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

Pharma and chemicals group says it will ‘defend itself vigorously’ amid mounting cases

With the disastrous purchase of Monsanto and plummeting shares, some question if it is time to break up the German group

German chemicals group faces surge in plaintiffs alleging cancer link to Roundup

Mark Cutifani says polyhalite a ‘very differentiated’ product to potash

Rise in plaintiffs comes as German chemicals group reports 19% jump in sales

Like other accelerators, Techstars, a network of more than 40 corporate and geographically targeted startup bootcamps, has had to bring its marquee demo day events online. Over the last two weeks of April, industry-focused accelerators working with startups building businesses around mobility technologies (broadly) and the future of the home joined programs in Abu Dhabi, […]

Banked, a London-based fintech using open banking to enable account-to-account payments at checkout (and beyond), has raised £2.35 million in further seed funding. The round was led by Force Over Mass, with participation from previous investors Backed and Acrew Capital, along with a number of high-net-worth individuals, such as Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed.com). It […]

While scientists disagree about their use, donning a mask can have an important social impact

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

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

WhatsApp, which began testing its mobile payments feature in India two years ago, could offer at least one more financial service to people in its biggest market. In a filing with the local regulator in India, the Facebook -owned messaging platform has listed credit as one of the areas it will pursue in the country. […]

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a jumpstart for your week. Equity had a busy last few days, so to help you catch up: Friday’s episode was a lot of fun (Duolingo, Figma, OMERS, and aquafaba), and we also dropped an Equity Shot on Saturday, digging into the first major technology earnings week. […]

Facebook has been struggling to keep its VR hardware supply chains open for months, but at the same time they’ve reportedly been hard at work on the next generation of their popular Quest headset. According to a report in Bloomberg, Facebook had been planning to release a new version of the Oculus Quest later this […]

The UK should not agree to proposals to stagger the talks, with fish as part of the first course

It would be the underlying law and EU treaty that needs changing, not the ruling

Another on-demand transport app is making a move into payments to expand the existing relationship with its customers (and subsequent margins that it makes from serving them). Bird today announced the launch of Bird Pay, a service that will let people use its app to purchase items from local participating businesses alongside renting scooters. The service […]

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 […]

Samsung overnight released its earnings guidance for the first quarter of 2020, stating that it expected sales of $45.4 billion and an operating profit of roughly $5.3 billion. The company’s fiscal year is aligned to the standard calendar year, and it will announce official earnings results on April 23. Those numbers are slightly up from […]

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 […]

After a quarter in which eBay, tussling with an activist investor, completed the sell-off of its ticketing business StubHub for $4 billion and saw appointed a new CEO after its previous one departed, while also weathering waves of surging demand and dodgy supply resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, today the e-commerce company reported its Q1 […]

With unemployment growing at a worrying rate, we’re seeing a lot more people finding themselves in hot water when it comes to their finances. Today a startup that’s built a platform to help identify and help those users when they find themselves unable to make payments is announcing a very large growth round of funding […]

Chief executive Jim Hackett signals disruption to carmaker’s plans as losses mount

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a jumpstart for your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop each and every Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re only adding to the mix. You can catch last week’s show with Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas right here if […]

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 […]

Renewed friction between Washington and Beijing adds to coronavirus concerns

Last updated 3:00pm BST. Featuring Royal Mail, Flutter, Stagecoach, Hiscox, Capital & Counties, Hammerson, Aston Martin, deep thoughts, kraftliner and Samhällsbyggnadsbolaget.

Last updated 2:00pm BST. Featuring ITV, National Express, Hiscox, Hammerson, LondonMetric, Metro Bank and OneSavings.

Last updated 1:00pm BST. Featuring BT, Vodafone, IAG, Hyve, Tui, Aston Martin and Burberry.

Target, which already owns on-demand delivery service Shipt, is in the process of acquiring technology assets from same-day delivery service Deliv. The retailer is characterizing the deal as more of an R&D type of acquisition and not one that will have an immediate consumer-facing impact. Deal terms were not disclosed, but we understand the deal […]

I am in the process of getting divorced from his mother

HMRC’s letter says I might have to withhold tax from my rent 

I own three properties and want to buy another with my new partner

I am approaching retirement age with very little pension to live on

My employer has said that if we don’t cut salaries redundancies will be on the cards

The Indian government has said that its contact-tracing app Aarogya Setu “by design” fetches the location data of its 90 million users and allows them to view the concentration of people who have tested positive for the coronavirus in their vicinity. New Delhi issued the statement after France-based security researcher Baptiste Robert found what he […]

All the opposition can do now is ask the right questions and be seen to behave responsibly

No family song on Facebook, no dance routine, no home-grown tomatoes… is it time to raise our game?

The John Lewis veteran came late to politics — and wants to bring power back to the regions

Update: We mistakenly noted in an earlier version that Chaudhri had been a part of Microsoft’s Hololens team. The story has been updated to remove the reference.  In his two decades at Apple, Imran Chaudhri worked on many of the company’s most iconic product lines, including the iPhone, iPad and Mac. The designer left the […]

India said today Zoom is ‘not a safe platform’ and advised government employees to not use it for official work as the video conference service surges in popularity in many nations including the world’s second largest internet market as billions of people remain stuck at home due to the coronavirus crisis. “Zoom is a not a […]

A stay-at-home order for several San Francisco Bay Area counties will be extended through the end of May due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a decision that affects 7 million residents and thousands of businesses. The Public Health Officers of the Counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara as well […]

Twitter has said that tweets posted early Tuesday morning by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that irresponsibly call for restrictions put in place to defend against the spread of COVID-19 don’t violate its guidelines around inaccurate or disputed information about the coronavirus that could cause harm. Musk tweeted a series of things on Tuesday, […]

By the summer of 2016, Marie Outtier had spent eight years as a consultant advising media agencies and martech companies on marketing growth strategy. Pierre-Jean “PJ” Camillieri started as a music software engineer before joining one of Apple’s consumer electronics divisions. Inspired by Siri, he left to start Timista, a smart lifestyle assistant. When the […]

Todd Chaffee has long been one of the most senior members of the late-stage venture firm Institutional Venture Partners. Chaffee joined IVP in 2000 after logging six years at Visa, and went on to lead rounds in numerous prominent later-stage companies, many (but not all) of which have gone public, including Coinbase, Compass, Klarna, Kayak, […]

The struggles of Uber provide a stark lesson of the dangers of buying new issues