South Korea erroneously sent a warning to residents of Seoul to take shelter after North Korea fired a projectile Wednesday morning, just days after signalling its intention to launch its first military reconnaissance satellite. Japan also issued a missile alert for the southern island of Okinawa, but it was quickly lifted after the projectile, which
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Western countries are increasing pressure on Turkey to admit Sweden to Nato, as Stockholm makes a final push to overcome Ankara’s opposition to its membership. Ulf Kristersson, Sweden’s prime minister, writes in the Financial Times that a new anti-terror law entering force on Thursday delivers “on the last part” of an agreement to secure Ankara’s
The writer is prime minister of Sweden With just over five weeks to go until the Nato summit in Vilnius, it is time to seriously consider Sweden’s application for Nato membership. Since the organisation’s meeting last year, 29 allies have approved Sweden’s application. Turkey and Hungary remain. Sweden has entered into an agreement with Turkey
The Conservative party’s high-profile mayor, Ben Houchen, has again been accused of secrecy after plans for a third transfer of public assets in his north-east England region were leaked to the Financial Times. Houchen, mayor of the Tees Valley, privately struck a deal with Hartlepool council to take control of the community’s key civic buildings
The UK’s security priority must remain Europe and the Atlantic, as Russia is the main threat to Britain until the end of the decade, the head of the country’s defence intelligence organisation has warned. In rare public remarks, Adrian Bird, chief of Defence Intelligence, stressed that the UK’s own backyard should be its primary concern.
Statisticians are questioning the accuracy of the official data that underpins UK government policymaking after the latest migration figures were significantly out of line with analysts’ expectations. Last week, experts were left puzzled when the Office for National Statistics reported that net migration reached 606,000 in 2022. Though that figure marked a record for the
Now that there aren’t any banks immediately and obviously on the brink of collapse any more, attention is shifting to commercial real estate, the doomed asset class du jour. The current outpouring of angst has felt a little overdone, and belated (swaths of CRE has been cruising for a bruising since the pandemic). And as
UK businesses are in the middle of a slow-motion car crash. New, expensive energy supply contracts are kicking in, just when government support has been scaled back. This makes energy unaffordable for some smaller companies and is likely to hit the troubled retail and hospitality sectors the hardest. Of course, this was all terribly predictable.
An Englishman’s home is his castle, they say. But too few Britons can afford a dwelling that would even rank as a sentry box. The opposition Labour party, which leads in opinion polls, therefore wants to cut the prices at which landowners are forced to sell sites to local authorities. It should think again. Councils
Britain’s housing market is broken. England has among the lowest numbers of homes per 1,000 people in western Europe, and dwellings are among the smallest and most expensive. UK house prices are about nine times average earnings; they were last at such heights in Queen Victoria’s reign. With home ownership falling, the Labour party is
Members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma can be shielded from lawsuits linked to the US opioid crisis in exchange for payments worth up to $6bn, appellate judges have ruled in a reversal of a lower court’s decision. The judgment addresses a controversial provision of US law that released Sackler family owners of
UK prime minister Rishi Sunak will fly to Washington next week for a meeting with US president Joe Biden — but there will be no attempt to forge a bilateral trade deal. Downing Street on Tuesday announced the visit, saying it would be a chance for the two countries to enhance their “co-operation and co-ordination”
A group of chief executives and scientists from companies including OpenAI and Google DeepMind has warned the threat to humanity from the fast-developing technology rivals that of nuclear conflict and disease. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” said a
Nvidia has become the first chipmaker to hit a $1tn valuation, leading a surge of enthusiasm across Wall Street for companies seen to benefit from the latest developments in artificial intelligence. Its shares rose more than 4 per cent to hit $406.1 in early trading in New York on Tuesday, after its chief executive Jensen
Consider for a moment what Donald Trump gives to his average follower. Membership in a vast nationwide communion of like-minded people. A paternal figure in a confusing world. The frisson of transgression: middle-aged whites don’t often in life get to play the rebel. Next to all this, what is the marginal benefit of seeing him
Spanish inflation has dropped to 2.9 per cent, its lowest level for almost two years, boosting hopes that price pressures will ease quickly across the eurozone. Economists said the bigger than expected fall was good news for the European Central Bank, suggesting that inflation data for the rest of the eurozone published later this week
Moscow came under attack by several drones on Tuesday morning, Russian officials said, exposing the capital’s vulnerability to retaliation over President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The barrage shortly after sunrise came as Russia launched another wave of air strikes on Kyiv, killing at least one person, hospitalising others and forcing the evacuation of a
Chinese stocks in Hong Kong fell into bear market territory amid mounting doubts about the outlook for the world’s second-largest economy and rising tensions between Washington and Beijing Declines for the Hang Seng China Enterprises index during Asian trading on Tuesday pushed it 20 per cent lower from its peak in January, placing it in
Supermarket chain Asda has agreed to buy the UK and Irish operations of petrol station group EG Group in a £2.3bn deal. The acquisition has been masterminded by the billionaire Issa brothers who co-own Asda and EG Group, which also operates petrol stations in the US, Australia and parts of Europe. Zuber Issa said on
David Handler made sure he signed the documents this time. Last summer, the veteran investment banker authorised and delivered a formal request to his then employer, Centerview Partners, seeking confidential details about its financial performance. He believed Centerview’s two founding partners, Blair Effron and Robert Pruzan, had been seeking to expel him from the firm,
First there was a mysterious drone strike on the Kremlin. Next came an “invasion” whose embarrassing implications for Moscow could prompt it to divert front-line troops to border regions. Then, late last week, Ukraine launched a marine drone attack on a Russian spy ship in the Black Sea. Ahead of Kyiv’s long-expected counter-offensive, when it