Category Archives: Financial Times

Opera actor, 82, furious with critic for saying she looked a fright on first night

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‘The “fright” look is all naturally mine,’ riposted Rose Knox-Peebles after FT reviewer assumed she had makeup on in Das Rheingold

Rose Knox-Peebles was on a high after the opening night of Das Rheingold at the Royal Opera House earlier this week.

It was the first time the 82-year-old model, who plays Erda, the weary, gnarled earth mother who has seen it all, who knows what has been, what is and will be, had performed in an opera. In quite the baptism of all sorts of fire, the director, Barrie Kosky, decided to keep her character on stage, naked, for the entire two-and-a-half-hour performance – with no interval.

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TikTok’s parent company fires four workers for improper access of user data

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ByteDance said four employees were fired for examining data of two journalists in attempt to find leak source

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of popular video app TikTok, said on Thursday that some employees improperly accessed TikTok user data of two journalists and were no longer employed by the company, an email seen by Reuters shows.

ByteDance employees accessed the data as part of an unsuccessful effort to investigate leaks of company information earlier this year, and were aiming to identify potential connections between two journalists, a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter, and company employees, the email from ByteDance general counsel Erich Andersen said.

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Mark Huband obituary

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Foreign correspondent respected for his work in west Africa and the Middle East who went on to write books and poems

Mark Huband, who has died aged 58 of pancreatitis and multiple organ failure, built a strong and lasting reputation over more than three decades as a foreign correspondent and business analyst, specialising in Africa and the Middle East.

He and I met when he arrived in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 1989 to take up the post of the Financial Times stringer and I was working for Reuters. He hit the ground running and, despite his youth, he soon became a well-known figure among the foreign journalists, diplomats and business representatives covering the west African region. He was sharp, engaged and committed to the story, and went on to work as Africa correspondent for the Guardian and the Observer before returning to London. He did not look at events from a distance but always saw something of himself in others.

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Edward Mortimer obituary

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Speechwriter for Kofi Annan at the United Nations who drew on his experience as a commentator for British newspapers

In 1998 Edward Mortimer, who has died aged 77, joined the staff of the UN secretary general Kofi Annan as chief speechwriter and later director of communications. Since the UN’s foundation at the end of the second world war, its leadership had often lacked breadth and depth of vision, with the exception of the eight years under the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld until his death in a plane crash in Africa in 1961.

Like him, Annan, who was from Ghana, believed that the UN represented more than the sum of its member states, and could act as a prime mover in undertaking initiatives. Now, once more, the words of the secretary general mattered, moved, provoked and were remembered, and Mortimer had a key role in making that happen.

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Financial Times pulls out of gala honouring Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro

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Corporate boycott of New York event grows after campaign by LGBT rights activists

The Financial Times has pulled its involvement in an event honouring Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, after a campaign by LGBT rights activists against the celebration of the self-declared homophobe.

The recently elected South American leader is due to be honoured at the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce’s person of the year gala dinner, which is scheduled to take place in New York later this month.

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