Lockdown threatens UK’s push to tackle national housing shortage

Several long-running conflicts are edging towards a temporary halt to hostilities

The ECB’s asset purchases are vital to the stability of the eurozone

Jean Pierre Mustier’s nascent turnround derailed as bank slips to first-quarter loss

Deka Investment urges chairman to act quickly to end crisis of confidence in payments group after special audit

Price wars and coronavirus have disrupted the sector, possibly moving peak demand even closer 

Latest proposal accused of being misleading over environmental risk

Fortnite is typical of the new business model, renting access to a platform

Whether we like it or not, spending on arms and security will rise in the next few years 

A new exchange traded commodity holds several advantages

Santander private banking arm’s six-year savings product

The four-year bond will pay 7.5%

As numbers and statistics come to the fore, can we boost national numeracy?

Brazilian prosecutors also accuse miner and safety group of environmental crimes

Investor group led by the CofE launches database to track tailings dams after Brazil disaster

Pledges to donate Covid-19 test kits pour in from groups including Vale and Petrobras

Bond market movements blamed for removal of nearly 175,000 cash prizes from monthly draw

Surprise measures on pensions and investing for children lay in the chancellor’s red box

NS&I scraps planned cuts to prize fund rate 

The US private sector shed a record 20m jobs in April as coronavirus lockdowns and the resulting closure of non-essential businesses led to historic joblessness

Swiss company announces ‘challenging’ results a day after its chief executive quit

Concerns over climate change led the chemicals veteran to dramatically transform Syngenta

Welcome to Due Diligence, the FT’s daily deals briefing

Amid charges of greenwashing from activists, the private company is investing in football, cycling and other ventures

Deep Render, a London startup and spin-out of Imperial College that is applying machine learning to image compression, has raised £1.6 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Pentech, with participation from Speedinvest. Founded in mid-2017 by Arsalan Zafar and Chri Besenbruch, who met while studying Computer Science at Imperial College London, Deep Render […]

Your guide to the investment and business revolution you can’t afford to ignore

Your guide to the investment and business revolution you can’t afford to ignore

Assigning an economic value to life is taboo — but we must confront the trade-offs

Under lockdown, vulnerable families are imprisoned in a cage of terror, stress and abuse

Researchers at NYU have identified hundreds of groups of Instagram users, some with thousands of members, that systematically exchange likes and comments in order to game the service’s algorithms and boost visibility. In the process, they also trained machine learning agents to identify whether a post has been juiced in this way. “Pods,” as they’ve […]

Facebook has a new connectivity app called Discover to help those who can’t afford to get online access information on the web. The service, available through mobile web and Android app, allows users to visit any website in text format (no video, images, audio and other elements that eat up large amounts of data) and […]

Security and climate change will be high on Ursula von der Leyen’s list of priorities

The EU is culpably complacent about the challenges of the digital age

COP25 attempts to confront climate change

Some big moves in the payments platform space: Ant Financial Group, the owner of China’s Alipay payment platform, has announced it’s taking a minority stake in Swedish payments platform Klarna . Klarna has a strong European presence and a flagship product that lets shoppers buy now and pay later in interest-free installments (typically 14 or […]

A few months ago, the idea of a hand-washing app would have seemed trivial, at best. We’re all adults here, right? We’ve been washing our hands our entire lives. But things change. It’s mid-April and we’re afraid to go outside and engage with other humans — and thorough hand-washing is one of very few tools […]

As coronavirus-hit financial markets continue to flip-flop in the wake of bad news followed by pockets of hope, a startup that aims to introduce ordinary consumers to investing has raised a big round of funding. New York-based Stash, which provides a mobile-first route to managing money through investment — as well as retirement, custodial and […]

Less than 24 hours after it was reported that Uber was considering layoffs of 20% of staff, its big rival Lyft is announcing its own cuts. Today the company said it would be reducing employee count by 17%, working out to 982 employees, and furloughing an additional 288, due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic […]

Today Microsoft reported its third-quarter, fiscal 2020 quarter earnings, the period of time corresponding to Q1 2020 on the regular calendar. The technology giant generated $35 billion in revenue, up 15% from the year-ago period. That top line led to $13 billion in operating income (+25% YoY), and $10.8 billion in net income (+22% YoY). […]

It’s fair to say that even before the impact of COVID-19, companies had begun a steady march to the cloud. Maybe it wasn’t fast enough for AWS, as Andy Jassy made clear in his 2019 Re:invent keynote, but it was happening all the same and the steady revenue increases across the cloud infrastructure market bore […]

Ali Amin-Javaheri grew up in the chemicals business. His father had worked for Iran’s state-owned chemical company and when the family fled the country in the nineteen eighties during the Iran-Iraq war, they first settled in Houston where employers welcomed the senior Amin-Jahaveri’s experience. Houston in the 80s was dominated by the petrochemicals industry and […]

The days of the big product event are on hold for the foreseeable future. Until then, a big blog post will have to do. A day after announcing that Microsoft would be shifting focus away from dual-screen devices, Chief Product Officer Panos Panay took to the company’s Devices blog to show off a slew of […]

In spite of being in the midst of a pandemic sowing economic uncertainty, one area that continues to thrive is cloud computing. Perhaps that explains why Microsoft, which saw Azure grow 59% in its most recent earnings report, announced plans to open a new data center in New Zealand once it receives approval from the […]

With conferences canceled indefinitely, companies are increasingly reliant on online events to hype product launches. As they prepare to release a next-gen console before the end of the year, expect plenty of live streams and blogs from both Microsoft and Sony in an attempt to flesh out all that their respective systems have to offer. […]

Microsoft and Amazon are at it again as the fight for the Defense Department JEDI contract continues. In a recent series of increasingly acerbic pronouncements, the two companies continue their ongoing spat over the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract spoils. As you may recall (or not), last fall in a surprise move, the DoD selected […]

The original Go was a mostly well-received addition to the Surface line when it arrived in late 2018. It was a nice, pint-sized alternatively, positioned fairly well to serve as a secondary device for some. It did the convertible double duty and traveled well, but otherwise was lacking in guts and versatility. Launching at the […]

Mike Mackenzie’s daily analysis of what’s moving global markets

Twitch is doubling down on esports in this new era of social distancing as a number of traditional sporting events have been cancelled. The company this week introduced a new esports directory on its site that will make it easier for viewers to find live matches, information on players, games with active competition leagues, a […]