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Boris Johnson has shelved plans to ban multibuy deals on unhealthy food in supermarkets after concluding that it would hit British consumers’ wallets during a broader cost of living crisis. The U-turn prompted immediate condemnation from health experts who said it would undermine the UK government’s efforts to tackle obesity — which puts an enormous

A new show which has both taken far too long to open and should never have seen the light of day has taken the West End by storm this week. Nicknamed the Wagatha Christie Trial or Scousetrap, the vanity case of Rebekah Vardy vs Coleen Rooney is estimated to cost about £2mn and is surge-powering

This interview is an edited and condensed version of an on-stage conversation that took place at the FT Weekend Festival in Washington, DC, on May 7 Frederick Studemann, FT literary editor: This session, “Writing in an Age of Intolerance”, was conceived as a conversation about what people call the culture wars. But now, as we

For the next few months in New York, we’re going to have daylight until 8pm. As the sun stays out longer and the days get warmer, there’s a playful and slightly reckless charge to the air. Summer is coming, and one can’t help but feel a little giddy, as though the season could still bring

I am bemused by your book reviewer repeating the claim that “the biggest threat to the UK was a Chinese farmer getting infected by an animal with a novel pathogen before boarding a plane to Britain” (Life & Arts, April 30). A Chinese farmer getting on a plane to London? Possible. But perhaps some of

One of Tether’s key partners halved its borrowings of the stablecoin in the months before the temporary loss of its dollar peg spread shockwaves through markets. Celsius Network, a crypto lender with digital assets valued at $17bn, reduced its borrowings of Tether’s USDT stablecoin down to 500m before the recent market volatility, according to a person

Regarding Simon Kuper’s piece on how to survive a conference (Opinion, FT Weekend, April 30), in my regiment we had an admirable way to stop officers droning on prior to lunch. The solution was to give all officers a pre-lunch drink on mess funds if the meeting ended by one o’clock. We never ran over

Andrei Kozyrev’s admirable opinion piece (“Putin’s military parade will be a squalid spectacle”, Opinion, May 7) points out the similarities “between Russian aggression today and Hitler’s war of conquest in Europe after 1939”. But surely the similarities lie even closer to home: Soviet aggression in 1939, when it invaded Poland from the east, exterminating or

In “We need to talk about anger” (Life & Arts, April 23) Enuma Okoro framed her article around pieces of art that intrigued as they expressed anger; and ended the column with a comment that “we need to find healthy ways to own [anger], understand it and release it”. Actually, many have. The ancient Greek

With “Ballad in Plain D” from (for me) Bob Dylan’s most underrated album, your “The Life of a Song” goes from strength to strength (Life & Arts, April 30). To continue the theme of tragic break-ups, please can we have “You Never Wanted Me” by Jackson C Frank, not forgetting Sandy Denny’s version. Tim Jones

I was surprised to learn of Sinn Féin’s divorce from its relationship with historical memory at the end of Simon Schama’s overview of nationalism and remembrance (Life & Arts, May 7). The claim itself is a rewriting of history in that it ignores the party’s continued commemoration industry, which is devoted to eulogising the republican

The world’s largest carmakers have warned supply chain disruptions and higher raw material prices threaten the rollout of electric vehicles, even as demand for battery-powered models vastly exceeds manufacturers’ current production capacities. Speaking at the Financial Times’ eighth Future of the Car summit this week, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk cast doubt on his company’s

How are the mighty fallen. The Nasdaq has had its worst week since March 2020: It is down 28 per cent this year. Scottish Mortgage is down 41 per cent in the year to date — and is no longer the largest investment trust in the UK. The Ark Innovation ETF in the US is

When an aide told me that “one of our drivers” would pick me up for my lunch with Sam Bankman-Fried, I imagined a hulking black SUV of the kind that shuttles high rollers to and from the casinos in Nassau, where the 30-year-old crypto billionaire lives. Instead, it’s a modest maroon Honda that pulls up

Masayoshi Son was uncharacteristically subdued when he revealed on Thursday that the Vision Fund lost $27bn from its investments last business year. He abstained from tongue-in-cheek slides depicting SoftBank geese laying the golden eggs of the AI revolution or a unicorn with wings flying over the “Valley of Coronavirus”. He did not compare himself to

Over the past 40 years or so, the face of dictatorship has changed a great deal. The most notorious tyrants of the 20th century — from Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to Uganda’s Idi Amin and François “Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti — ruled by means of mass violence, cults of personality, rigid

Nowhere is our bad attitude towards food better illustrated than by a recent incident in the home of Professor Phil Stevenson, head of trait diversity and function at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. During a meal his teenage son threw a piece of cauliflower in the bin because it was a bit burnt. “I said to

Russia’s war in Ukraine has created fresh problems for its Caribbean ally Cuba, already shaken by street protests and facing severe financial stress amid tighter US sanctions and a pandemic-induced collapse in tourism. Cubans have contended with chronic shortages of food, medicine and other basic goods for more than two years, owing to the country’s

To fully experience Alexandra Kehayoglou’s new artwork at the Kunsthal KAdE museum in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, you’ll need to take your shoes off. Then the Argentine artist’s textile piece, “Paraná de Las Palmas”, can be walked on, laid upon and even rolled around on. Part of the exhibition Abrasive Paradise (until July 3) and stretching

What child can resist a secret door, one that leads to another world, magical or menacing? This staple in stories from Alice in Wonderland to Harry Potter excites the adult imagination, too: it appears, alongside hidden passageways and sliding bookcases, in many spy films and thrillers. But it is not just a fictional trope. European