Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Technology myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. The first time I heard the term “superfluous people” was when reading the 19th-century Russian writers Alexander Pushkin and Ivan Turgenev. In their stories, mollycoddled, world-weary layabouts from the minor nobility would chase women, gamble away
The Florida state legislative session ended Friday with lawmakers approving a $117.46 billion budget for fiscal 2024-2025, up 0.8% from the $116.5 billion fiscal 2023-2024 budget. This year’s budget provides another $500 million toward accelerating the debt pay-down. The general fund budget totals roughly $49.4 billion, a 7.2% increase from the current fiscal year’s budget
Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the UK tax myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. More than 13,000 wealthy families faced surprise tax bills as high as £1.4mn on lifetime gifts, after the donor died within seven years of making the bequest, data has shown. The donors had tried to
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Michael Gove has defended the UK government’s new definition of extremism from a wave of criticism, maintaining that it does not seek to ban organisations but instead to allow government bodies to “choose our friends
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. I left my meeting with a senior French officer feeling that the west is so weak it scarcely exists any more. “The West”, a longtime object of obsession for anti-westerners from Egypt’s President Nasser to
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Deutsche Bank slashed cash bonuses of senior executives by up to 50 per cent in the wake of a botched IT project that caused chaos for German retail clients and attracted a rebuke from banking
The working day for MPs in the House of Commons chamber has been shorter on average this parliamentary session than in any other in the past quarter century, according to a Financial Times analysis. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been accused of presiding over a “zombie parliament”, with opposition parties arguing the relative shortness of
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Shell has weakened some of its climate targets to accommodate its plans to keep growing its giant gas business, even as it pushes to cut emissions to net zero by 2050. In the first three-year
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. TikTok is the star of social media. Upstart networks such as Donald Trump’s Truth Social and Meta’s Threads might reach thousands or millions of users, but TikTok’s audience exceeds a billion. It launched an in-app
This was supposed to be Yasser al-Ostaz’s final year at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City before graduating as an engineer. But on October 7, exactly a week after classes started in 2023, his hopes of completing his degree were shattered. Al-Ostaz, from north Gaza, is now living in a tent in the small town of
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Borrowing costs for European companies have fallen to a two-year low against benchmark bonds, as shifting expectations on interest rates narrow the gap with their US counterparts. The average European investment-grade spread — the premium
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The writer is the founder and managing director of New Financial, a capital markets think-tank. When Jeremy Hunt announced plans for a UK Isa at last week’s budget, it echoed a similar proposal by one
Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Education myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. Campaigners who have sued Harvard and other US universities over alleged antisemitism on campus are raising millions of dollars to go after other prominent schools. “We have a number of others who we’re going to be
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. A common refrain in the City of London is that finance directors make the best boardroom chairs. They are seen to have smaller egos (at least compared with some table-thumping chief executives), an attention to
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. If the entire (cooked) length of instant noodles sold around the world in a single year were laid out in a line, the resulting 6.2bn kilometre giga-noodle would stretch well beyond Pluto and into the
Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the UK house prices myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. UK estate agents are at their most optimistic about near-term growth in house prices in almost two years, according to a closely watched survey published on Thursday that also points to more properties coming
Marlboro maker Altria Group said it plans to sell more than $2.2bn worth of its shares in Budweiser and Beck’s brewer AB InBev. Altria on Wednesday announced it planned to offload 35mn of its shares in the brewer via a secondary offering of American Depositary Receipts in the US, and private placements of shares in
The US House of Representatives’ approval of a bill to ban TikTok from app stores unless it is sold by its Chinese parent company has cemented the video-sharing platform as one of the biggest flashpoints in a wider US-China conflict and has ignited a debate about free speech and data security. The overwhelming support for
Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The early 1990s saw an ugly US populist backlash against Japan’s acquisition push of American assets. That era seems to have partially returned. On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that President Joe Biden would soon
When former CNN boss Jeff Zucker swooped in with an audacious eleventh-hour Abu Dhabi-backed bid to take control of the UK’s Telegraph and Spectator last November, he appeared confident he would emerge a winner. But Zucker underestimated the fierce resistance he would encounter as he went head-to-head with Britain’s Conservative establishment — and its favourite
The Kansas Department of Transportation expects to head to the municipal market this summer with its first bond issue to help finance a $10 billion, statewide transportation improvement program. The $200 million of bonds backed by state highway fund revenue will be sold in a negotiated deal for the 10-year Eisenhower Legacy Transportation Program, which