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Bank of England regulators have warned lenders about “gaming the rules” with capital arbitrage transactions via their pension schemes, a move largely directed at Barclays, which has used such deals to boost its capital level. On Wednesday, the Prudential Regulation Authority released a strongly-worded statement criticising the use of “deficit reduction transactions with their defined-benefit

New York City was already on edge about rising gun violence, lawlessness and hate crimes. Then came Tuesday’s attack on a Brooklyn subway, in which a masked suspect detonated two smoke grenades and shot 10 people during the morning rush hour. On Wednesday, police arrested Frank James, a 62-year-old man who had earlier been named

A US judge has allowed a case to proceed against UK traders accused of causing an unprecedented crash in oil futures markets after ruling that text messages between the group were sufficient to point towards a potential conspiracy. The proposed class-action lawsuit centres around trading on April 20 2020, when the price of benchmark West

Stellantis shareholders have rejected a proposed €19mn pay package for the carmaker’s chief executive Carlos Tavares and remuneration for other managers after an outcry from a minority investor and some French unions over excessive payouts. Just over 52 per cent of investors voted against the remuneration report of the world’s fourth biggest carmaker at an

This article picked by a teacher with suggested questions is part of the Financial Times free schools access programme. Details/registration here. Specification: AQA Physical Geography 3.1.6 Ecosystems under stress This article is about Costa Rica. It looks at the issues of sustainability and ecosystems under pressure due to economic development, particularly with relationship to housing development,

Microsoft was once the primary target of Big Tech antitrust cases, narrowly avoiding having to split into two companies at the end of the 1990s when it was taken to court for making it difficult for customers to uninstall Internet Explorer in favour of other browsers. The company eventually settled with the US Department of

The UK government has announced a £2.6bn fund to replace EU development financing post-Brexit but attracted immediate criticism from Welsh and Scottish leaders for failing to match previous levels of EU funding. Michael Gove, levelling-up secretary, said the new Shared Prosperity Fund would “help spread opportunity and level up the country” and made good on

Wall Street’s biggest banks prospered during the pandemic. But JPMorgan’s first-quarter results suggest disappointment is in store for investors hoping higher US interest rates can keep the good times going. JPMorgan set the tone for the US bank earnings reporting a 42 per cent drop in first quarter net income on Wednesday. For America’s largest

In a mountainous part of central Bosnia-Herzegovina, the town of Konjic has a long history of decorative woodcarving. “At one point there were 36 woodcarving workshops,” says Orhan Niksic, a former senior economist with the World Bank, whose great-grandfather founded a workshop in Konjic in the late 1800s. “By 2014, we were the only ones

American Vintage wool hoodie, €195. Prada wool trousers, £1,400, and jacquard knitted shorts, £1,250. Comme des Garçons Play x Converse cotton Chuck ’70 sneakers, £130. Neckpiece, stylist’s own Furniture throughout, Memphis Milano. Ettore Sottsass metal Treetops floor lamp, 1981, €2,590 Hermès perforated technical-cotton canvas Quadrige shirt, €1,530. Isabel Marant cotton Carello trousers, £325. Edhèn raffia and brass Brera shoes, €450. Etro leather and cabochon-stone

Chess 2477 It’s mate in six at most by 1…Qxf1+! 2 Kxf1 d2+ 3 Kg2 Bc6+ 4 Qd5 Bxd5+ 5 e4 Bxe4+ 6 Kg1 d1=Q mate. Chess 2476 1 b4! Kxc4 2 Nf4! g6/g5 3 Rc7 mate. Chess 2475 1…Nxc3?? 2 Qxe6+! fxe6 3 Bg6 mate. An elegant double bishop mate. Chess 2474 1 Qxa3+ Ra4

Half a century ago, Bobby Fischer captured Boris Spassky’s world title in Reykjavik and sparked a global chess boom. A galaxy of English talent, led by Nigel Short and Michael Adams, surged to No 2 behind the former Soviet Union. England’s Fischer generation are now in their fifties and sixties, while Adams, 50, leads a

Cyber warfare follows on the heels of conventional weaponry, a fact not lost on Ukraine’s neighbouring governments and corporates. Globally, more is being spent on cyber security, according to an update from Darktrace on Wednesday. Yet investors marked its shares down 10 per cent. This is at odds with the way Moscow’s invasion of Kyiv

More than 250 people have been killed in severe flooding in South Africa, officials said on Wednesday, a day after heavy rains swept away roads and houses and disrupted shipping from the continent’s biggest port. The death toll in the floods in Kwazulu Natal, South Africa’s second-most populous province, makes it one of the worst

Private equity billionaire and co-owner of the Boston Celtics basketball team Stephen Pagliuca has revealed that Larry Tanenbaum, chair of the National Basketball Association, is among the list of heavyweight backers of his bid to buy Chelsea. The consortium led by the co-chair of Bain Capital, a US private equity firm with $160bn of assets

One oddity of the Ukrainian war has been watching far-right leaders such as Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini and Nigel Farage scramble back from their adoration of Vladimir Putin, while their far-left peers tone down the excoriations of Nato. It must have felt similar watching Hitler’s appeasers reinvent themselves in autumn 1939. Today’s far right

British travellers have been warned to expect extensive delays this Easter as staff shortages, engineering work and seized ferries affect the industry just as demand for holidays soars. Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said on Wednesday that he expected this weekend to be “extremely busy” as people take advantage of relaxed Covid travel restrictions to

Ukraine’s finance minister recently sent out an SOS to the west asking for emergency funding. The Institute of International Finance has had a stab at estimating just how bad the situation is. Its economists stress that there is obviously “an extraordinary level of uncertainty”, with the brutal war still ongoing, but reckon that Ukraine’s gross

Every novelist is in the business of managing cliché and the unreal. The first is necessary for a work to have some degree of universal appeal, the second because fiction is never a strictly documentary art. Realism itself is a way of managing invention, of deviating from and shaping real materials in the service of

At first, I assumed that the senior investment banker I was meeting for lunch at his posh private members’ club in Mayfair was joking. “There are no chief executives in Germany,” quipped the specialist in merger and acquisitions advisory. I wondered if he was referring to the fact that the current crop of German chief

Please don’t tell anyone what happened today lads x. That’s among the standout lines in chat logs released on Tuesday as part of litigation against UK traders accused of engineering an oil futures crash. A class-action lawsuit filed by rare coin shop Mish International Monetary alleges that traders associated with Vega Capital London made out