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China will remove quarantine requirements for inbound travellers from January 8 as the country dismantles the remnants of a zero-Covid regime that closed it off from the rest of the world for almost three years. The National Health Commission on Monday unveiled the move as part of a wider announcement that downgraded the country’s management

Hedge funds trading bonds and currencies are on track for their best year since the global financial crisis, boosted by the steep interest rate rises that have inflicted heavy losses on equity specialists and mainstream investors. So-called macro hedge funds, made famous by the likes of George Soros and Louis Bacon, endured a barren period

Apple’s business is under threat from a widespread coronavirus outbreak in China, with supply chain experts warning of a growing risk of months-long disruption to the production of iPhones. The US tech giant has had to contend with more than a month of chaos at its main assembler Foxconn’s megafactory in Zhengzhou, China, known as

The UK faces a fresh wave of strike action in the new year, as nurses, ambulance staff and rail workers prepare to walk out over pay. The PCS union, which represents striking civil servants including Border Force staff, on Friday warned industrial action would be ramped up even further if the government continued to refuse

A US congressional panel said Donald Trump was the “central cause” of last year’s attack on the US Capitol, in a final report that laid out detailed evidence and offered the most damning assessment yet of the former president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The 845-page document released late Thursday followed

The UK economy contracted by more than previously estimated in the third quarter and lagged further behind other advanced economies, as households struggled amid high inflation. UK output fell 0.3 per cent between the second and third quarter, a larger contraction than initial estimates of 0.2 per cent, data published by the Office for National

UK public sector borrowing nearly tripled in November following government measures to shield households and businesses from soaring energy prices and higher debt interest payments. Public sector net borrowing hit £22bn last month, nearly three times the £8.1bn reached in the same month last year and the highest November borrowing since monthly records began in

A Russian court has ordered the seizure of a luxury hotel complex owned by billionaire Oleg Deripaska, one of the few oligarchs to have criticised President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, in a sign of the pressure facing the country’s tycoons since the invasion. The legal dispute, following an initial claim brought by a science

Britain is bracing itself for one of the most disruptive weeks of strike action in recent history after the government signalled its determination to face down the unions despite calls for pay negotiations from health leaders and some Conservative MPs. Nurses, ambulance workers, customs and immigration staff, postal and rail workers will all walk out

The coronavirus sweeping across China is causing widespread business disruption as staffing shortages threaten to close down factory production lines and truck drivers fall ill, bringing chaos to supply chains. The Omicron variant of the virus has begun to run rampant through several big cities since the sudden U-turn on president Xi Jinping’s former zero-Covid

David Cameron, Britain’s former prime minister, is returning to public life with a new job teaching politics at a university in the Gulf state of Abu Dhabi. Cameron will lecture students on “practising politics and government in the age of disruption” for a three-week course in January at the New York University Abu Dhabi. It

Evidence of a wave of Covid-19 deaths is beginning to emerge in Beijing despite official tallies showing no fatalities since an uncontrolled outbreak began sweeping through China’s capital this week. Staff at one crematorium in Beijing said they cremated the bodies of at least 30 Covid victims on Wednesday and Financial Times reporters saw two

The UK’s heath minister has said that the government had no realistic way of meeting nurses’ pay demands as the first day of historic strikes gets under way. Maria Caulfield expressed “huge regret” over the walkouts, the latest in a wave of industrial action sweeping the UK and the first time the Royal College of

UK inflation dipped to 10.7 per cent in November as an easing in the rise in petrol prices helped to lower the rate from a 41-year high of 11.1 per cent last month. The figure was better than an expected 10.9 per cent and economists said the annual inflation rate had now probably passed its

Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested in the Bahamas at the request of US government prosecutors who have filed criminal charges against the disgraced crypto entrepreneur. Bahamian attorney-general Ryan Pinder said the country’s police force had taken Bankman-Fried into custody after receiving “formal notification” from the US government that it had filed criminal charges and was

The UK electricity grid operator has instructed two emergency-use coal generators to start warming up as the network faces its first big test of the energy crisis, with demand across the country soaring as temperatures dip below zero. The National Grid Electricity System Operator said on Monday morning that it had asked the “contingency” plants

The White House’s chief energy adviser has described as “un-American” the refusal of US shale investors to ramp up drilling, even as Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine causes havoc on global oil and gas markets. US oil groups have been under pressure from Wall Street to funnel record profits back to investors this year, despite repeated

Jeremy Hunt has warned trade unions not to jeopardise Britain’s recovery, saying that high pay demands will hit the fight against inflation and harm the workers they are trying to protect. In an interview with the Financial Times, the UK chancellor did not deny that ministers had blocked a potential 10 per cent pay offer

UK ministers blocked a possible deal to call off this month’s rail strikes by preventing the industry from offering unions higher pay deals and adding tough new conditions at the last minute. Employers had planned to offer a 10 per cent pay rise over two years to the RMT union, but were blocked by the

The gulf between short- and long-term US borrowing costs has reached its widest point since 1981, in a sign investors expect the Federal Reserve to stay the course in its battle to tame inflation, even as recession worries mount. The two-year Treasury yield traded on Wednesday at 4.2 per cent, while the 10-year yield stood