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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The activist shareholder which called in January for Peloton to fire co-founder John Foley has taken aim at its new chief executive, arguing that Barry McCarthyhas failed to reform the connected-fitness company’s governance or justify its continued independence. Blackwells Capital, which has a stake of almost 5 per cent, plans to set out its argument

P&O Ferries has suffered a setback in its efforts to return to full operations after maritime inspectors detained the Spirit of Britain, the second of two ferries on its Dover-Calais route to be barred from sailing. The UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency said the vessel was held because surveyors identified “a number of deficiencies” that

James Bullard, president of the St Louis branch of the Federal Reserve, has warned it is a “fantasy” to think the US central bank can bring down inflation sufficiently without raising interest rates to a level where they constrain the economy. Bullard, a voting member of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee and one of

Tesco lifted profits last year but the UK’s biggest supermarket group has warned earnings will suffer this year as it prioritises price competitiveness in the face of soaring costs and a vicious squeeze on household incomes. Chief executive Ken Murphy said on Wednesday that while the full impact of rising inflation was yet to be

Sometimes you come across a recipe or the story of a dish that strikes a chord. It could be something you tear out of a magazine or a screengrab on your phone that sets off a journey which concludes only when that dish is on your table. For us, Rosie Sykes’ The Sunday Night Book

Delta Air Lines’ chief executive said the carrier has sold a record number of tickets in the past five weeks as customers set aside their concerns about inflation to splurge on air travel. “We’ve . . . sold more tickets, in that time, than any period in public history,” Ed Bastian told the Financial Times in an interview. “We’re

A full EU embargo on Russian energy would trigger a major recession in Germany, sending output down 2.2 per cent next year and wiping out more than 400,000 jobs, according to the country’s top economic institutes. The new forecast released on Wednesday was more pessimistic than most earlier economic studies and could give cover for

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

More than two decades ago — before fund companies began converting mutual funds into ETFs and US regulators streamlined the ETF approval process — Vanguard executives had an idea. Rather than launch ETFs as a standalone vehicle, they decided to work on packaging them within a mutual fund. The idea led the firm in 2001

Wealthier UK investors have suffered greater losses than smaller traders since the beginning of the year, as market turbulence struck down the riskier portfolios typically favoured by those with higher levels of investment. Interactive Investor, which has roughly a one-fifth share of the UK’s self-directed investment market, said on Monday that customers with more than

The 47th Old Vic, London What wouldn’t we give to have Shakespeare’s voice on the seismic power struggles currently playing out on the national and international stage? His absence is key to Mike Bartlett’s bold, witty new drama, The 47th, which playfully echoes many of the playwright’s great works as it measures up to this