Business

A Tory-led council has admitted a series of disastrous investments in risky commercial projects caused it to run up an unprecedented deficit of nearly £500m and brought it to the brink of bankruptcy. The staggering scale of the catastrophe at Thurrock council in Essex – one of the biggest ever …

Speaking to reporters on Thursday afternoon, the RMT union’s general secretary said scheduled rail strikes would go ahead after what he said was a ‘positive meeting’ with the transport secretary, Mark Harper. ‘If we called off the strikes, we’d never get a settlement,’ said Lynch, adding: ‘We did that two …

A strong smell of weed hangs over many New York neighborhoods, the result in part of cannabis decriminalization in 2019 – but cannabis growers in the state are at an impasse when it comes to getting their crops to market. Almost 300,000 pounds of the drug, worth as much as …

Most of the customers of failed crypto exchange FTX were institutions but the effects of its collapse are still likely to reverberate across the sector and may affect small retail investors, MPs have been told. “What we’re hearing … is that the majority of the funds in that platform were …

Jeremy Hunt is expected to increase the number of people paying the highest rate of tax by lowering the threshold from £150,000, according to Treasury sources. The move to increase the number of taxpayers paying the 45p rate of tax is a handbrake turn from Liz Truss’s government, which proposed …

Twitter temporarily closed its offices and cut workers’ access to internal systems on Friday as it began sacking staff without notice, a week after the billionaire Elon Musk took over the social media platform. The firings, which could see as many as half of Twitter’s 7,500 workers dismissed, came as …

The United Nations, Nato, European Union and US have all urged Russia to reverse its decision to pull out of a deal that allowed Ukrainian grain exports via the Black Sea, amid fears of a global food crisis. Moscow announced it was suspending the UN-brokered arrangement in response to a …

Alphabet revenue fell below analysts’ expectations in the third quarter, it announced on Tuesday, as it continues to battle an industry-wide tech slowdown. The company reported a third quarter revenue of $69bn, up 6% from last year but lower than analyst estimates of $70.9bn. Like many tech and social media …

Texas is suing tech giant Google for allegedly collecting biometric data of millions of Texans without obtaining proper consent, the attorney general’s office said in a statement on Thursday. In its complaint, Texas says that companies operating in the state have been barred for more than a decade from collecting …

Elon Musk on Saturday announced that his company would continue to pay for Starlink satellite internet in war-torn Ukraine, a day after suggesting he could not keep funding the project. “The hell with it,” the world’s richest man wrote on Twitter. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other …