News

America’s fledging offshore wind power industry risks being left “dead in the water” if US authorities clamp down on the use of foreign materials and equipment, according to the Spanish-owned company jointly building the country’s first big project. Bill White, head of offshore wind at Avangrid, part of Iberdrola, said that strict demands for local

Chinese police are using a new anti-fraud app installed on more than 200m mobile phones to identify and question people who have viewed overseas financial news sites, according to individuals summoned by the authorities. The app was launched in March by the public security ministry’s National Anti-Fraud Centre and blocks suspicious phone calls and reports

Beijing wants to break up Alipay, the 1bn plus-user superapp owned by Jack Ma’s Ant Group, and create a separate app for the company’s highly profitable loans business, in the most visible restructuring yet of the fintech giant. Chinese regulators have already ordered Ant to separate the back end of its two lending businesses, Huabei,

The failure by the US to bring Covid-19 cases under control is scrambling business expectations of a rapid economic revival, forcing companies to reset plans and revise forecasts as they also grapple with a new federal vaccine mandate.  Revenues have fallen at a quarter of US small businesses in each of the past three weeks

The US judge presiding over Epic Games’ high-profile antitrust case against Apple declined to give either side a full victory. Kate Adams, Apple’s chief counsel, called the verdict “a huge win”, pointing to the court’s ruling that “Apple is not a monopolist under ‘either federal or state antitrust laws’”. However, the iPhone maker is being

Joe Biden has held his second call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping since becoming US president in an effort to break an impasse in the relationship between the countries after two rounds of top-level meetings produced little progress. The White House said the two leaders had a “broad, strategic discussion” and that Biden had “underscored

Christine Lagarde said “the lady isn’t tapering”, reassuring bond investors even as the European Central Bank’s president announced it would buy fewer bonds in a sign of confidence in the eurozone’s economic recovery. After a two-day meeting of its governing council, the ECB said on Thursday it had decided to move to “a moderately lower

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has warned that it will sue Coinbase if it launches a new digital asset lending product, and also issued subpoenas to the cryptocurrency trading platform to provide it with more information, according to executives. Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, said in a blog post that the company, which

Deutsche Telekom has agreed a multipronged deal with SoftBank that deepens its bet on the lucrative US market and will see the Japanese group take a roughly $5bn stake in Germany’s dominant telecoms operator. The arrangement was unveiled on Tuesday as Deutsche Telekom also announced the sale of its T-Mobile Netherlands unit to private equity

A frantic summer of dealmaking has put 2021 on track to break records, with almost $4tn of deals already agreed since the start of the year, as companies rush to exploit cheap financing and bumper profits. There were $500bn of transactions globally in the usually quiet month of August, up from $289bn in the same

Fighting is raging in Afghanistan’s isolated Panjshir Valley, the last stronghold of resistance to the Taliban, as the Islamist group maintains a military offensive to pacify the last territory holding out against its rule. Amrullah Saleh, vice-president of the former government of Ashraf Ghani, warned of an “overwhelming humanitarian crisis” and pleaded for international relief

A sharp slowdown in US jobs growth precludes the possibility that the Federal Reserve will announce plans this month to begin scaling back its pandemic-era stimulus, economists say, as the spread of the Delta coronavirus variant muddies the economic outlook. Following very strong payrolls reports in June and July, the US central bank readied for

The US economy created just 235,000 jobs in August, in a sign that the more contagious Delta coronavirus variant is having an effect on hiring plans and worker shortages are still rampant nationwide. Non-farm payrolls data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday marked a sharp deceleration from the upwardly revised 1.1m jobs

WhatsApp has been fined €225m for breaking the EU’s data privacy law by not telling its users how it was sharing their data with its parent company Facebook. In one of the biggest fines relating to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Irish data regulator applied a penalty more than four times the level

The chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission is warning that cryptocurrency trading platforms are putting their own survival at risk unless they heed his call to work within the nation’s regulatory framework. Gary Gensler told the Financial Times that while he remained “technology neutral”, crypto assets were no different than any others when

The US dramatically scaled back its evacuation mission in Afghanistan on Monday with the number of civilians being airlifted out of Kabul falling sharply as its forces scramble to withdraw ahead of Tuesday’s deadline to end the 20-year war. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said military commanders were sharing some drawdown logistics with Taliban commanders to

Rockets were fired at Kabul’s international airport on Monday as US troops rushed to complete evacuations a day ahead of the deadline for the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan. Jen Psaki, White House spokesperson, confirmed that the airport had come under rocket attack but said that “operations continue uninterrupted”. There was no report of

The US warned its citizens to leave the vicinity of Kabul airport immediately due to “a specific, credible threat” of an imminent attack, with the Taliban scaling up its armed presence around the site ahead of an August 31 deadline for the American withdrawal. The alert from the US embassy in Kabul came hours after

The US has carried out a drone strike in eastern Afghanistan against an Isis-K “planner” behind the deadly attack on Kabul airport on Thursday, as countries wrap up desperate efforts to evacuate thousands of Afghans trying to flee. According to US Central Command on Friday night, American forces conducted an “over-the-horizon counter-terrorism operation” in Nangarhar

Joe Biden vowed to plough ahead with the evacuation of those trying to flee Afghanistan and punish the perpetrators of an attack outside Kabul’s airport that killed at least 13 US troops and dozens of Afghans. At the end of what one aide called “maybe the worst day” of his eight-month presidency, Biden attempted to