French voters began casting their ballots on Sunday in the first round of a presidential election in which far-right leader Marine Le Pen is mounting a strong challenge to the incumbent Emmanuel Macron. A victory for Le Pen, who is sceptical about the EU and Nato and has in the past boasted of her ties
The writer is professor of energy and climate change at University College London and was former senior adviser to energy regulator Ofgem The defining feature of the UK energy strategy is its incoherence. It doesn’t know what problem is it is trying to solve — and thus it doesn’t solve any. By failing to boost
Russia has boosted the fund that cushions its sanctions-hit economy with $3.4bn in additional oil and gas revenues thanks to rising energy prices since the start of its war with Ukraine, as it edges closer to its first debt default since 1998. Moscow said on Sunday that it would direct an additional Rbs273.4bn ($3.4bn) to
Britain’s public broadcaster wants its workforce to reflect the population it serves. By 2028 at the latest, the BBC hopes a quarter of its workforce — currently numbering 20,300 — will be from “a lower socio-economic background”. What does that mean? Brits spot class signifiers as keenly as police sniffer dogs locate loosely-bagged marijuana. Accents,
Covid cases in Shanghai hit their highest level yet as authorities in the locked-down city stepped up their battle to suppress China’s worst outbreak in two years. Shanghai, which is sealed off from the rest of the country as part of the most severe citywide measures since the virus emerged in Wuhan, reported 24,952 new
Your browser does not support playing this file but you can still download the MP3 file to play locally. In the second episode of this season of Tech Tonic, James Kynge, the FT’s Global China Editor, asks how significant Chinese intellectual property theft has been to the country’s rise as a global tech superpower. We
Just over a week ago, the United Nations made an announcement that prompted a biting put-down from a climate journalist named Megan Darby. “Ban the UN from naming things. I’m serious,” wrote Darby, after the UN launched an anti-greenwashing unit that it called the “High Level Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State
When Katie Lazell-Fairman returned to work after recovering from a Covid-19 infection, she quickly discovered that the virus had taken a much heavier toll on her body than she initially realised. “I woke up suddenly feeling incredibly exhausted, dizzy. My heart rate was 135 beats per minute standing, 140-150 walking,” says the 35-year-old, a data
Lars Wingefors’ 13-year-old self would approve of his recent purchase: Dark Horse Media, one of the biggest independent comic studios in the world and home to iconic titles including Hellboy and Sin City. Thirty years ago, while studying at a secondary school in Sweden, Wingefors started selling second-hand comics and by 18 he had dropped
Stand on the railway embankment near Hostomel and look north-east and the story of Russia’s rout in the Battle of Kyiv comes together. Three kilometres away you can see the village of Moschun, the site of a big battle and just south of it are the woods where Oleksandr Konoko, a battalion commander, described how,
When Buta Atwal took the helm of Wrightbus in 2019, coffee cups still littered the office desks and buses were standing half assembled on the factory floor. One of Northern Ireland’s most emblematic businesses had fallen into receivership six weeks previously. Atwal, 53, hadn’t planned to be a bus company chief executive, despite a quarter
Oleg Chaban, a Ukrainian psychiatrist, has witnessed at close quarters the emotional devastation caused by Russia’s war against his country. The head of psychology and psychotherapy services at Bogomolets National Medical University in Kyiv recalled a recent patient who just two days earlier saw her only child, a toddler daughter, die when the bus on which
Adaptation Making changes to deal with the effects of climate change — both now and in the future. This includes building infrastructure such as flood and fire defences, developing crops that can cope with new climatic conditions, and exploring new ways of cooling buildings. Air/Atmosphere While oxygen is critical to life on earth, it is
Trust is in diminishing supply around the world. That is true among nations, business counterparts and securities traders. In the markets we can measure this distrust in the differing prices of similar financial assets ultimately backed by the US Federal Government. Take, for example, the interest rate paid by the Federal Reserve to banks who
You saw some surreal things during the autumn/winter 2022 fashion shows earlier this year. I don’t just mean the spectacle of challenging garments paraded six months before they go on sale — though there’s definitely something surreal about that. But rather surrealism in the sense the writer André Breton intended it. As he wrote in
The temptation of a fantasy dinner party is to invite great people from history. This will only end up with you disappointing your heroes. You get a story about the time you met Marie Curie, and she goes home with an anecdote about meeting someone “a bit thick” who spent the entire time googling radiation
There aren’t many people who can claim to have been involved in the wine and hospitality business for 50 years and none who can claim they spent eight years before that in the civil service overseeing, inter alia, the merger of Britain’s two national airlines BEA and BOAC, followed by a stint as a management
At the risk of sounding like someone who is about to disgrace his megachurch, I am an ethics guy. I think the question of how to do good is the most important subject a person can think about, and fitting our behaviour to whatever answers we find is the fundamental project of living. Does this
The writer is editorial director and columnist at Le Monde It was supposed to be a walk in the park for Emmanuel Macron. Since 1965, when the French first started electing their head of state by popular vote, no sitting president had been re-elected while keeping a majority in parliament. François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac
These new works combine graphite drawing and blind embossing to reinterpret classical paintings. You see me placing the black figure at the centre of each work to offer an alternative depiction of the western artistic canon. The works take inspiration from Old Master paintings in major museums, such as the National Gallery in London and