SoftBank-funded fintech challenger Ualá expands rapidly amid the pandemic

How to navigate government help schemes, the benefits system, redundancy pay and help from banks

Take steps to improve your relationship with money and the role it plays in your life

A live blog from FT.com

Italy to lay out strategy this week on its plans to ease Covid-19 restrictions. Global stocks under pressure as oil tumbles again. England and Wales record 75 per cent more weekly overall deaths than normal.

Number of global cases of Covid-19 nears 2.5m, international oil prices tumble to lowest levels since the 1990s, Heineken hit as pandemic cuts into beer drinking globally.

US job gains since financial crisis wiped out. Switzerland faces sharpest economic contraction since 1974. UK and eurozone business activity hit by historic collapse this month as lockdowns choked Europe’s biggest economies.

The number of US deaths attributed to Covid-19 surpassed 45,000 on Friday, while the rate of new cases remained flat

British fatalities rise by 813 with almost 150,000 infected; Spain prepares to ease restrictions slightly as daily deaths remain below 400

In today’s news: UK warns it would be ‘irresponsible’ to discuss easing lockdown. Spain sets out plan to lift its own tough measures. Donald Trump signals a halt to his daily media briefings as US death toll accelerates.

New daily cases of Covid-19 around the globe rose by the lowest amount in 12 days as 73,858 diagnoses were confirmed on Sunday, bringing the total to 2.93m

Deaths in England and Wales are highest on record in mid-April while cases in the US surpass 1m

The worldwide Covid-19 death toll rose by 6,365 on Tuesday, pushing the total through 200,000

Eurozone GDP in historic fall, millions more Americans file for unemployment, Shell cuts dividend for first time since second world war and UK's AstraZeneca combines with Oxford on a potential vaccine

A live blog from FT.com

Spain allows outside exercise for the first time in weeks while Russia’s daily case count rises by a fifth

The FT's live blog on the Covid-19 pandemic

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez says no other option remains but to maintain the state of alert

Russia's coronavirus outbreak worsens and Federal Reserve research finds a correlation between deaths from the influenza pandemic in 1918-1920 and extremist voting in Germany in 1932 and 1933

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

BT halts dividend for first time since dot com bubble two decades ago, BA parent IAG warns of further cuts as recovery set to take three years and shoemaker Puma warns worse to come as profits halve in first quarter

Germany's dominant export sector in record decline, South Korea may be forced to close bars and nightclubs after partygoer is found to have infected at least 14 people

Thousands attend military parade in Belarus even as virus spreads rapidly in neighbouring Russia, UK airline industry warns of huge blow if travel quarantine is launched and Seoul closes down bars and clubs in wake of new cluster

German chemicals group blames Brexit and trade tensions for earnings fall

“Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite?” Google that phrase and you will get thousands of results. It just goes to show that, to a large extent, the “Q&A” model is broken on the internet. Where once Yahoo Answers and Quora were considered the bright young things of Web 2.0’s “Read/Write Web,” today there is only the […]

Under lockdown, communities are finding new ways to voice their defiance, anger and support

You can now debunk thousands of coronavirus-related hoaxes with a few texts on WhatsApp . Poynter Institute, a non-profit organization that supports journalism, today launched a bot on the Facebook -owned service that will allow people across the globe to debunk over 4,000 hoaxes surrounding the pandemic such as whether the infectious disease originated in […]

Ideally governments would co-ordinate fiscal policy but there is no sense of urgency

Nine countries can make a stand for sharing the fiscal burden of the pandemic

Shares soar in after-hours trading following better than expected figures

Transport demand will rebound while the pandemic will reboot the use of plastics

A series of big bankruptcies is unlikely but debt workouts will slow economic recovery

Tinder will add a video dating feature in the second quarter of this year, parent company Match announced on Tuesday as part of its Q1 2020 earnings report. The company also detailed the coronavirus impact, which slowed Tinder user growth in the quarter, as social distancing requirements and government lockdowns went into effect. Match didn’t […]

The UK’s data protection watchdog confirmed today the government still hasn’t given it sight of a key legal document attached to the coronavirus contacts tracing app which is being developed by the NHSX, the digital transformation branch of the country’s National Health Service . Under UK and EU law, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) […]

The UK has this week started testing a coronavirus contacts-tracing app which NHSX, a digital arm of the country’s National Health Service, has been planning and developing since early March. The test is taking place in the Isle of Wight, a 380km2 island off the south coast of England, with a population of around 140,000. […]

The UK may be rethinking its decision to shun Apple and Google’s API for its national coronavirus contacts tracing app, according to the Financial Times, which reported yesterday that the government is paying an IT supplier to investigate whether it can integrate the tech giants’ approach after all. As we’ve reported before coronavirus contacts tracing […]

Lofty ideas about open economies will have to be sold on directly improving voters’ lives

In a choice between discussing the WTO and the WHO, I’d take a rules-of-origin trade debate any day

Britain has less margin for error because it is zigging to everyone else’s zag

With police enforcing the lockdown, it may mean new roles for some old telly favourites

Post-lockdown, technology could help us contain Covid-19. But why stop there?

Before lockdown, my desire to eat Hobnobs outweighed my desire to be thinner. Not any more

The coronavirus pandemic’s global presence and ubiquity in everyday life is a perfect storm for misinformation, as conspiracy theorists from different corners of the web converge on a shared news topic—the only topic, at the moment. From the earliest days of the crisis, everyone from pro-Trump QAnon conspiracists to left-leaning purveyors of dubious home remedies […]

The global economy was already looking a bit ropey and vulnerable to shocks

Pandemic's economic impact compared with historic crises of 1930s and 2008

Box has joined a number of tech companies supporting employees to work remotely from home in response  the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. It’s applying the policy to all staff, regardless of location. Late yesterday Box co-founder Aaron Levie tweeted a statement detailing the cloud computing company’s response to COVID-19, the name of the disease caused […]

The tech industry is mobilizing its considerable resources to attempt to support efforts against the growing global coronavirus pandemic. Over the weekend, the CEOs of Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all shared updates regarding some aspects of their company’s ongoing contributions, which range from donations of medical supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline healthcare […]

Like many other websites at the moment, the career-oriented networking platform LinkedIn has seen a big boost in traffic as a result of people being asked to work from home and stay indoors overall to slow the spread of the coronavirus, with a bump of 55% more conversational activity between existing connections in recent weeks. […]

The UK has this week started testing a coronavirus contacts-tracing app which NHSX, a digital arm of the country’s National Health Service, has been planning and developing since early March. The test is taking place in the Isle of Wight, a 380km2 island off the south coast of England, with a population of around 140,000. […]

The UK may be rethinking its decision to shun Apple and Google’s API for its national coronavirus contacts tracing app, according to the Financial Times, which reported yesterday that the government is paying an IT supplier to investigate whether it can integrate the tech giants’ approach after all. As we’ve reported before coronavirus contacts tracing […]