Author: Press Room

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Chinese equities hit their highest level this year, defying a decline in the US stock market that pushed it into correction territory overnight amid hopes of further policy support for consumption in Asia’s largest economy. Chinese authorities announced late on Thursday that they would hold a press conference on “boosting consumption” on Monday. This helped push the country’s CSI 300 benchmark up 2.4 per cent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index climbed 2.5 per cent.Gains were concentrated in stocks with exposure to China’s…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.A French high-speed trading firm has urged Europe’s top markets regulator to close what it says is a loophole at futures exchange Eurex that gives some traders an “unfair” advantage.Paris-based Mosaic Finance, which specialises in trading derivatives, has called on the European Securities and Markets Authority to end a “significant” flaw in the German exchange’s systems that it claims has existed for three years and allows some traders to break the exchange’s rules.It said some traders were able to bypass Eurex’s monitoring…

Scarlett Johansson has taken a vocal stand on artificial intelligence, after having her likeness and voice used without permission.Last year, Johansson said she had been asked to voice OpenAI’s Chatbot by CEO Sam Altman, but turned down the job, only for people to notice that the feature, named “Sky,” sounded almost exactly like the actress.”Particularly with the A.I. piece. It was like: If that can happen to me, how are we going to protect ourselves from this? There’s no boundary here; we’re setting ourselves up to be taken advantage of,” the 40-year-old told InStyle Magazine earlier this month.In a statement…

A man who looks like Musk, only 20 years younger and better rested, eats hummus before another cut to belly dancers with large breasts, shapely hips and full beards. This jarring sequence brings us to the chorus: “Trump Gaza, shining bright/golden future, a brand-new light/feast and dance, the deed is done/Trump Gaza, No. 1.”As the chorus repeats, we enter the “after” portion of the spot. A child walks down a shining boulevard, holding a Mylar balloon shaped like the president’s head. The president himself chats up a younger woman in a casino. Money falls from the sky. The aforementioned golden…

Citing government data, Lai said 64 people were charged for Chinese espionage last year, three times more than in 2021. He said the majority of them were current or former military officials. “Many are worried that our country, hard-earned freedom and democracy and prosperity will be lost bit by bit due to these influence campaigns and manipulation,” he said. By making these efforts, Lai said China constituted what Taiwan’s Anti-Infiltration Act defined as “foreign hostile forces”. The president proposed 17 legal and economic countermeasures, including the strict review of Taiwan visits or residency applications by Chinese citizens, and proposals to…

Ingrid Daubechies, a mathematician at Duke University, is an expert on many matters, not least the baking of cookies in the shape of pi, the mathematical constant that equals the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, or roughly 3.14159. A sugar cookie recipe works fine, Dr. Daubechies says. But she prefers a savory version with cheese (Parmigiano-Reggiano) and herbs (thyme and marjoram).In the summer of 2023, Dr. Daubechies made a pi-shaped cookie cutter that tiles the plane: In principle, when this shape cuts cookies from a large sheet of dough, it generates absolutely no wasteful scraps from one…

A judge in Maryland has blocked for now the mass firings of probationary federal workers and ordered thousands of fired probationary workers to be reinstated, marking the second decision of its kind in a day.The order from U.S. District Judge James Bredar came late Thursday in a lawsuit filed by 19 states and the District of Columbia against multiple federal agencies alleging the mass firings are illegal.”In this case, the government conducted massive layoffs, but it gave no advance notice,” Bredar wrote. “It claims it wasn’t required to because, it says, it dismissed each one of these thousands of probationary…

Resignations. Retirements. Firings.And now large-scale layoffs, as agencies faced a Thursday deadline to turn in their plans for executing the next phase of President Trump’s goal of significantly reducing the government payroll.Agencies were given guidance and a timeline last month to submit outlines for “reductions in force” — a bureaucratic term meaning shrinking of an organization. Many agencies have not yet announced detailed plans. But some plans have trickled out, pointing to a downsizing effort exceeding the number of probationary workers already fired and the number of workers who accepted voluntary resignation offers.At least some planned cuts could be blocked…

The killer, who was just a teenager when he stabbed a three-year-old girl in the middle of the night back in 2001, has learned of his future.

The Deutsche Telekom pavilion at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.Angel Garcia | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesBARCELONA — Europe’s telecommunication firms are ramping up calls for more industry consolidation to help the region compete more effectively with superpowers like the U.S. and China on key technologies like 5G and artificial intelligence.Last week at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) trade show in Barcelona, CEOs of several telecoms firms called on regulators to make it easier for them to combine their operations with other businesses and reduce the overall number of carriers operating across the continent.Currently, there are numerous telco players operating…