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European shares and US stock futures rose sharply on Thursday, as Facebook parent Meta rallied in out-of-hours trading on the back of better than expected profits. The regional Stoxx Europe 600 index added 0.9 per cent, while futures contracts tracking Wall Street’s S&P 500 rose 1.4 per cent. Those tracking the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 index

Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador is proposing a sweeping overhaul of the country’s election apparatus, in a move analysts said would damage democracy by handing his party greater control of the electoral system. The proposed constitutional changes, which will be sent to Congress on Thursday, would dissolve the country’s national electoral institute (INE), which

Eli Lilly said a late-stage trial of its new weight-loss drug showed it helped patients on high doses reduce their body weight by about a fifth, raising hopes among doctors and investors that it could become a blockbuster treatment to tackle the global obesity epidemic. The US drugmaker said its drug Tirzepatide showed an average

Accounting and investor groups on Thursday hit out at the government’s move to ditch a bill from its next legislative programme that would have implemented long-delayed reform of audit and corporate governance. A draft bill to underpin the reform, including the creation of a new regulator of audit firms, has been dropped from the Queen’s

The Conservative party is coming under mounting pressure to expel a backbench MP accused of watching pornography in the House of Commons chamber. The MP, who has not been named, has been referred to parliament’s independent complaints and grievance scheme by Chris Heaton-Harris, Tory chief whip, after two female party members said on Tuesday that

The British government has become a shareholder in a cannabis-based products company called Grass & Co, as well as a south London brewery and a Nordic yoghurt bar maker as part of its most recent investments under the Future Fund Covid-19 support scheme. Chancellor Rishi Sunak launched the Future Fund in May 2020 to help

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the UK’s Brexit opportunities minister, has defended his decision to delay for a fourth time full post-Brexit border checks on imports from the EU, claiming it would save £1bn a year and control rising living costs. Port operators were critical, saying the £100mn they had spent in preparation for the checks from July

Elon Musk is either a jester or a genius, if commentary since the world’s richest man bid $44bn for Twitter is anything to go by. But Musk’s loud and divisive personality, perfectly suited to the platform, risks diverting attention from bigger questions about who should control social media. No matter whether his audacious debt-fuelled bid

Hedge fund Elliott Management has launched an activist campaign against Suncor Energy, one of Canada’s biggest oil producers, calling for an overhaul of company leadership in a bet on the future of the country’s controversial oil sands. Elliott, which said it was one of Suncor’s top shareholders with a 3.4 per cent stake, hit out

There’s a lot of debate over what makes a successful social media platform. Elon Musk promises to prioritise freedom of speech if he takes over Twitter but balancing that with moderation is a course that networks have tried to navigate since their inception. In the wake of the Tesla chief’s $44bn buyout of Twitter, the

It was barely two weeks after Carillion’s 2018 collapse that the head of the accountancy watchdog — a body accused of being “useless” and “toothless” — called for an overhaul of the audit market. There was plenty of blame to go around. The construction company’s demise had left tens of thousands of staff facing redundancy,

Voluntary insolvencies in England and Wales reached their highest level for 60 years in the first quarter to a backdrop of surging business closures, according to official statistics. In the first three months of 2022 there were about 4,900 company insolvencies, more than double the number in the same period last year, according to data

Some of the world’s largest asset managers are clamouring for a slice of the action after China announced plans this month to push more of the country’s vast pool of household savings into financial markets. Under the new schemes, employees will be able to contribute up to Rmb12,000 a year ($1,860) to private pension plans,

In recent years, there has been a growing fear among certain sections of the British public that our much loved and strictly publicly funded National Health Service is at risk of being privatised. The NHS will be secretly sold by the dastardly Tories to US corporations in a cut price deal, or so the theory

Rishi Sunak, UK chancellor, has launched a consultation on radically changing the rules governing insurance companies, with the aim of allowing them to invest tens of billions of pounds more in infrastructure — including green energy. The government argues that reform of the EU’s Solvency II rules — and their replacement with a British regulatory

The US dollar surged to its highest level in two decades on Thursday as investors ramped up bets that aggressive interest rate rises from the Federal Reserve will leave other big central banks trailing far in its wake. The dollar index, a gauge of the US currency’s strength against a basket of other developed world

It is arguably the strangest thing to emerge from an English car park since they found Richard III under a Leicester pay-and-display. This time, on an equally nondescript patch of asphalt opposite a Burger King in Coventry, the focus is the future — and a purported revolution in green transport. Air-One, which opened in the

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Tug of war matches are rarely lengthier or more exhausting than those between the insurance industry and its customers. The conflict in Ukraine is creating many such tussles, where the outcome remains extremely uncertain. A little clarity emerged in an update from UK speciality insurer Lancashire on Thursday. It estimated its ultimate net losses in

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