Emmanuel Macron wants to see a drive for higher oil production around the world as the French president seeks ways of bringing down the cost of energy and alleviating the pressure being felt by energy-importing economies. Macron made the proposal to fellow G7 leaders as they seek to hammer out the details of a price
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G7 leaders meeting for a summit in the Bavarian Alps on Sunday are seeking a deal to impose a “price cap” on Russian oil as the group works to curb Russia’s ability to finance its four-month war in Ukraine. The goal would be for a broad range of countries going beyond the G7 to impose
The battle over abortion rights in the US shifted rapidly to Congress and the midterm elections after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade and gutted the decades-old constitutional protection for women seeking to end a pregnancy. As conservative states began to implement new abortion restrictions across the country in the wake of Friday’s ruling,
The US Supreme Court has struck down Roe vs Wade, the legal decision that has enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years, in a dramatic ruling by the court’s conservative majority that will shake up American society, politics and jurisprudence for years to come. In the decision authored by Justice Samuel
Interest payments on UK government debt hit one of the highest levels on record last month as rising inflation limited an expected fall in public sector borrowing. Interest costs rose to £7.6bn in May, well above the figure for last year and higher than a £5.1bn forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility, following a
The second of three one-day rail strikes across Britain will go ahead on Thursday, the union at the heart of the dispute said, after talks to resolve the dispute broke down. Mick Lynch, head of the RMT union, criticised transport secretary Grant Shapps for the impasse in the negotiations between the RMT, the train operators
Large parts of Britain have ground to a halt after the biggest strike to hit the country’s railways in 30 years began in the early hours of Tuesday with disruption to passengers expected to last all week. Members of the RMT union officially launched the industrial action by not turning up for night shifts that
Strikes will spread across the UK unless the government acts on its promise to create a high wage economy, the leader of the country’s main movement for organised labour has warned. Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, said that workers all over the country were supporting striking rail employees and would in
President Emmanuel Macron was on course to lose his majority in France’s National Assembly on Sunday night, after a strong showing in legislative elections by a left-green opposition alliance and a late surge from the extreme right. Initial results and projections by polling agencies after voting stations closed showed that Macron’s centrist Ensemble (Together) alliance
Bitcoin’s price has broken below the key threshold of $20,000 for the first time since November 2020, risking triggering a fresh wave of selling and deepening the crisis gripping the digital asset sector. The largest cryptocurrency, which acts as a benchmark for the broader crypto market, plunged to under $19,000 on Saturday morning, a fall
Shares in Asia followed Wall Street lower after the UK and Switzerland raised interest rates, adding to concerns that tighter monetary policies from central banks could undercut a global economic recovery. Japan’s benchmark Topix index and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 both shed 2 per cent, while South Korea’s Kospi fell 1.7 per cent. China’s CSI 300
Stock markets and eurozone bond prices dropped on Thursday after Switzerland delivered an unexpected interest rate rise, following a sharp boost to borrowing costs by the US Federal Reserve. Europe’s regional Stoxx 600 share index, which rallied on Wednesday after the European Central Bank promised a new mechanism to support weaker eurozone nations from rising
The Federal Reserve is set to embrace an increasingly aggressive approach to monetary policy tightening as it confronts the highest inflation in four decades. During its two-day policy meeting, officials on the Federal Open Market Committee have been actively debating the merits of implementing the first 0.75 percentage point increase since 1994. An adjustment of
Crypto exchange Coinbase plans to cut almost a fifth of its workforce, in the latest sign of the chill descending on the digital assets market as token prices tumble. The US-listed group’s plans to reduce its staffing by 1,100 employees comes as a sharp downturn in the crypto market threatens to deal a heavy blow
Brussels is to launch legal action against the UK as early as Monday, on the publication of draft legislation to rip up large parts of the 2020 Brexit deal, EU officials say, as the two sides edge closer to a possible trade war. The officials said the European Commission would respond immediately to a British
Boris Johnson has been accused by Tory MPs of “damaging the UK and everything the Conservatives stand for” as he prepares to publish a bill to rip up his 2020 Brexit deal with the EU covering trade with Northern Ireland. The legislation, to be published on Monday, will bring Johnson into conflict with many of
US defence secretary Lloyd Austin accused China of stepping up coercive behaviour towards Taiwan as he stressed that Washington would maintain its military capacity to resist any force that threatened the country. Speaking at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue defence forum in Singapore, Austin said China was engaging in provocative behaviour across the Indo-Pacific region that
Ministers are planning to reject the main recommendations from a major review of England’s food strategy as Boris Johnson seeks to regain the support of rightwing MPs and avoid hitting households with new expenses in the cost of living crisis. The review, led by Henry Dimbleby, founder of the Leon restaurant chain, was commissioned in
Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering £11bn of taxpayers money by paying too much interest servicing the government’s debt. Calculations by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the oldest non-partisan economic research institute in the UK, show the losses stem from the chancellor’s failure to take out insurance against interest rate rises
Hundreds of millions of people are at risk of “hunger and destitution” because of food shortages due to the Ukraine war, the chief of the UN warned, as talks stalled over ending Russia’s blockade of Black Sea grain shipments. António Guterres spoke as negotiators from Russia and Turkey failed to break an impasse over how