The water industry regulator for England and Wales has appointed a new chief executive who has pledged to address the sector’s poor performance on sewage pollution at a time of mounting public anger. David Black, who has served as interim chief executive of Ofwat for the past 12 months, will take the post on a

Playground, the vastly impressive debut feature of Belgian director Laura Wandel, was released there last year as Un monde, a world. Both end up meaning the same thing. The English title pinpoints where much of the film takes place; the French what it feels like for the brother and sister whose story it is. He

America looms over Audrey Diwan’s Happening. The film is set in Angoulême, south-west France, but the year is 1963, and the students here are besotted with the transatlantic exports of chewing gum and rock’n’roll. Now, in 2022 this bold, clear-eyed drama, which won the top prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival, is about to

The life of Ennio Morricone — composer of transcendent themes for Spaghetti Westerns, award-winners such as The Mission and countless more — might have been a movie by the age of 18. That would have taken us to 1946, a world of drama already unfolded for a boy from Rome who had wanted to become

Melissa Aldana’s cultured, light-toned tenor saxophone is steeped in the winding pathways, dynamic contrasts and harmonic thickets of contemporary narrative jazz. Raised in Santiago, Chile, she graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2009, and, based in New York, is a fixture in international jazz. This quartet gig, an early evening full-house show, presented music from

It should be no surprise that a beauty business is a dab hand at putting a good face on things. Nutrition, beauty and logistics group THG’s cut to its profit margin outlook for this year came with something to pretty it up: the confirmation that it had received “indicative proposals from numerous parties” to buy

Tycoons, bankers and bosses are vying for control of Generali, Italy’s largest insurer. This acrimonious and, at times, personal battle has divided the Italian financial establishment. The outcome will matter far beyond this tight circle. Generali is worth about €30bn, employs roughly 75,000 people and serves approximately 67mn customers. Construction tycoon Francesco Caltagirone leads rebels

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