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Joe Biden has nominated former Mastercard chief executive Ajay Banga as World Bank president, picking a Wall Street veteran raised in India to oversee the institution’s biggest mission change in a generation. Banga’s nomination, a week after sitting president David Malpass abruptly resigned, comes as the US and other shareholder nations seek to expand the

The UK’s crisis-hit public services will not recover before the next election and may require significant injections of cash to prevent further decline, according to a sobering annual review by the Institute for Government, a non-partisan think-tank. After almost 13 years of austerity and grave damage to the public sector’s capacity as a result of

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak is exploring a 5 per cent pay rise for public-sector workers to end an escalating wave of strikes after the Treasury was given an unexpected £30bn windfall. In a sign of a change of mood after months of strife, the Royal College of Nursing on Tuesday called off a 48-hour

Less than half of the financial aid pledged to Ukraine by the west has actually reached Kyiv since Russia’s invasion last year, according to analysis of international financial support. Ukraine’s finance ministry received €31bn by December 2022 of the €64bn promised by western countries after Russia launched its full-scale attack last February, research by the

Poland’s head of state has called on Nato powers to give postwar security guarantees to Ukraine, on the eve of a visit by the US president to Warsaw to reaffirm the west’s support for Kyiv a year into Russia’s war. Andrzej Duda told the Financial Times that promises of security guarantees “would be important” for

US secretary of state Antony Blinken said the US is “very concerned” China is considering supplying Russia with weapons and ammunition in Ukraine. Blinken said he told Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, that such support would have “serious consequences” for the US relationship with Beijing during a meeting on the sidelines of the

The Russian army is suffering huge losses in Ukraine, shows no sign it has improved its “meat grinder” tactics and is struggling to sustain a stuttering offensive that is “advancing, if at all, in metres not kilometres”, Britain’s defence secretary Ben Wallace said on Friday. Despite fears that Russia is poised to launch a huge

Rishi Sunak has launched a high-stakes gamble to seal a deal with Brussels over Northern Ireland, making a surprise visit to Belfast as Tory Eurosceptics warned he was going too far to accommodate the EU. The UK prime minister is seeking to win backing from Northern Irish parties for an outline deal with the EU

Nicola Sturgeon announced her resignation as Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National party on Wednesday after a backlash over her strategy for securing independence and controversy over proposed gender laws. A thorn in the side of UK prime ministers for almost a decade, Sturgeon led the pro-independence SNP to repeated electoral success

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and chancellor Jeremy Hunt are exploring a pay offer to try to end the wave of public sector strikes that would backdate next year’s wage award for NHS staff and other key workers. After weeks of deadlock, Sunak and Hunt are considering giving workers a lump sum by backdating next year’s

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy has vowed to double down on the company’s struggling grocery store business, despite recently announcing that its growth plans were on hold. Jassy told the Financial Times that the ecommerce giant was ready to “go big” on bricks-and-mortar stores, blaming a lack of “normalcy” during the pandemic for a series

Taiwan has observed dozens of Chinese military balloon flights in its airspace in recent years, far more than previously known, adding to concerns that Beijing could be preparing for an attack on the country. “They come very frequently, the last one just a few weeks ago,” said a senior Taiwanese official. Another person briefed on

Turkish authorities have launched a crackdown on developers connected to buildings that were toppled by this week’s devastating earthquake as president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan faces growing discontent over the quality of construction in the stricken region. The justice ministry has authorised almost 150 local prosecutors’ offices to set up earthquake investigation units to probe contractors,

Gillian Keegan, UK education secretary, has signalled she will fight any Home Office attempts to cut migration into Britain by driving away overseas students, saying universities were a “hugely valuable” export success. Keegan, in an interview with the Financial Times, said she wanted to build on the UK’s booming export market in university education, and

Nelson Peltz has called off his fight against Walt Disney a day after the company unveiled a restructuring plan involving the loss of 7,000 jobs, ending one of the biggest corporate battles in recent years. The end of the activist investor’s push removes a distraction for chief executive Bob Iger, who is seeking to steer

Disney chief executive Bob Iger announced plans to cut the company’s workforce by 7,000, or about 3 per cent, as part of a broad restructuring that he said would save $5.5bn over the next few years, revive its creative output and make its streaming business profitable. Investors have been waiting to hear Iger’s strategic plan

Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell has warned that the US central bank might have to raise interest rates more than expected by investors because it will probably take a “significant period of time” to tame inflation given stronger labour market data. Powell’s comments to the Economic Club of Washington on Tuesday were his first since

Turkey was battling to respond to a historic natural disaster after its biggest earthquake in almost a century flattened neighbourhoods across the country’s south-east and northern Syria, killing more than 3,000 people. Monday’s 7.8 magnitude quake destroyed thousands of buildings when it hit shortly after 4am local time, sending people fleeing into the streets in

For some time, American officials have talked about the need to “put a floor” under the sharp deterioration in US-China relations. But the controversy surrounding the Chinese spy balloon (which Beijing insists was a “civilian” vessel blown by accident into American airspace) has dashed efforts to gradually improve relations between the two countries. A visit

The US military has shot down the Chinese spy balloon that flew over North America for a week and moved to recover the debris to glean more information about the surveillance craft. US defence secretary Lloyd Austin said a fighter jet on Saturday afternoon shot down the surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina

The UK’s FTSE 100 hit an all-time high on Friday, as the blue-chip index dominated by multinational companies overcame the drag of a domestic economy headed for recession. The FTSE added as much as 1.1 per cent on the day to trade at 7906.58, eclipsing its previous peak in May 2018, before closing at 7902.