Business

“The uncertainty was the biggest challenge. So this is good progress,” says Andrew Lynas, of the new deal struck on Monday between the UK and EU to try to end the dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol. For the managing director of Lynas Foodservice, a family-run firm from Coleraine, the …

Soy, oat, almond and other drinks that bill themselves as milk can keep using the term, according to draft federal rules released on Wednesday. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials issued guidance that says plant-based beverages do not pretend to be from dairy animals – and that US consumers aren’t …

Manchester United were the subject of an official bid of a minimum £4bn on Friday from Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani, the chairman of QIB, a Qatari bank. The offer comes with a promise to load no debt on the club and to redevelop the club’s infrastructure. The bid from …

Labour has said Richard Sharp’s position as chair of the BBC is “increasingly untenable” after a committee of MPs found he made significant errors of judgment in failing to disclose his role in organising an £800,000 loan facility for Boris Johnson. Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling up secretary, said on …

Google and Microsoft are going head to head over the future of search by embracing the technology behind artificial intelligence chatbots. Google announced on Monday that it is testing Bard, a rival to the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, which has swiftly become a sensation, and will roll it out to the public …

ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence chatbot, has reached 100 million users just two months after launching, according to analysts. It had about 590m visits in January from 100 million unique visitors, according to analysis by data firm Similarweb. Analysts at investment bank UBS said the rate of growth was unprecedented …

“I got an email asking me to check in, and 10 minutes later they had gone into administration.” Andrew Gibbins was one of hundreds of passengers across the UK who have expressed frustration at regional airline Flybe, which abruptly announced its collapse on Saturday morning, telling any passengers expecting to …

Microsoft has announced a deepening of its partnership with the company behind the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT by announcing a multibillion dollar investment in the business. It said the deal with OpenAI would involve deploying the company’s artificial intelligence models across Microsoft products, which include the Bing search engine and …

A Russian national who founded a cryptocurrency exchange that the justice department says became a haven for the proceeds of criminal activity has been arrested, federal officials said on Wednesday. Anatoly Legkodymov, who lives in China, was arrested on Tuesday night in Miami and was due in court on a …

The contributions of Nesrine Malik (When state services fail, citizens pay extra or sink. This is Sunak’s Britain now, 9 January) and John Harris (Sweeping social care reforms can wait – homes need money and workers right now, 8 January) made me wonder, not for the first time, just how …