In 2017, Muslim social worker Zouhairr Ech Chetouani campaigned for Emmanuel Macron in Asnières-sur-Seine, plastering posters of the centrist politician all over the suburb of northern Paris he calls home. Five years after Macron’s victory against Marine Le Pen, the 47-year-old says he is tempted to cast a blank ballot in the rematch between the
Steve Toltz’s new novel (only his third in 14 years; he’s a slow producer) could be a merry riff on the phrase “the suburbs of hell”. The narrator Angus Mooney (“people call me Mooney”) informs us that he’s dead from the start, and no one could be more disgruntled to discover there’s life after death.
This week, as western governments pondered sending aircraft to Ukraine, the Kyiv government embarked on a novel financing step: it launched a website #buymeafighterjet to crowdsource donations for jets from the world’s mega-rich. Once that might have seemed a laughably bizarre thing to do. But today it no longer appears quite so odd. Never mind
Carlsberg has warned it will book a $1.4bn writedown from the sale of its Russian business as part of the exodus of western companies following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The Danish group, which owns Russia’s biggest beer brand Baltika, has more exposure to the market than any other international brewer, earning 9 per cent of
The writer is prime minister of Ukraine If Russia stops fighting, there will be peace. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine. This feeling permeates our society. Ninety-five per cent of Ukrainians believe in our victory. The courage of our armed forces and citizens has excited the world. Mariupol, Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolayiv —
The United Arab Emirates has frozen the assets of the Kinahan drug trafficking gang, adding to international pressure on an organisation that has deep ties with boxers and promoters at the highest levels of the sport. The Gulf state said it was continuing to investigate the Irish organised crime group in parallel with authorities in
The Easter Sunday denunciations of the government’s plan to deport illegal asylum seekers to Rwanda that rained down on ministers from the highest pulpits in the land have raised concerns among Conservatives that God may be a bit too dominated by liberal metropolitan elite attitudes. There is particular concern that God has developed a bit
One thing to start: I highly recommend checking out this interactive break down of Europe’s efforts to wean itself off of Russian gas. Welcome back to Energy Source after the short break! A world desperate for more oil is going to be paying a lot more to get it out of the ground, I report
The world’s biggest alternative asset manager Blackstone Group expects less dealmaking this year because of high inflation, rising interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty. “It’s hard to predict deal activity, although I would expect it to be lower than last year,” Blackstone’s president Jonathan Gray told the Financial Times. A record $5.8tn in mergers were agreed
When Donald Trump became US president, his critics pronounced the death of the liberal international order. The shorthand “LIO” spread like a rash across think-tanks and op-ed pages. Its funeral was both premature and parochial. Like the Holy Roman Empire, which was not holy or Roman, nor an empire, the liberal international order was always
China has said it will launch an official private pension scheme that aims to push more of the country’s vast household savings into the financial market, as the government grapples with an ageing population. Employees in China will be able to contribute up to Rmb12,000 a year ($1,860) to private schemes, which the government said
Choppy waters distance Chinese business from western capital. Cnooc, a driller in the contested South China Sea, embodies that gulf. The US expelled China’s biggest offshore oil and gas producer from the New York stock market in 2021, deeming it a security threat. Cnooc’s politicised status invites scepticism from international investors, despite a triumphant homecoming
Bill Ackman may have hung up his activist breeches this year, but there seems to be a new generation of young guns emerging that is just as willing to take on companies. The investment bank Lazard recorded 73 new activist campaigns globally in the first three months of 2022, the most since it started systematically
Nestlé pushed up prices for its products by more than 5 per cent in the first three months of the year, in the latest sign of steep commodity inflation feeding through to consumer prices for branded goods. The world’s largest food company said on Thursday it had increased pricing by 5.2 per cent in the
Deloitte has been ordered to pay a fine and costs of more than £2mn by the UK accounting regulator after admitting rule breaches during its audit of outsourcing group Mitie. The Financial Reporting Council found that the Big Four firm failed in its audit of the FTSE 250 company’s impairment testing of goodwill, which was
This is Lauly Li in Taipei, covering the tech industry’s hardware supply chain, from semiconductors to smartphones to EVs. My fellow tech correspondent Cheng Ting-Fang and I have seen some incredible changes over the past four years. I remember back in March 2018, the chairman of a key Apple supplier told me it would be
Pandemic-related absenteeism and social unrest in Chile have hit BHP’s copper and nickel output, which fell 10 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively, as the company warned labour constraints would persist for the rest of 2022. Declines in copper production in the nine months to March 31 were driven by large Covid-19 outbreaks at
This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: Le Pen, patriots and the anti-globalist movement [MUSIC PLAYING] Gideon RachmanHello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s edition comes from France, where I’ve been following the presidential election. It’s now a
Good morning and welcome to Europe Express. European leaders — the UK’s Boris Johnson today, the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen on Sunday — are visiting India at a time of simmering anxiety over its relations with Russia. We’ll explore the stakes and what goodies are on offer in terms of free trade deals. In
The carbon emissions of JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company, soared more than 50 per cent in the past five years, according to new research that lays bare the challenge of reducing greenhouse gases in the global food industry. The study by several environmental groups suggested that the São Paulo-headquartered company released 421.6mn metric tonnes