements said on Thursday it was pleased the Home Office would not proceed with an appeal against a

Gautam Adani’s electricity unit is halting an $847mn acquisition of a coal-fired power station in India in a sign that the billionaire’s business empire is slowing down spending following a short seller attack. The Indian tycoon’s conglomerate, which includes India’s biggest private thermal power producer, has been roiled by a stock market rout triggered by

PwC is under investigation by UK regulators over its auditing of the failed shopping centre owner Intu Properties, as accountants brace for increased scrutiny of their work ahead of an expected rise in insolvencies. In its fifth outstanding probe into PwC’s work for British companies, the Financial Reporting Council is investigating the firm’s audits of

IBM led some of the 20th century’s most pioneering projects in artificial intelligence and supercomputing, including the development of the Deep Blue chess-playing system that became the first to defeat reigning world champion Garry Kasparov, in 1997. Then, in 2010, the IBM Watson AI system for answering questions in natural language was put to the

European stocks rose at the open on Thursday as investors cheered the prospect of strong US corporate earnings and shrugged off the threat of further interest rate rises to combat inflation. The region-wide Stoxx 600 gained 0.4 per cent, while Germany’s Dax index rose 0.6 per cent. France’s Cac 40 was up 0.7 per cent.

Profits at Centrica more than tripled year on year to a record high of £3.3bn in 2022, as the energy group’s North Sea production and nuclear power businesses benefited from a surge in gas and power prices. The owner of British Gas, which has recently been embroiled in a scandal over forcibly installing expensive prepayment

In a huge hangar in Quonset Point, Rhode Island, welders are aiming blazing torches at sheets of aluminium. The hulls of three new ships, each about 27 metres long, are taking shape. The first will hit the water sometime in the spring, ferrying workers to service wind turbines off the New England coast. The US

The layer of sky above the cruising height of commercial aircraft and below satellite orbits was, until recently, regarded by most people to be empty space. That changed after a gigantic Chinese balloon drifted across North America 20km above the ground, followed by three more mysterious objects with lower altitude flight paths, which were all