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As the Berlin-based music group BMG was bargaining over the terms of the sale of its record label to Sony 15 years ago, executives at the New York-headquartered entertainment giant could not understand why their German counterparts wanted to hang on to the likes of Rick Astley. Like a string of “legacy artists” that BMG

The west must take “into account” Russian president Vladimir Putin’s security concerns and stop the slide towards a Versailles-style victors’ peace in Ukraine, said Brazil’s top foreign policy adviser. Celso Amorim, a foreign minister during President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first two terms and current adviser on international affairs to the leftwing leader, said

The US Senate has approved a fiscal deal between the White House and congressional Republicans, ending a weeks-long political stand-off over the debt ceiling that risked triggering an unprecedented default in the world’s largest economy. Lawmakers in the upper chamber passed the bill with overwhelming bipartisan support on Thursday evening, with 63 senators backing the

Katie Petrelius, a top White House official who oversaw fundraising for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and has been responsible for his presidential appointments while in office, is leaving the administration.  Petrelius helped the president select US ambassadors around the world, as well as other top positions within the government, including members of his export council

Rishi Sunak’s government on Thursday refused to hand over Boris Johnson’s unredacted WhatsApp messages to the official Covid public inquiry, instead launching a legal challenge to try to keep them secret. The move puts Sunak at loggerheads with the inquiry, headed by former judge Baroness Heather Hallett, and fuelled claims by opposition parties that he

What if Apple came up with its most important new product in years and the world yawned? Next week’s expected unveiling of Apple’s mixed reality headset — a product that combines virtual reality with augmented reality, which overlays a digital world on to the real one — feels oddly out of step with the times.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has secured US funding to provide satellite internet to the Ukrainian military, as its founder abandoned his stated doubts over how his company’s terminals were being deployed in a major conflict. The Department of Defense has agreed to buy Starlink terminals from Musk but has not disclosed the quantities it will purchase,

Compared with what could have happened, it was close to being the least bad outcome possible. The deal that President Joe Biden struck with Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker, to avert a US sovereign default was hammered out under duress. No other large economy has a debt ceiling rule let alone a routine habit of

When Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan, flew to Shanghai this week, he might have expected to attract attention for his views on Sino-American relations. But that was before Bill Ackman, the veteran activist investor, jumped in. On Wednesday, Ackman issued a passionate appeal for Dimon to throw his hat into the 2024 presidential race, challenging

Goldman Sachs is preparing for “a tougher environment” by laying off more employees, which may help it surpass a $600mn savings target from job cuts, one of the bank’s top executives said on Thursday.  The warning from Goldman president John Waldron underscores the increasingly gloomy outlook on Wall Street as rising interest rates have damped

The British state is, for a reporter, a deeply irritating entity. Officials, ministers and advisers all too often believe that the core power of government is its ability to control the flow of information. That is also part of why it is so difficult for businesses to engage with the UK government. This was shown

In the three decades since the end of the cold war, the leafy streets around Mimosa Plus Golf Course in Clark, an area about 92km north of the Philippines’ capital Manila, have been largely quiet, populated mainly by retirees. But one day in April, about 100 US troops were sitting on a pavement and more

Losing one finance director is an isolated misfortune. But when a quarter of FTSE 100 finance directors box up their desk contents in the space of a few months, it is clear something does not quite add up.  The level of churn is remarkable. Both Unilever and Prudential announced the departure of their finance directors this

Facebook’s parent company has unveiled its latest virtual reality device, signalling a continued commitment to building an avatar-filled “metaverse” while seeking to grab attention ahead of rival Apple’s anticipated headset launch next week.  In a video posted on his Instagram account on Thursday, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg teased the new Quest 3 product, which

Next week, a veteran New York lawyer of 30 years’ standing will face a disciplinary hearing over a novel kind of misdemeanour: including bogus AI-generated content in a legal brief. Steven Schwartz, from the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, had submitted a 10-page document to a New York court as part of a personal injury

Financial watchdogs must “significantly” increase their budgets in the wake of recent banking crises, said the head of the umbrella body for central banks, arguing that more intensive day-to-day oversight was critical to preventing failures. Global policymakers are weighing rule changes to better insulate banks from risks such as changing interest rates and a swifter

Labour has suspended veteran MP Geraint Davies pending an investigation into “incredibly serious allegations of completely unacceptable behaviour”. The decision on Thursday means the MP for Swansea West is, until further notice, barred from representing the UK opposition party in parliament. It followed claims, first reported by Politico, that he had subjected five women to

Eurozone inflation has fallen more than economists expected to hit its lowest level since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago, bolstering hopes that monetary policymakers could stop raising interest rates this summer. Annual consumer prices in the 20-country single currency bloc rose 6.1 per cent in the year to May, a

UK house prices have fallen further as rising mortgage rates deterred home buyers and prompted owners to repay property loans at a near record rate. Figures from the Nationwide Building Society released on Thursday showed prices of the average property in May were 3.4 per cent lower than a year earlier, with the annual fall

Ukraine is ready to join Nato but is waiting for the alliance to reach an agreement on its entry, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, stepping up pressure on western governments as a debate over providing security guarantees to Kyiv intensifies. Ukraine has long seen membership of the US-led military alliance as the foundation of its future

Stocks edged higher in Asia and futures markets tipped European shares to rally on Thursday after the US House of Representatives voted to raise the debt ceiling, sending the bill to the Senate where it is expected to be passed. Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng stock index and Japan’s Topix both rose 0.8 per cent,