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The US Senate approved $40bn in military, economic and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine on Thursday, as Russia continues its offensive in the country’s Donbas region. The vote passed 86-11 after a week-long delay and despite opposition from a handful of self-described America First Republicans. US president Joe Biden is expected to quickly sign the measure,

First seize the airwaves. The old playbook, deployed in countless coups across Asia and Africa, is back in vogue. Authorities in Hong Kong froze the assets and arrested top journalists of Apple Daily, a gossipy pro-democracy newspaper, triggering its demise. Now Russian authorities have seized and raided Google’s domestic bank account, tipping its subsidiary in

Sir Bufton Tufton, the archetypal British Conservative MP, is deeply unhappy. He did not spend decades advocating free market economics to see such a dire situation visited on the country’s economy. Growth is anaemic, inflation rampant, the tax burden at its highest in six decades and every corner of the public realm has an insatiable

Royal Mail has said there is a “more urgent” need for the company to adapt to changing consumer behaviour after the pandemic as it reported a slide in profits and warned it would lift prices to counter the effects of climbing inflation. The UK postal service pointed to “significant headwinds” ahead as it highlighted the

UK competition regulators have warned that the €13bn merger of French waste and water groups Veolia and Suez risks driving up council bills in Britain because the deal will cut the choice available to local authorities. Paris-based Veolia agreed to buy Suez in April 2021 after an acrimonious pursuit that erupted into a public dispute

Art came into Lonnie Holley’s life, improbably and unannounced, when he was 29 years old, following a family tragedy. He made two tombstones for a nephew and niece who died in a house fire in his home city of Birmingham, Alabama. In the process of their manufacture, he unexpectedly found himself infused with a rare

On the eve of the publication of her newest novel in English, Jokha Alharthi is nervous. Not about the reception of her work, Bitter Orange Tree, but over the possibility that I will misrepresent her. “I’ve seen shocking headlines [about me] put on an article”, she says. “It makes me hold back from doing interviews.”

One thing to start: US officials are pushing tariffs or a price cap on Russian crude to help break an impasse in the EU over new oil sanctions. Welcome back to Energy Source! With fuel stockpiles expected to continue dropping, we have a dire warning from JPMorgan that US petrol prices could top $6 a

Lymington is a lovely little spot. It’s on the south edge of the New Forest National Park and just a few hundred yards from the Isle of Wight, making it the closest place on the UK mainland to the 1950s. There is a pleasant little harbour with some smart boats, the sort you have if

An internal staff memo from the desk of Greg Peters, co-chief investment officer of the $890bn asset manager PGIM Fixed Income, reaches our inbox. It makes some timely points so we’re sharing the highlights. Peters has been around the block and knows his stuff. Despite being known internally for somewhat jazzy jackets, he has helped

Sri Lanka’s central bank has confirmed the country has missed a deadline for foreign debt repayments, the first sovereign default in the Asia-Pacific region this century, according to Moody’s. A 30-day grace period for missed interest payments on two international sovereign bonds expired on Wednesday, forcing Sri Lanka into what some analysts called a “hard”

British Airways owner IAG has agreed to order 50 Boeing 737 Max jets, handing the US aerospace group a much-needed boost as it struggles to overcome a series of production delays to its core programmes. IAG on Thursday said the order for the narrow-bodied aircraft was worth $6.25bn at list prices, but that it had

Target yesterday echoed a warning from rival Walmart the day before that rising costs would hit its annual profits, triggering the biggest one-day decline in its share price since the stock market crash of 1987. Shares in Walmart, the world’s largest bricks-and-mortar retailer, fell a further 6.8 per cent yesterday after losing 11 per cent

The movie in which the two best friends in the middle of sharp-witted comedy Emergency would want to appear is simple: a riotous college romp. After all, they are the perfect odd couple for it: Sean (RJ Cyler) a hardcore thrill-seeker, his buddy Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) bookish and morally diligent. Marking their graduation with

Last week, shares of Chinese tech giants looked like they could not go any lower. On Thursday, Tencent led further declines, falling as much as 8 per cent and pulling down Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index 2.5 per cent. The sell-off adjusts valuations to rising discount rates and lower expected growth. It has further to

Good morning. The chancellor Rishi Sunak has warned “the next few months will be tough”, after inflation hit 9 per cent, its highest rate in 40 years and more than any other G7 economy. Political rows over the Bank of England’s handling of its inflation target are rumbling on. That, plus Labour-Liberal Democrat relations, are

The net worth required to be considered wealthy in the US has reverted back to near pre-pandemic levels of $2.2mn, as inflation weighs on household finances and the rising cost of borrowing money puts pressure on prospective homebuyers. The 2022 rise followed a stark drop in last year’s figure, which fell to $1.9mn in 2021

The latest ESG version of the S&P 500 index has a notable absentee, who took the exclusion with his customary grace. Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500, while Tesla didn’t make the list! ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social

Good morning. Yesterday, Rob landed in London just in time to hear that UK inflation there had hit 9 per cent. This turned out to be the best news of the day. Soon thereafter, markets descended into the worst session since the grim early weeks of the pandemic. A few days ago we wrote this:

Good morning and welcome to Europe Express. In case you’re confused about what exactly EU energy companies should do to continue paying for Russian gas — as morally unpalatable as that may be in the context of the war in Ukraine — you’re not the only one. We’ll try to cut through the fog of