President’s ‘hard, drastic and necessary measure’, likely to attract widespread public support, polls suggest
The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has signed an order banning fixed-odds sports betting just over a week before the first round of the presidential election, in a move he said was designed to tackle the pervasive problem of families falling into debt.
The decision ends the operation, offering, intermediation and advertising of betting.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Economist Ravinder Athwal who worked in Keir Starmer’s team is poached from Flint Global
Ravinder Athwal, the economist who wrote Labour’s 2024 manifesto, is taking on a senior role as an adviser to John Healey, in a move likely to fuel speculation about an early general election.
The chancellor is keen to beef up his team before the critical budget on 28 October, as the economy is buffeted by high oil prices and rising government borrowing costs.
Continue reading...Industry leaders call on government to protect homegrown produce in the interest of national security
The gap between Britain’s food and drink exports and imports has neared its highest this century, as a combination of Brexit, war in the Middle East and US tariffs dented deliveries overseas while imports soared.
The UK’s food and drink trade deficit has risen to more than £21bn – the largest since 2000 – in what industry leaders said was a “wake-up call” for the government to protect homegrown produce in the interest of national security.
Continue reading...‘If you’re not in the internal market, you don’t get the same protection,’ says French minister of policy designed to curb Chinese competition
France is leading a push to exclude the UK from the EU’s “Made in Europe” policy that could result in British companies losing out in the race to supply European countries with low-carbon technologies and electric cars.
The plans were raised by Andy Burnham when he met the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly earlier this week.
Continue reading...Datacentre hailed by government was supposed to start operating next year but may be held back into mid-2030s
A huge datacentre project hailed by the UK government will miss its launch date next year and could be delayed into the mid-2030s.
The site in Loughton, Essex, was described as the country’s largest AI supercomputer when it was announced in 2025, but power supply problems mean it now faces a lengthy wait before coming online.
Continue reading...IPPR finds failure to align testing standards has forced companies to abandon exporting to EU and is costing costing 0.18% of national income
The UK is losing out on annual exports to the EU that could be worth as much as £6.5bn without a deal with Brussels that allows manufacturers to jettison duplicate product testing.
In the latest attempt to calculate the loss of trade with the EU after Brexit, the IPPR thinktank said many companies have given up selling goods to the EU or set up subsidiaries inside the trade bloc after successive governments failed to secure a mutual recognition agreement that would avoid the extra administration costs.
Motor vehicle and part exports would have been between £2.48bn and £3.42bn higher each year.
Electronic exports could have been between £1.17bn and £1.67bn higher.
Pharmaceutical exports would have had an estimated annual uplift of between £740m and £820m.
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Anthony Albanese has revealed an artificial intelligence agent developed by OpenAI hacked Medicare in June.
The prime minister made the comments at the UN summit in New York.
This incident occurred in June this year and involved an Open AI agent gaining unauthorised access into the public-facing Medicare statistics reporting service portal, which is administered by Services Australia.
The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files.
Continue reading...Sunil Bharti Mittal’s Airtel Money targets $9bn IPO in boost for ailing UK stock market
Nils Pratley: Does this mark the end of London’s listing drought? Not yet
A payments business that operates across Africa and is ultimately controlled by an Indian billionaire has announced its intention to float on the struggling London Stock Exchange.
Airtel Money, the mobile money arm of Airtel Africa, is planning one of the biggest UK listings in years, in a boost for the shrinking London market that has faced a string of recent departures.
Continue reading...Trump says further talks possible as barrel of Brent crude falls to below $100 for first time in two weeks
Iran has pushed back on claims that it dropped former preconditions for reopening the strait of Hormuz in surprise talks held in New York under the mediation of Qatar between Tehran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
Trump said the three-hour talks held in a room at the UN headquarters had gone very well and been very productive. He suggested further talks were possible imminently, which led to the price of a barrel of Brent crude to fall to below $100 (£75) for the first time in two weeks. Witkoff said the talks had been “encouraging, constructive and successful”.
Continue reading...Treasury committee rejects calls for fundamental reform of independent watchdog the Office for Budget Responsibility
Attacks on the government’s independent economic forecaster from left and right of the political spectrum are akin to “shooting the messenger”, according to an influential group of MPs.
The Treasury committee rejected “siren calls to fundamentally reform” the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and said it should not be blamed when policymakers had to make tough decisions because of tight public finances.
Continue reading...Some economists say it is now ‘inevitable’ that chancellor will need to raise taxes in the budget next month
The UK government borrowed a higher-than-expected £18.3bn last month, increasing the pressure on John Healey as he attempts to calm jittery bond markets before next month’s budget.
Some economists said it was “inevitable” that the chancellor would need to raise taxes on 28 October if he is to meet demands for extra spending on defence without further borrowing investors on international money markets.
Continue reading...MPs send out letter as Israeli government seeks bids for construction of large E1 settlement in West Bank
British banks and financial institutions are receiving written warnings from MPs that they should not invest in Israel’s E1 settlement project even though new UK laws banning trade with illegal settlements are unlikely to be in place for months.
A letter was sent to banks on Tuesday by the all-party Britain-Palestine group of MPs saying the onus was now on banks to review their obligations not to cooperate with new settlements.
Continue reading...EVs with 90,000 to 120,000 miles on the clock are more likely to pass MOTs than petrol models of the same age
Motorists buying a secondhand car with a lot of miles on the clock are likely to find an electric vehicle (EV) ultimately more reliable than a petrol vehicle, according to a study.
An analysis of 47.4m MOT tests found that after cars were driven 90,000 to 120,000 miles, EVs were about 25% less likely to fail than petrol models of the same age (based on a failure rate of 16.5% versus 22.1%).
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Jim Chalmers was also asked earlier if the government would support a national royal commission into violence against women and children. He said the government had chosen to increase resourcing for child and family violence and domestic violence, adding to the ABC:
We’re trying to deal with the sources of all of this violence, whether it be more security in the housing system, whether it be the monetised misogyny that we see online – there are a whole range of factors feeding in here.
We do acknowledge that all of this violence is obviously entirely unacceptable. It’s horrific in every way. That’s why we’ve increased the resources and that’s why we all need to do better to do everything we can to make a difference here.
Continue reading...Nats says fault at Prestwick has been ‘fixed’ after airports in Scotland, northern England and Northern Ireland are hit
Airlines have called for “action and accountability” over the UK’s air traffic control services after a technical issue led to flights being disrupted for the second time in a fortnight.
Dozens were cancelled and others severely delayed after a fault on Monday morning at National Air Traffic Services (Nats), this time at its second control centre at Prestwick in South Ayrshire.
Continue reading...Unions, thinktanks and others say overhaul could provide investment Britain needs
Unions, thinktanks, environmental groups and charities have come together to call on ministers to boost the financial firepower of the national wealth fund to empower it to invest more in Britain and rebalance the country’s economy.
Lower energy bills, the revitalisation of the UK’s industrial heartlands and the provision of more high-quality jobs could all be unlocked by scaling up the NWF, according to a statement from organisations including the TUC, Greenpeace, WWF and the New Economics Foundation.
Turbocharging the retrofitting of homes and buildings.
Giving the public a bigger stake in critical infrastructure through taking part-ownership stakes in key projects.
Launching a targeted investment programme to bring new green industries to communities hit hardest by deindustrialisation.
Supporting a network of regional banks to funnel money into the small businesses that hold up local economies.
Continue reading...Error first occurred at 10am but major incident was not declared until 12.30pm, says report
A software defect in part of the UK’s air traffic control system corrupted flight data “in the space of a millisecond”, leading to a six-hour outage and mass airline cancellations and delays across the UK last week, National Air Traffic Services has said.
But ministers said the Nats report into the incident still left questions unanswered, saying they needed “to urgently understand why this issue was not discovered and fixed before it caused chaos”.
Continue reading...Latest data to defy economic gloom shows 0.5% rise boosted by purchases of sports items, aircon units and fans during heatwaves
Retail sales across Great Britain unexpectedly rose last month, the latest economic indicator to defy gloomy forecasts as the chancellor, John Healey, prepares to present next month’s budget.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the volume of goods sold rose 0.5% month on month in August, defying analyst expectations of a 0.2% fall.
Continue reading...Increase from 1% to 1.25% follows US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank tightening monetary policy
Japan’s central bank has increased interest rates to a fresh 31-year high as it attempts to combat global inflation linked to the war in Iran.
The Bank of Japan voted to raise its target interest rate from 1% to 1.25%, the highest level since 1995.
Continue reading...Although Mark Carney welcomed offer to become bloc’s first associate member, no one seems to know what that means
Mark Carney received a rapturous reception in the European parliament when he gave his speech on Thursday welcoming a proposal for Canada to become the EU’s first-ever associate member.
Politicians queued to shake his hand and take selfies. One described the speech as a historic moment. “Europe has extended a hand, and Canada has taken it,” said the German Green MEP Terry Reintke, who borrowed a Canadian ice hockey shirt for the occasion.
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