The Guardian
2 days ago
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Is Trump's Iran deal a failure? - video explainer
Donald Trump has signed a 14-point agreement with Iran, claiming it delivered a 'major win' for the US – even as it made significant political and financial concessions to Tehran to reopen the strait of HormuzTrump’s Iran deal is result of unrealistic ambitions for an untenable warIran announces plans to bring in maritime fees for strait of HormuzIran peace deal makes clear how far US has been forced to retreat since 2025 Continue reading...
The Guardian
2 days ago
‘It’s a scam’: Americans express unease over SpaceX’s influence on retirement savings
Guardian readers in the US share concerns about how the SpaceX IPO and AI boom affect their retirement accountsElon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire last week after SpaceX debuted on the stock market with a valuation of $1.77tn.Millions of Americans could soon become indirect investors in SpaceX and other emerging AI-focused companies as US markets increasingly shift toward AI-driven investments. Continue reading...
The Guardian
2 days ago
How the world’s voracious appetite for shrimp is destroying Ecuador’s mangroves
As demand soars, the country’s mangrove forests and the livelihoods of shellfish gatherers are under threat from encroaching farms and unchecked pollutionAt low tide, Johana Carolina Cruz Potes steps into the mudflats around Isla Costa Rica, in Ecuador’s Jambelí Archipelago. Holding a bucket and a short metal hook, she probes the tangled roots of a mangrove patch, searching for concha negra, black-shelled cockles, buried beneath the sludge.Cruz Potes has done this work since she was nine, when she first followed her father into the mud. But earning a living from shellfish gathering – often the only income for families here – has become harder as grounds shrink and catches decline. Continue reading...
The Guardian
2 days ago
Shoppers splash out on fans and paddling pools as retail sales in Great Britain hot up
May heatwave drives up volume of sales 1.2%, the strongest monthly growth since January, says ONSRetail sales bounced back to growth in May as record hot weather spurred sales of fans and paddling pools, while online purchases also soared.The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the volume of retail sales in Great Britain grew 1.2% in May compared with the previous month, the strongest monthly rate of growth since January. Continue reading...
The Guardian
2 days ago
Trump’s Iran deal could place his legacy in the hands of Tehran
He lambasted Jimmy Carter during the 1980 hostage crisis; now Trump’s presidency could be similarly blemishedIt began with the fate of hostages.Donald Trump’s first recorded foray into politics was sparked by the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, which saw 52 American diplomats held incommunicado for 444 days. Continue reading...
The Guardian
3 days ago
On the trail of the dotcom queen: how Julie Meyer left a pattern of unpaid bills, missing funds and broken dreams in her wake
Investigation: The entrepreneur was once the toast of London’s tech scene, a ‘global leader of tomorrow’ who starred on Dragons’ Den and promised untold riches for the startups she championed. But people she worked with in the last decade, from Malta to Switzerland, describe a very different realityJulie Meyer is sitting in a starkly lit attic, surrounded by piles of £50 notes. A California blond in a crisp, white shirt, her long, stockinged legs crossed at the knee, she listens intently to the young man standing before her. As he talks, she sizes him up. Eventually, she tells him: “I’m going to make you an offer.” It could be a scene from a heist movie, but Meyer is in a BBC studio, shooting a 2009 episode of the TV show Dragons’ Den. A celebrated entrepreneur with a venture capital fund, she is ready to invest in whichever contestants catch her eye. For the viewers, she has some advice: “What is success? A lot of it is self-belief. Continuing on when most rational people would stop.”This is an online spin-off from the original Dragons’ Den series, so the stakes are a little lower. But for Lex Deak, a 23-year-old with a big idea for a social media website, what happens in this room today could be make or break. He desperately wants to work with Meyer. Continue reading...
The Guardian
3 days ago
MPs urge Fujitsu to make ‘immediate’ payment to Post Office Horizon victims
Liam Byrne, who chairs Commons business committee, says too many operators are still waiting for redressThe Japanese tech company at the centre of the Post Office IT scandal is facing calls from a parliamentary committee to make an “immediate” payment towards the compensation bill for victims.Fujitsu supplied the faulty Horizon software to the UK Post Office, which led to branch operators being wrongly prosecuted over discrepancies in their business accounts. Continue reading...
The Guardian
3 days ago
Homes for sale in former schools in England and Scotland – in pictures
From a one-room village school transformed into a five-bedroom rural pile to a flat in a grand Victorian building in London Continue reading...
The Guardian
3 days ago
Think like a billionaire part one – podcast
Glamorous, rich and well-connected, Julie Meyer was a darling of the dotcom boom. But people who worked with the entrepreneur complain about unpaid wages, debts to suppliers and missing money. Journalist Olivia Lee and the Guardian’s investigations team unravel the complicated storyJournalist Olivia Lee was in Fabric nightclub in London when she heard a story that intrigued her: a tech founder told her a tale of woe about a luxury networking event he had been to. He told Lee there were supposed to be yacht trips and gala dinners. But nothing had gone as planned. “He claimed that there were these really chaotic scenes of taxi drivers supposedly working for the organiser going on strike because they hadn’t been paid. People chucked out of hotel rooms because the organiser appeared to have not paid the hotel bill.”The woman he said was behind the event was Julie Meyer. An entrepreneur who had been the queen of the 00s dotcom scene in London and was later awarded an MBE. Lee, along with Juliette Garside from the Guardian’s investigations team, began looking into Meyer. Lee tells Helen Pidd what she learned about the tech entrepreneur and the accusations made against her. Continue reading...
The Guardian
3 days ago
Another FTSE 100 firm falls to private equity. Where are the new listings? | Nils Pratley
You can’t complain Intertek’s £10bn takeover happened – the problem is the lack of arrivals in the other direction It would be a stretch to describe the £10bn-ish takeover of Intertek as a landmark event for the London stock market or the FTSE 100 index.This is not an Arm Holdings moment – the purchase of that Cambridge chip designer by Japan’s SoftBank in 2016 provoked long (and continuing) agonising over the lack of whizzy tech stocks on the London market. Continue reading...
The Guardian
3 days ago
‘Cynical to get power’: Michel Barnier on Boris Johnson, Brexit and the EU’s future
Former negotiator believes in an unstable world, it is ‘perfectly possible’ the UK can rejoin the EU with old opt-outsUK could keep special pre-Brexit terms if it rejoined EU, Michel Barnier saysA couple of years ago, Michel Barnier spent a weekend with Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley. It was not some ghoulish Brexit spin-off of The Traitors, but the result of the former EU negotiator’s wife, Isabelle, being a close friend of Johnson’s French cousin, Anne du Boucheron, the owner of Château de la Baronnière, a 19th-century estate in Mauges-sur-Loire, in western France.“We spent a weekend together in a French castle. Very friendly. Long promenades in the forest,” Barnier recalls of Johnson senior, with whom he discussed the former prime minister’s motivation to back Brexit. “It was interesting. Boris was much more European at the beginning. Even if he was critical. I don’t see it as a motivation but it is, perhaps, a method or attitude: to be pragmatic in some way. Cynical. Cynical to get power.” Continue reading...
The Guardian
3 days ago
How Brexit has made Britain poorer – in charts
Forecasters were wrong about an immediate recession but right that we would be worse off outside the EUAs the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote approaches, the verdict on Britain’s economic performance is clear: voting to leave has resulted in severe costs for households and businesses.The immediate recession predicted in the Treasury forecasts ordered by George Osborne – dubbed “project fear” by the Leave campaign – did not happen. The impact from the Covid pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Iran, and Donald Trump’s trade battles also cloud the picture. Continue reading...
The Guardian
1 week ago
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