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A bad trump break and a frozen suit combined to cause most declarers to fail in this game contract. Can you do better? BiddingDealer: SouthLove All North East South West — — 1S NB 3S NB 4S West led Q♥. Most declarers won, played ♠AK and then breached diamonds. East took dummy’s J♦ with K♦;

The world’s largest serviced office company, IWG, warned that inflation, Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine could weigh on profits this year, pushing its shares down even as it reported record demand from big companies signing up to hybrid working. The WeWork rival reported improved revenues for the first quarter of the year on Tuesday

The biggest revelation of Colombia’s presidential election campaign is a black female social activist who is no longer running for the top job. Francia Márquez, who was little known outside the Afro-Colombian community until this year, caused a sensation when she won the third-largest number of votes of any candidate in national presidential primaries last

Australia’s biggest liquefied natural gas producer said Asian demand for supplies from “democratic” nations had risen following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and called on Canberra to speed up approvals of domestic projects. Meg O’Neill, the chief executive of Woodside Petroleum, said the LNG market had “changed tremendously” since Russia invaded Ukraine and the west imposed sanctions on Moscow, forcing countries

AP Moller-Maersk warned that container trade could decline this year due to the ongoing supply chain crisis even as the shipping group upgraded its annual profit forecasts by a quarter. The Danish company, the world’s largest container line by profits but second-biggest by capacity, boosted its full-year guidance after its first-quarter results came in above

Good morning. Today we process chancellor Rishi Sunak’s continuing slide in the ConservativeHome rankings and Elon Musk’s looming purchase of Twitter (I for one think that $44bn is a very reasonable price given the quality of my tweets). Thank you to everyone who has kindly left feedback on our newsletter — we always welcome suggestions

HSBC’s profits fell by more than a quarter in the first three months of the year, as Europe’s largest lender increased reserves for bad loans in response to war in Ukraine and slowing growth in its core Asia markets. The London-based bank reported profit before tax of $4.2bn for the first quarter, a decline of

Primark owner Associated British Foods has said it will raise prices to offset the impact of rising inflation, which it warned is set to drag down profits this year and next. The FTSE 100 company said higher costs for commodities, transport and energy were being felt across its businesses, which include food groups Allied Bakeries,

I have been appointed deputy for financial affairs for my brother, who has learning difficulties and is severely disabled. He lives in a residential home a long way from me so I cannot visit him every week. I have been asked by his carers to obtain a prepaid card for him which they will be

A tree gracefully sheds leaves of paper bearing cryptic statements about the future. As people gather around to pick them up, the scene has the valedictory feel of autumn; ominous, too. But what does it mean? The questions multiply throughout Sibyl, the latest stage work from William Kentridge, South African artist, theatre director and all-round

There’s the dropping of names. Then there’s carpet-bombing. Then there’s blitzkrieg. The scattershot of grand writerly personalities throughout John Walsh’s coming-of-literary-age memoir sometimes makes you want to duck for cover. And to wonder whether this author ever spoke to anybody who wasn’t, or wasn’t to become, famous. But Walsh can be forgiven, since this isn’t

Investors managing $3tn in assets are pushing food multinationals Nestlé, Danone, Kraft Heinz and Kellogg to set out new disclosures and targets on health after a successful campaign for changes at Unilever. The investors including Legal & General Investment Management and BMO Global Asset Management have written to the boards of the companies ahead of

Shoreditch has suffered. Stagnated even. Its edge needs serious sharpening after the devastation of the pandemic. One of the early symptoms was the surprising closure of the Ace Hotel, an imprimatur of the area’s global cool, in 2020. Now it has been reincarnated as One Hundred Shoreditch, relaunching last month in a move many are

Admiral John Aquilino, the top US military commander in the Indo-Pacific, recently held an unusual meeting with the head of US Space Command and deputy head of US Cyber Command — in a remote part of the Australian outback. Aquilino and his colleagues, General James Dickinson and Lieutenant General Charles Moore, had flown all the

When Jacqueline Bouvier married John F Kennedy in 1953, every detail of her ivory wedding gown was pored over by journalists. But one critical fact was overlooked. The gown’s designer was not credited by name; one writer referred to her as “a colored woman dressmaker”. That designer was Ann Lowe, the couturier who had also

This article is part of a guide to London from FT Globetrotter I like big buns and I cannot lie. Temptation is inescapable. Gail’s, London’s bougiest bakery chain (and Bat Signal for the yoga pants-clad) seems to have new locations opening every few metres or so. Independent hawkers are in on the fun too: there’s

Bad news comes thick and fast these days, from climate change to war to inflation. So it is worth pausing sometimes to appreciate good news, especially when it shows the power of policy to change things for the better. Last week brought one such opportunity, when official data revealed just how successfully the UK has

Europe’s attempt to build more sustainable life-sciences business clusters faces being damaged by a sharp drop in biotech valuations — prompting renewed concerns that US buyers will swoop on European start-ups. A rapid decline in the Nasdaq biotechnology index — down 13 per cent this year amid scientific setbacks and after a pandemic-driven surge —

Months of acrimony and division over the future of Generali will culminate this week in a shareholder vote in Trieste, the Italian port city that gave the country’s largest insurer its nickname. At stake is not just the fate of Generali, the almost 200-year old group with 75,000 employees and 67mn customers, but the credibility

Jean Monnet, one of the European Union’s founding fathers, wrote that “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” And the coronavirus pandemic appears to have proven his adage correct, once again. EU health policy has advanced at breakneck speed in the last two years,

Standing outside a shopping centre in Belfast, Ann McCartney sighs. “Food is going up. There are ridiculous prices for electricity and gas. You don’t see your money when you’re in the shops — I’m cutting back.” For the 56-year-old who relies on sickness benefits, and many others in Northern Ireland, the cost of living crisis