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UK prime minister Boris Johnson on Friday admitted that the government’s existing £37bn cost of living package may not be enough to support struggling households, as Liz Truss, the frontrunner to replace him, rejected calls for windfall taxes to limit the pain of rising energy bills. Johnson, who will leave office next month, said in

Spain has said an additional link in a gas pipeline from the Iberian peninsula to France could be ready within nine months after Germany backed the idea of linking the region to central Europe to improve the continent’s energy security. Spanish energy and environment minister Teresa Ribera said on Friday that a new section of

Germany’s ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder is suing the Bundestag to restore the parliamentary privileges it stripped him of in May after he refused to distance himself from Russian president Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine war. Schröder’s lawyer Michael Nagel told the DPA news agency on Friday that the lawsuit had been filed with a Berlin administrative

Count me among those who believe the wheels of US justice should turn as surely for Donald Trump as for any ordinary criminal suspect. No man is higher than the law etc. Yet I cannot help worrying that the Republican party’s response to this week’s FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago has pushed America’s democratic predicament into

Before our Lunch has even begun, Toto Wolff has bent the FT’s rules. It is hard enough to pin down the globetrotting leader of Mercedes’ Formula 1 team to a specific continent, let alone a city, so when his handlers suggest a late dinner in Wolff’s native Vienna rather than a rushed midday meeting, I

The UK economy contracted in the second quarter, with households cutting spending as the cost of living crisis began to bite and health sector output falling as Covid cases and testing declined. Gross domestic product, the measure of the quantity of goods and services produced, fell 0.1 per cent in the second quarter of the

Anna Williamson has been hunting for a flat in London since January. In that time, average rates for new mortgages have jumped multiple times, each limiting the pool of what she can buy. Grace and Howard are anxiously waiting to see how much further the cost of borrowing will have risen by September, when they

European shares rose on Friday as investors balanced signs of steadying inflation in the US with questions over the global economic outlook. The Stoxx Europe 600 added 0.4 per cent, while Germany’s Dax rose 0.6 per cent. London’s FTSE 100 moved 0.5 per cent higher. Those moves came as fresh data showed that the UK

With the fall of Kabul on August 15 2021 and the Taliban’s reinstatement of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, women across the country had to find ways to cope with their lives being turned upside down swiftly and unexpectedly.  A group of women writers aged 22 to 60, from different provinces and ethnic groups, found

Boris Johnson briefly chaired a crisis meeting with energy companies on Thursday as a riposte to claims that he is leading a “zombie government”, but all big decisions have been put on hold until a new UK prime minister is in place. Civil servants may be working behind the scenes on policy options for the

The government long insisted it was not going to introduce a windfall tax on soaring energy company profits. It has now done one and repeatedly threatened another. All while various ministers mutter that they do not believe in the entire endeavour. Electricity generators came under government pressure this week to show plans to boost investment

Johnson & Johnson said it will discontinue production of its talc-based baby powder in 2023 as it battles almost 40,000 legal claims that the product caused users to fall ill with cancer. The US drugmaker said on Thursday that it decided to transition to an all cornstarch-based baby powder, which it has already launched in

US attorney-general Merrick Garland said the justice department had moved to unseal the search warrant and the list of items retrieved by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday, breaking days of silence on the extraordinary operation. In a statement from the headquarters of the Department of Justice in Washington on Thursday, Garland

Asian shares rallied and European stocks ticked higher after data showed that inflation in the US had steadied, boosting investors’ hopes that the Federal Reserve will soften its approach to tackling rising prices. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 gained 0.4 per cent at the open, while the FTSE 100 slipped 0.2 per cent and Germany’s

Liz Truss, the Tory leadership frontrunner, is a strong communicator, gutsy and could prove to be an economic “nightmare” for Labour, according to some of the opposition party’s leading strategists. Allies of Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer have also been impressed by the way the foreign secretary has grown into the contest to succeed outgoing

Since Covid-19 took its first English life in March 2020, the country has recorded around 120,000 more deaths than would have been expected over the same months of three typical, non-pandemic years. This is a huge number but one that, for the first year of the pandemic, was relatively straightforward to explain. A novel and

Maybe Rupert Murdoch and AT&T knew what they were doing all along. In recent years both have curtailed their Hollywood ambitions. The pair sold entertainment assets to buyers keen to do battle in the content streaming wars. So far this year, Fox and AT&T shares have held up versus declining market indices. Other media titans

European electricity prices have soared to new records as the prolonged heatwave disrupted power markets that were already under strain from Russia’s cuts to the continent’s gas supplies. German baseload power for delivery next year, the benchmark European price, was up more than 5 per cent on Thursday at a record €455 per megawatt hour.

Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey has sent a strong warning to the UK’s next prime minister not to interfere politically in the regulation of the City of London, saying it would hit the country’s competitiveness. The two Tory leadership contenders, foreign secretary Liz Truss and former chancellor Rishi Sunak, want to allow ministers to

Consumers have soured on stuff. For nearly two years, the pandemic supercharged online purchases of everything from home office equipment and furniture to cooking gear and gardening tools. The surging demand for goods exacerbated supply chain woes and sent prices skyrocketing, even as lockdowns strangled spending on travel and entertainment. But now western economies are