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When Joe Biden launched his re-election bid with a social media video on Tuesday, the US president left little doubt about who will be by his side as he seeks another four years in the White House. The three-minute clip, narrated by Biden, is full of images of vice-president Kamala Harris: conferring with the president

The writer is a professor of sociology at Edinburgh university Fierce hostility was the first reaction to the Chicago Board of Trade’s proposal to set up an organised market in stock options in the early 1970s. There were “absolutely unsurmountable obstacles”, said one Securities and Exchange Commission official, according to the Board’s Joe Sullivan, who

Tencent is ramping up overseas investment in gaming assets, seeking to diversify away from China even as Beijing lifts punishing restrictions on the industry. China’s largest listed company by market capitalisation is aiming to invest in or purchase gaming studios after slowing the pace of new investments towards the end of 2022, according to four

The shareholder registers of oil companies these days resemble a pack of gerbils fighting under a blanket. There are those who want the companies to cut oil and gas production targets and to do it yesterday, those who want to make as much money as possible right now, and everything in between. BP’s annual general

Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader once recognised by the west as Venezuela’s legitimate president, arrived in the US on Tuesday, strengthening the hand of authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro amid stalled political negotiations. Guaidó, the most prominent member of Venezuela’s opposition, said on social media ahead of his departure that his family had been threatened. “Until

Google’s advertising revenue in the opening months of 2023 came close to matching the buoyant results it reported a year ago, allowing parent Alphabet to top Wall Street’s earnings expectations and lifting its shares 4 per cent in after-market trading on Tuesday. The results followed two quarters of earnings disappointments, as advertisers pulled back and

Shares of First Republic continued to plunge on Tuesday as regulators in Washington and financiers on Wall Street scrambled to come up with a plan to stabilise the ailing bank. The California-based lender’s stock price, which is down by more than 90 per cent this year, fell by a further 40 per cent, a day

Microsoft’s cloud division continued to drive better-than-expected quarterly earnings, dispelling fears that growth would decelerate as corporate clients keep costs in check and try to do more with less. The company’s intelligent cloud unit — its biggest revenue driver, led by Azure, its public cloud computing platform — recorded revenue of $22.1bn in the three months

The UK government said on Tuesday that its target to reduce sewage overflows by 2050 would be enshrined in law, as it sought to head off a growing political storm over water pollution in England and Wales. Thérèse Coffey, environment secretary, told the House of Commons the Conservatives’ plan was “credible and costed” and accused

The relationship between the US and China is likely to determine humanity’s fate in the 21st century. It will determine whether there will be peace, prosperity and protection of the planetary environment, or the opposites. Should it be the latter, future historians (if any such actually exist) will surely marvel at the inability of the

Britain’s companies and households need to accept that high energy prices and inflation will make them “all worse off”, the Bank of England’s chief economist said on Tuesday, in an attempt to head off a wage-price spiral. Huw Pill told a Columbia University podcast that high inflation would persist if companies remained unwilling to take

Europe’s financial authorities are quizzing lenders about their exposure to rapidly rising interest rates, as they investigate how much this risk may spread beyond the banking sector. Andrea Enria, chair of the European Central Bank’s supervisory board, said the bank was looking at whether unrealised losses on lenders’ bond portfolios, the value of which have

Let us finish the job, said Joe Biden in his re-election video. The rest of us, including Biden, could have been forgiven for thinking he had already done that by defeating Donald Trump in 2020. Yet here we are again: two bald men fighting over a comb, as Jorge Luis Borges depicted the British-Argentine war

Ever since the voting machines maker Dominion secured a blockbuster settlement last week in its libel suit against Fox News, it felt inevitable that someone at Rupert Murdoch’s channel would have to shoulder the blame. No company likes to make expensive, self-inflicted mistakes but Fox’s airing of baseless claims that Dominion was complicit in rigging

Joe Biden has announced he will seek a second term in the White House, ending months of speculation and firing the starting gun on a 2024 re-election campaign that could result in a rematch of his 2020 clash with Donald Trump. In a video posted to social media on Tuesday that sought to depict him

The trappings of Joe Biden’s office were on full display in the days leading up to his re-election announcement: he spent the weekend at the presidential retreat Camp David, had lunch with his vice-president Kamala Harris at the White House and held an event in the Rose Garden to honour US teachers. With the Marine

The omni-talented entertainer Barry Humphries died over the weekend. On Monday, his native Australia announced a new and enhanced defence posture. One way of engaging with the world as a middle power is fading. Another has just started. In the middle of the last century, Humphries, Germaine Greer, Clive James and Robert Hughes brought their

South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol is set to receive a warm welcome in Washington this week, spending two days with his US counterpart Joe Biden on a state visit that will underline Seoul’s position on the front lines of US economic and security concerns in Asia. South Korea’s manufacturing muscle and expertise in semiconductors

The UK government borrowed £139.2bn in the 2022-23 financial year, significantly less than official forecasts, in a development that opens the way to possible tax cuts later in the year. The borrowing figure, published by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday, was £13.2bn less than forecast last month — largely because of lower than expected

Asian stocks sold off sharply on Tuesday with investors growing increasingly nervous about the extent of China’s recovery and potential US restrictions on investments in the world’s second-biggest economy. China’s CSI 300 index dropped 0.8 per cent, taking its decline since last Tuesday to more than 5 per cent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index slipped