Chipmaker dethrones Microsoft and Apple as stock market surge boosts valuation above $3.3tn

Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company on Tuesday, dethroning tech heavyweight Microsoft, as its chips continue to play a central role in a race to dominate the market for artificial intelligence.

Shares of the chipmaker climbed 3.2% to $135.21, lifting its market capitalization to $3.326tn, just days after overtaking the iPhone maker Apple to become the second most valuable company.

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© Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

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© Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

Investment fund supermarket has been offered £11.40 a share by trio of international investors

British investment fund supermarket Hargreaves Lansdown has said it will accept a proposed offer from a trio of private equity investors, meaning another of the UK’s biggest companies will leave the FTSE 100 index.

In a stock market filing on Tuesday, the company said that the US private equity firm CVC, Denmark’s Nordic Capital and a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) had made an offer worth £11.40 a share in cash.

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© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

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© Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters

Ian Henderson, looking into possible miscarriages of justice, said he came to believe he was dealing with ‘a cover-up’

An investigator appointed to look into concerns about the Post Office’s Horizon IT system in 2012 came to believe that he was “dealing with a cover-up” by the state-owned body, which made “various threats” against him, a public inquiry has heard.

Ian Henderson, a chartered accountant, and his colleague Ron Warmington, who ran Second Sight Investigations, were appointed in 2012 to review cases of post office operators after MPs raised concerns about possible miscarriages of justice involving the Post Office’s Horizon IT system. Second Sight’s fees were paid by the Post Office, which had agreed to cooperate with the investigation.

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© Photograph: Chris Ison/PA

Finma watchdog says bank failed to carry out adequate checks of two high-risk business relationships

HSBC’s Swiss private banking arm breached money-laundering rules by failing to carry out adequate checks on the high-risk accounts of two politically exposed individuals, Switzerland’s banking regulator has found.

HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) has been banned from taking on any new high-risk customers until it has completed a full review of its business relationships, Switzerland’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma) said.

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© Photograph: Felix Clay

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© Photograph: Felix Clay

The companies led by the boob-obsessed billionaire have faced a number of sexual harassment lawsuits. Why do his cult-like followers still consider him a genius?

Elon Musk is a boob. The brash billionaire is also, as he can’t stop telling the world, embarrassingly obsessed with breasts – so much so that last year he painted over the “W” on the Twitter sign at the San Francisco headquarters so that it read “Titter”. This belaboured joke was a long time in the making: days before offering to buy Twitter in April 2022, he tweeted a poll: “Delete the w in Twitter?” It’s highly possible that Musk spent $44bn on the social media platform just so that he could one day turn this very stupid gag into reality.

This wasn’t the first time he’d publicly sniggered “Haha, female anatomy is hilarious!” like a dimwitted schoolboy. In 2021 he joked about starting a university called the Texas Institute of Technology & Science. Gettit? It’s a naughty acronym. Hilarious! Indeed, this particular joke never seems to get old for the 52-year-old. Earlier this year, he tweeted “Boobs just rock, it’s a fact,” alongside a meme of a man distracted by a woman’s cleavage.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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© Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Increasing use of fans, air coolers and air conditioners is placing ‘serious’ strain on grid in north of country

Engineers in India have warned of the possibility of prolonged power outages in the north, where a heatwave has brought misery for millions of people.

Demand for electricity has soared due to fans, air coolers and air conditioners being run constantly, placing a strain on the grid in Delhi and elsewhere in the north. Manufacturers of air conditioners and air coolers report sales rising by 40-50% compared with last summer.

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© Photograph: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images

Unite union also considering employment tribunal claims for unfair dismissal against Whitbread

Workers are planning to demonstrate at Premier Inn owner Whitbread’s annual shareholder meeting over plans to cut 1,500 jobs amid rising profits.

The employees of restaurants including Brewers Fayre, Table Table and Beefeater plan to protest outside the company’s investor meeting in Dunstable, Bedfordshire on Tuesday.

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© Photograph: Lee Smith/Reuters

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© Photograph: Lee Smith/Reuters

Number of rail trips using season tickets now 13%, down from 34% before the pandemic

The use of rail season tickets in Great Britain has plummeted to the lowest level on record, driven by a rise in working from home since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The number of rail journeys made by people using season tickets fell to 13% in the year to 31 March, from 15% in the previous year, according to figures from the Office for Rail and Road, the industry regulator. This is the lowest figure since records started in 1986-87.

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© Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Bad weather makes consumers trim supermarket shop and rethink summer purchases despite slower food price rises

• Business live – latest updates

Britons have cut back on their supermarket shopping and traditional summer purchases because of recent poor weather, even though grocery price inflation slowed further, according to a report.

Supermarket prices were 2.1% higher than a year ago in the four weeks to 9 June, according to the retail researchers Kantar. This is down from May’s 2.4% inflation rate, and marks the 16th month that price rises have slowed. Kantar found costs are falling in nearly a third of the categories it tracks, including toilet tissue, butter and milk, an improvement from last year when just 1% of categories showed price declines.

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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Charities are calling for more help for women trapped with mortgages they cannot change because they are controlled by an abusive partner

A woman whose controlling partner’s abrupt departure left her with an unaffordable mortgage has accused Barclays of refusing to help her as she struggled with the fallout.

Sally James*, a mother of two teenage daughters, says the bank refused to restructure her repayments when she could no longer afford them after being left as a single parent. And when the ombudsman ordered Barclays to do so, it trashed her credit score.

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© Photograph: Roman Lacheev/Alamy

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Iceland’s chairman, Richard Walker, says Kantar are correct that the cost of living squeeze isn’t over – before squeezing in a plug for his supermarket:

Back in January, Walker (a former Conservative supporter) announced he was backing Labour, saying Keir Starmer understood how the cost of living crisis has put an “unbearable strain” on families.

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© Photograph: Denis Charlet/AFP/Getty Images

Threat of EU tariffs may not be enough to slow carmaker in its attempt to challenge Tesla on global stage

• How will tariffs on Chinese EVs work?

Germany’s men kicked off Euro 2024 on Friday in Munich. The city is storied in football terms, but it also occupies an important place in Germany’s self-image for a different reason: Munich is home to BMW, one of the country’s car exporting powerhouses.

Yet it will not be the logos of BMW or German rivals including Volkswagen or Mercedes-Benz plastered on stadiums or television coverage. Instead, China’s BYD is the only carmaker to sponsor Europe’s premier international tournament.

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© Photograph: Leonhard Simon/Reuters

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© Photograph: Leonhard Simon/Reuters

Look to Simon Peckham’s return with Rosebank Industries for an example of where the market should place value

It’s a euros triumph already: the value of all the companies on the London stock market is greater than all those on the Paris exchange: $3.18tn plays $3.13tn, calculates Bloomberg.

Actually, we should probably contain our excitement. First, the position is not groundbreaking: until only a few years ago, London was miles ahead as the biggest stock market in Europe. Second, the current position could reverse in an instant: it would merely take a marginal improvement in the value of fashion stocks such as LVMH, Hermès and Gucci-owning Kering that are heavyweights in Paris.

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© Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

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© Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

Investigation finds assessors providing inaccurate EPCs and unhelpful advice to homeowners

The consumer group Which? has called for an overhaul of the energy performance certificates (EPC) system after an investigation found assessments riddled with inaccuracies and unhelpful advice that could cost homeowners thousands of pounds.

The investigation, which included Which? securing EPC assessments for 12 homeowners, found in one case an assessor had failed to mention a property’s solar panels or wood burning stove in their final assessment, while the cost of upgrades recommended to another owner would not have been recouped for 29 years.

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© Photograph: monkeybusinessimages/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Institute for Public Policy Research urges Labour and Conservatives to reverse planned cuts

Investment in the UK has trailed other G7 countries including the US and Germany since the mid-1990s, according to a report that urges Labour and the Conservatives to reverse planned cuts to investment or risk long-term damage to economic growth.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) thinktank found the UK was bottom of the G7 league for investment in 24 out of the last 30 years, using figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

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© Photograph: Monty Rakusen/Getty Images

The UK can’t continue with policies that have produced a productivity slump and record amounts of insecure work

In the manifestos of both the Conservative and the Labour parties, there is a commitment to implementing the NHS long-term workforce plan to ensure that the country will be able to populate the health service with UK-trained doctors and nurses. However, neither of the parties are suggesting that they will fund the £30bn it would cost to employ the tens of thousands of staff they say they will train. Instead, voters are expected to believe that the confidence fairy will turn up when the next government arrives – and businesses will invest, leading to economic growth.

It is magical thinking to believe that, without actually doing anything, private spending in Britain will be stimulated to such an extent that it will more than compensate for the anticipated public sector cuts that depress it.

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© Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty Images

Value of Euronext Paris stocks falls by about $258bn in week after Macron’s announcement of snap elections

Paris has lost its spot as Europe’s largest equity market to London, as investors reacted to political turmoil in France in the week since Emmanuel Macron called snap elections.

Stocks listed on Euronext Paris were collectively worth about $3.13tn after about $258bn was knocked off the market capitalisation of French companies last week, putting it behind the London Stock Exchange’s $3.18tn (£2.51tn), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Separate data from Refinitiv, a subsidiary of the London Stock Exchange Group, also suggested the market value of UK-listed companies was bigger.

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© Photograph: Éric Piermont/AFP/Getty Images

The appetite for drama based on real events seems insatiable, but a preliminary ruling that a British film defamed the original of one of its characters – along with legal action against Baby Reindeer – may give producers pause for thought

It’s enough to chill the blood of screenwriters, directors and producers everywhere – or at least provoke a wince of recognition, whether they are in UK legal jurisdiction or not. In a preliminary ruling, a British judge has ruled that the The Lost King, the film about the discovery in 2012 of Richard III’s remains in a Leicester car park, has a case to answer that it is defamatory of Richard Taylor, a former university official.

The Lost King covers the efforts spearheaded by Philippa Langley (played by Sally Hawkins) to uncover Richard III’s skeleton, and Lee Ingleby plays Taylor, the then deputy registrar of Leicester university. Taylor claims the film shows him “behaving abominably” and shows him taking credit for the discovery for himself and the university.

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© Photograph: Warner Bros/Graeme Hunter

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© Photograph: Warner Bros/Graeme Hunter

Exclusive: Some of the drivers say they were not paid in full and in some cases billed thousands for vehicle damage

A group of drivers hired in Spain and brought to the UK to deliver Amazon packages to British households in the run-up to Christmas are taking legal action against the company and one of its subcontractors.

The drivers claim the subcontractor promised them earnings of more than £100 a day, free housing, van rental, insurance and free return flights via an online meeting in Spanish.

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© Photograph: supplied

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© Photograph: supplied

Wells Fargo's co-branded credit card partnership with fintech startup Bilt Technologies is causing the bank to lose up as much as $10 million monthly, according to a WSJ report. The bank agreed to a co-branded program with the fintech startup that most other big banks -- including JPMorgan Chase -- passed on, incorrectly modeled key assumptions and sees no path to profitability. The card, which allows users to pay rent without fees while earning rewards, has attracted many young customers. From the report: There is a reason why credit cards hadn't gained traction in the rent sector until Bilt came along. Most landlords didn't accept them because they refuse to pay card fees that get pocketed by the banks issuing them and often run between 2% and 3%. Bilt structured the card so landlords won't incur the fees. Wells instead eats much of that. About six months after the credit card was launched, Wells began paying Bilt a fee of about 0.80% of each rent transaction, even though the bank isn't collecting interchange fees from landlords. It appears that the problem for Wells Fargo is that Bilt customers are savvy. They are making the rent payments, but not carrying balances or doing any other transactions through the card.

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Authority has debts of £1.8bn after years of local government funding cuts and has failed to find an auditor

Warrington council’s inability to find an auditor to sign off its accounts has led the credit rating agency Moody’s to withdraw its monitoring of the authority, amid mounting concern about the broader crisis in local government funding.

In a statement, Warrington borough council said Moody’s Investors Service was no longer providing it with a credit rating, a crucial metric used by potential lenders to assess a borrower’s creditworthiness.

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© Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters

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© Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Devices used after opening hours at some London branches amid rise in shoplifting and attacks on staff

• Business live – latest updates

Tesco has installed smoke machines in some of its stores to stop people from stealing goods after night-time break-ins.

Britain’s biggest supermarket chain uses the 4ft-high security devices in some stores at high risk of burglary outside opening hours.

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© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

• China’s glut of idle property causes headache for the government

China has retaliated against Europe’s new curbs on its electric cars, by opening an anti-dumping investigation into imported pork and its by-products from the European Union.

China is the EU’s biggest overseas market for pork, which was worth over $1.8bn last year according to Bloomberg, led by shipments from Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands.

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© Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

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© Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Lambeth council, which raised bills for more than 3,000 tenants on communal heat networks, has delayed crediting them for over a year

A local authority that threatened tenants with eviction if they could not afford a 350% hike in energy bills has delayed crediting them with a £1m government subsidy for more than 12 months, it has emerged.

Lambeth council is facing demands to pay compensation to residents who campaigners say have been forced into poverty by its conduct.

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© Photograph: Jonathan Harbourne/Alamy

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© Photograph: Jonathan Harbourne/Alamy

Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT are finding widest use at big companies, but there is wide expectation that the impact will spread.

© Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

Blow to London’s fashion scene as British creatives find it makes commercial sense to move shows to Italian city

Milan men’s fashion week is where all the big Italian names converge. It’s where Prada dictates what trouser shape everyone will one day be wearing and where Gucci drops the next it-bag. But as the shows got under way at the weekend an unexpected new trend was emerging: the great fashion Brexit.

Just four months after making his debut as creative director of Dunhill at London fashion week, Simon Holloway instead chose the Italian capital for the brand’s spring/summer ’25 show. On Sunday he aimed to recreate “the sense of a beautiful spring day in England” by showing in a garden in Milan.

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© Photograph: Justin Shin/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Justin Shin/Getty Images

ASUS has suddenly agreed "to overhaul its customer support and warranty systems," writes the hardware review site Gamers Nexus — after a three-video series on its YouTube channel documented bad and "potentially illegal" handling of customer warranties for the channel's 2.2 million viewers. The Verge highlights ASUS's biggest change: If you've ever been denied a warranty repair or charged for a service that was unnecessary or should've been free, Asus wants to hear from you at a new email address. It claims those disputes will be processed by Asus' own staff rather than outsourced customer support agents.... The company is also apologizing today for previous experiences you might have had with repairs. "We're very sorry to anyone who has had a negative experience with our service team. We appreciate your feedback and giving us a chance to make amends." It started five weeks ago when Gamers Nexus requested service for a joystick problem, according to a May 10 video. First they'd received a response wrongly telling them their damage was out of warranty — which also meant Asus could add a $20 shipping charge for the requested repair. "Somehow that turned into ASUS saying the LCD needs to be replaced, even though the joystick is covered under their repair policies," the investigators say in the video. [They also note this response didn't even address their original joystick problem — "only that thing that they had decided to find" — and that ASUS later made an out-of-the-blue reference to "liquid damage."] The repair would ultimately cost $191.47, with ASUS mentioning that otherwise "the unit will be sent back un-repaired and may be disassembled." ASUS gave them four days to respond, with some legalese adding that an out-of-warranty repair fee is non-refundable, yet still "does not guarantee that repairs can be made." Even when ASUS later agreed to do a free "partial" repair (providing the requested in-warranty service), the video's investigators still received another email warning of "pending service cancellation" and return of the unit unless they spoke to "Invoice Quotation Support" immediately. The video-makers stood firm, and the in-warranty repair was later performed free — but they still concluded that "It felt like ASUS tried to scam us." ASUS's response was documented in a second video, with ASUS claiming it had merely been sending a list of "available" repairs (and promising that in the future ASUS would stop automatically including costs for the unrequested repair of "cosmetic imperfections" — and that they'd also change their automatic emails.) Gamers Nexus eventually created a fourth, hour-long video confronting various company officials at Computex — which finally led to them publishing a list of ASUS's promised improvements on Friday. Some highlights: ASUS promises it's "created a Task Force team to retroactively go back through a long history of customer surveys that were negative to try and fix the issues." (The third video from Gamers Nexus warned ASUS was already on the government's radar over its handling of warranty issues.) ASUS also announced their repairs centers were no longer allowed to claim "customer-induced damage" (which Gamers Nexus believes "will remove some of the financial incentive to fail devices" to speed up workloads). ASUS is creating a new U.S. support center allowing customers to choose either a refurbished board or a longer repair. Gamers Nexus says they already have devices at ASUS repair centers — under pseudonyms — and that they "plan to continue sampling them over the next 6-12 months so we can ensure these are permanent improvements." And there's one final improvement, according to Gamers Nexus. "After over a year of refusing to acknowledge the microSD card reader failures on the ROG Ally [handheld gaming console], ASUS will be posting a formal statement next week about the defect."

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Rightmove says demand from buyers up 5% with caution detected only among would-be sellers at top of market

• Business live – latest updates

The average asking price for a UK home remained near its record high in June, with the housing market maintaining its “2024 momentum” across much of the country, according to the latest figures from the property website Rightmove.

The UK’s biggest property listings website said the average price of homes coming to the market over the past four weeks was £375,110 – just £21 less than in May, when average prices had posted a new high.

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© Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

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© Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

Make UK survey foresees growth in sector, but warns next government must tackle skills shortage

• Business live – latest updates

Britain’s largest manufacturers are expecting orders and output to increase dramatically in the second half of the year, even as a chronic shortage of skilled workers is threatening the ability of some companies to do business.

Manufacturing is returning to normal business conditions after wild swings in demand during the pandemic, disruptions in prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the effect on supply chains of blockages and conflict around the Suez canal, according to a survey of 320 companies by the trade body Make UK.

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© Photograph: Richard Saker/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Richard Saker/The Guardian

Plant-based food company This has not detected E coli in the wrap but is concerned about possible contamination

A third sandwich and wrap manufacturer has recalled one of its products after an E coli outbreak that has left 67 people in hospital and more than 200 in total seriously ill.

On Sunday evening the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said This had “taken the precautionary step of recalling its This Isn’t Chicken and Bacon wrap because of possible contamination with E coli”.

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© Photograph: this

News comes as US regulators investigate separate incident after Boeing 737 Max 8 plane did a ‘Dutch roll’ in May

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating after a Southwest Airlines flight reportedly plunged to “within 400ft” of the Pacific Ocean during a flight.

A memo distributed to Southwest pilots, obtained by Bloomberg, said that the Boeing 737 Max 8 plunged at a rate of 4,000ft a minute off the coast of Hawaii, coming within hundreds of feet of the ocean before climbing to safety.

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© Photograph: Kiichiro Sato/AP

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© Photograph: Kiichiro Sato/AP

A hiccup in the Hollywood studio machine has allowed indie films to flourish – and, crucially for cinemas, find a new generation of customers

This time last summer, British cinemas were holding their collective breath, looking forward to the biggest box office weekend of the year. “Barbenheimer” came to the rescue, with the doubleheader of blockbusters jointly chalking up an initial total of £30m when released in mid-July.

This summer is a different story. There may be no lucrative Barbie or Oppenheimer at hand, but the holiday months at the cinema look potentially more interesting, if not downright weird – at least when it comes to Sasquatch Sunset, this weekend’s new, grunting, wordless tale of mythical Bigfoot folk, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough.

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© Photograph: Tempesta/ Ad Vitam/ Amka Films/ RAI

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© Photograph: Tempesta/ Ad Vitam/ Amka Films/ RAI

Alton Towers and Legoland owner alters tactics after period of VAT cuts and people spending cash saved during lockdowns

The period of post-Covid “revenge spending” has ended, leaving businesses having to look at different ways to attract customers, the chief operating officer of Merlin Entertainments has said.

The term revenge spending was coined to describe how people looked to splash the cash they had saved up during the Covid pandemic on products or experiences that would help make up for time lost to lockdowns.

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© Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

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© Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

With nearly 60% of NHS cataract operations outsourced, critics say it is sapping funding for more serious conditions

Hundreds of thousands more NHS patients a year are having cataracts removed in England in a boom driven by private clinics – but funded by taxpayers.

Doctors say the trend, which now means nearly 60% of NHS cataract operations are outsourced to private providers – up from 24% five years ago – is piling pressure on already stretched NHS finances and sapping the funds needed for more serious conditions that can lead to blindness.

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© Photograph: Sergio Azenha/Alamy

Across the EU and US, strong anti-incumbency sentiment shows voters in west are unhappy with direction of travel

• UK election live – latest updates

As the weeks roll by, Rishi Sunak’s decision to call the election before he needed to appears ever more curious. Unemployment is up and growth has stalled. NHS waiting lists have increased. There will be better news from this week’s annual inflation figures but it won’t make a difference to voting intentions.

The case for holding on until the autumn was that it would give time for the Bank of England to start cutting interest rates and for recovery to become more firmly embedded. That case now looks all the stronger. Threadneedle Street is not going to deliver a pre-election cut in interest rates this week and by the time it does start to reduce the cost of borrowing, the Conservatives will be long gone.

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© Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AFP/Getty Images

Even the HMRC doesn’t know if any of the 341 tax breaks promote economic growth – many merely line the pockets of company owners and the super-rich

• Caution, not grand plans, is needed if Labour is to build wealth in Britain

When Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves consider the funding gap between what they want a Labour government to achieve and the money available, there are billions of pounds in unjustified tax giveaways that could be cancelled to help reverse austerity.

Successive governments have put in place tax breaks to boost economic growth that in the worst examples have proved to be a fraudsters’ charter and, even in less scandalous circumstances, are undermined by a lack of evidence about whether they achieve their aims.

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© Photograph: Lucy North/PA

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© Photograph: Lucy North/PA

With spotlight on investments behind banks, we ask whether three top providers still offer a good deal

Protests outside Barclays branches and the recent arguments over Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship of book festivals have put the spotlight on the investments behind big banking institutions. For most people, choosing an ethical home for their current account will be the easiest way to ensure their money is being used in an environmentally friendly or socially responsible way.

The consumer group Which? names three “eco providers” for current accounts: the Co-operative Bank, Nationwide building society and Triodos Bank. These three also do well on the green money website MotherTree, which has ranked major UK banks on how much £10,000 in a current account contributes in carbon emissions. At the bottom of its table – so therefore the winner – is Triodos, followed by the Co-op Bank and then Nationwide.

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© Photograph: BrianAJackson/Getty Images/iStockphoto

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© Photograph: BrianAJackson/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Thanks to our reader-funded model, we can turn down money from a sector that leads some users to despair

• Support the Guardian’s bold, independent reporting today

When I began reporting on the gambling sector in 2015, I didn’t have any preconceptions about the industry. After all, it rarely seemed to make front-page news.

One reason for this, I would later learn, is that problem gambling and addiction often fly under the radar, not just at a societal level but even within close-knit families.

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© Composite: Alamy/Guardian Design

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© Composite: Alamy/Guardian Design

Former Debenhams stores across the UK are being reinvented, with a dizzying array of new uses – but only a third of the sites are now occupied by retailers

Science labs, parks, health centres and community arts hubs, lecture halls, bowling alleys and even a submarine training centre.

Former Debenhams stores across the UK are being reinvented with a dizzying array of new uses as councils and landlords battle to fill millions of square feet of space left empty after the demise of the department store chain in May 2021.

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© Photograph: The Pioneer Group

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© Photograph: The Pioneer Group

Paul M. Nakasone, a retired U.S. Army general and former NSA director, is now OpenAI's newest board member. Nakasone will join the Safety and Security Committee and contribute to OpenAI's cybersecurity efforts. CNBC reports: The committee is spending 90 days evaluating the company's processes and safeguards before making recommendations to the board and, eventually, updating the public, OpenAI said. Nakasone joins current board members Adam D'Angelo, Larry Summers, Bret Taylor and Sam Altman, as well as some new board members the company announced in March: Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former executive vice president and global general counsel of Sony; and Fidji Simo, CEO and chair of Instacart. OpenAI on Monday announced the hiring of two top executives as well as a partnership with Apple that includes a ChatGPT-Siri integration. The company said Sarah Friar, previously CEO of Nextdoor and finance chief at Square, is joining as chief financial officer. Friar will "lead a finance team that supports our mission by providing continued investment in our core research capabilities, and ensuring that we can scale to meet the needs of our growing customer base and the complex and global environment in which we are operating," OpenAI wrote in a blog post. OpenAI also hired Kevin Weil, an ex-president at Planet Labs, as its new chief product officer. Weil was previously a senior vice president at Twitter and a vice president at Facebook and Instagram. Weil's product team will focus on "applying our research to products and services that benefit consumers, developers, and businesses," the company wrote. Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who leaked classified documents in 2013 that exposed the massive scope of government surveillance programs, is wary of the appointment. In a post on X, Snowden wrote: "They've gone full mask-off: Do not ever trust OpenAI or its products (ChatGPT etc). There is only one reason for appointing an NSA director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth. You have been warned."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Julia Hoggett awarded damehood for services to business, while HSBC chair Mark Tucker receives knighthood

• Business live – latest updates

The head of the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and the chair of HSBC are among the business leaders to be recognised this year in King Charles’s birthday honours list.

Julia Hoggett, a former banker who has been the chief executive of the London Stock Exchange since 2021, has been awarded a damehood for her services to business and finance.

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© Photograph: James Manning/PA

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© Photograph: James Manning/PA

Concerns set out over supply of materials with military applications, and impact of subsidies on global market

China’s role in providing assistance to Russia in its war against Ukraine, and its “harmful overcapacity” in the production of cheap goods, have been targeted by G7 leaders despite misgivings from Germany.

On the second day of the annual summit, being held in Puglia under the Italian chair, the US drove home a 36-page communique that condemned Chinese subsidies for products such as solar panels and electric cars which it said were leading to “global spillovers, market distortions and harmful overcapacity … undermining our workers, industries, and economic resilience and security”.

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© Photograph: Ukrainian presidential press office/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: Ukrainian presidential press office/UPI/Rex/Shutterstock

CAC 40 index has its worst week since March 2022 after Macron’s decision to call snap elections

France’s stock market is heading for its biggest weekly fall in more than two years, amid fears that the country’s far-right party could win the upcoming parliamentary elections.

French bonds were also hammered this week, as analysts warned of the risk of a Liz Truss-style market panic following Emmanuel Macron’s shock decision last Sunday to call snap national assembly elections.

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© Photograph: Stéphane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Stéphane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images

Producer Shonda Rhimes opens London Stock Exchange as second part of show’s season three launches

The “Bridgerton effect” has been hard to ignore since the drama first appeared on our screens, inspiring clothing and interiors trends with a period twist and helped make afternoon tea and visiting stately homes sexy.

Now Netflix has put a big number on the worth of what it calls the “Bridgerton universe”, suggesting the period romp produced by the company Shondaland has given a £275m shot in the arm to the UK’s ailing economy over the past five years.

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© Photograph: James Manning/PA

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© Photograph: James Manning/PA

Exclusive: Greencore recalls items sold via Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and others, as does separate firm that supplies Tesco

• UK supermarket sandwich recall: full list of products

The sandwich maker Greencore, which supplies big supermarkets including Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s, is one of a number of companies recalling products after being potentially linked to an outbreak of E coli that has caused cases in the UK to almost double to more than 200.

The company is recalling thousands of sandwiches, wraps and salads sold through those three supermarkets as well as Boots, Aldi, Amazon and the Co-op. The 45 products contain a certain variety of salad leaf linked to the outbreak identified this month by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

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© Photograph: Justin Kase z12z/Alamy

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© Photograph: Justin Kase z12z/Alamy

We are appalled by the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Gaza. Activists must not threaten my colleagues as a result of a disinformation campaign against us

Since last October, I have watched with increasing sorrow the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in the Middle East. Within Barclays, a global bank of which I am the chief executive, we have been deeply sympathetic about the overall suffering in the region. We have educated ourselves, contributed to supportive charities and consoled all our own colleagues who have experienced loss.

During this period, there has also been a campaign of disinformation against Barclays. The crux of the allegation is that we finance defence manufacturers and invest in them. Let me be clear about what we do and don’t do. Like other banks in the UK, we finance some companies making defence equipment, alongside their civilian products.

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© Photograph: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

Funding for policing comes amid soaring insurance costs after Range Rovers hit by wave of crime

Jaguar Land Rover is planning to invest more than £1m to support UK police to fight car thefts and fund intelligence gathering.

The luxury carmaker said the money would be used to target theft hotspots and provide police forces “with additional dedicated resources to respond to vehicle thefts across the country”.

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© Photograph: Parmorama/Alamy

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© Photograph: Parmorama/Alamy

The Grab: "a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources."

The Grab, from the Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite and filmed over the course of six years, captures the CIR team's developing understanding of the pattern in real time, connecting Halverson's Smithfield reporting in 2015 to a New York investment company's purchase of Arkansas farmland to supply Hong Kong, WikiLeaks cables detailing how Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah ordered national companies to buy up resources abroad to drained aquifers in Arizona, and a leaked trove of emails from a private security company to displaced farmers in Zambia. The notches in the pattern are geographically disparate and murky, but they underscore one point: what oil was to the 20th century, food and water will be to the 21st – precious, geopolitically powerful and contested. "The 20th century had Opec," says Halverson in the film. "In the future, we're going to have Food Pec." That trend is already under way, from Mexico's avocado militias to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which the film argues was motivated, in part, by Putin's desire to control a bread basket. The Grab has the feeling of a revelation, though the reveal is not a conspiracy; the pattern is less a plan than a series of reactions, from a variety of actors, to the fact that every single human needs food and water, and there is not enough arable land on Earth for the projected increase of 2 billion people by 2050. The instinct, on a primal and national level, is to hoard.

-Why Bill Gates is the largest private farmland owner in the United States -'A system perverted by corporate money': inside documentary sequel Food, Inc 2 What is Behind the Rise in Food Prices as a Few Monopolies Gouge the Public and Farmers While Protected by the Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack [30:12; mp3] - "Then finally we speak with Austin Frerick, an expert on agricultural and antitrust policy. He worked at the Open Markets Institute, the U.S. Department of Treasury, and the Congressional Research Service before becoming a Fellow at Yale University. A 7th generation Iowan, he's the author of the new book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry. We investigate what is behind the rise in food prices, as a few monopolies gouge the public and the farmers while protected by the Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack."[1,2]

• Interview with Austin Frerick, author of 'Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry' - "I got the idea to write this book back in the spring of 2018. Over Busch Lights at the dive bar Carl's Place in Des Moines, an Iowa political operative told me about a couple who had recently donated $300,000 to Republican Governor Kim Reynolds in support of her campaign for reelection in a hotly contested race against Democrat Fred Hubbell. According to the operative, the donors were hog farmers who owned a private jet emblazoned with the phrase 'When Pigs Fly.' I just found this image to be such a powerful example of what happened to Iowa over my life: the power of robber barons in the food system has overrun the state's government to the detriment of its environment and its communities. My curiosity led me to co-write an article about the Hog Barons in Vox. But as I dug into their story, I realized that they're just part of a bigger trend that has transformed the food system in places across the country and beyond."

Each chapter is built around both a baron and a key concept. I first figured out the key ideas I wanted to touch on in the book and then worked backwards to figure out which baron best encapsulates each idea. For example, the Berry Baron chapter is really about the outsourcing of America's produce system. I used the story of Driscoll's to explain how this happened and what it means for farmworkers.

Likewise, I tell the story of JAB Holding Company, which is owned by a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade by gobbling up countless independent companies using wealth traced back to the Nazis. You probably haven't heard of JAB, but I promise that you've heard of their brands: Peet's Coffee, Caribou Coffee, Einstein Brothers Bagels, Bruegger's Bagels, Manhattan Bagel, Noah's NY Bagel, Krispy Kreme, Pret A Manger, Insomnia Cookies, Panera Bread, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Intelligentsia Coffee, Green Mountain Coffee, Trade Coffee, and Keurig. I use their story to talk about changes in American antitrust law and what those changes mean for democracy...

While researching the chapter on the Dairy Barons, I discovered a previously unreported incident in which a worker died on their farm in January 2021. The incident took place in a barn that I happened to tour just a few months later. Records from the Indiana office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration described the man as a forty-seven-year-old recent immigrant born in Honduras who spoke limited English. He had been working a twelve-hour shift near manure equipment when his clothing got caught in the machinery. He was pulled in and died from asphyxiation. He left behind a wife and three children. In response, OSHA fined the Dairy Barons just $10,500. But sadly, what surprised me most in this tragedy was how hard it was for me to uncover what happened. It took years of persistent hounding to get this information...

In May 2021, I was driving down Highway 6 just five miles east of Grinnell heading to a site visit when I noticed a multistory industrial animal facility (what some might call a CAFO) going up. I've driven this stretch of road hundreds of times, so I knew it pretty well and recognized the new building instantly. I had read about the use of multistory industrial animal facilities in China, but I had never seen or read about one in America. I pulled over, took a picture, and tweeted out, "I passed what I assume is one of the first-multi-story CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operations]/confinement farms in America. ... Truly horrifying." The tweet went sort of viral, and the Des Moines Register ended up doing a story based on my tweet.

After the publication of that story, I did not think much of it until a few weeks later when my boss forwarded me an email she had received... My boss told me to laugh it off and not to worry, but I know the story would be different if I was at a university where Big Ag runs the show. To be frank, instead of being told by my boss to laugh it off, I'd probably be shown the door right then or pretty soon after...

Most of these barons became powerful because they were willing to cross ethical lines that others weren't willing to cross. They then used this advantage to corrupt the political system and compound their economic power. You really see an example of this process in my first chapter on the Hog Baron. The cost of this corruption is that we can't solve basic problems and government is no longer responsive to people's needs. It increasingly functions to serve the barons' interests.

This corruption matters to all of us. The food we consume and the way it is produced has enormous implications for our health and our environment. It impacts the strength of our cities and towns, the cleanliness of our air and our water, and, in the face of global climate change, the livability of our planet. Food is also incredibly important to our sense of identity and culture. The corruption of our food system benefits a handful of barons to the detriment of all of these values.

• The Hog Barons - "How Iowa's largest hog producer courted power, turned farming into a numbers game, and transformed the American heartland."
• Why Austin Frerick Is Taking On The Grocery Barons - "Cargill is really the story of the Farm Bill and what happened to it. Cargill is the largest private company in America. They're all about from the second grain is picked, to when it's put on your plate. They want to own that process and they don't have consumer facing brands. A lot of people don't know who they are. They're almost like the 19th century British Empire because they're so global. We've never had companies like this before."

I view places like Iowa as extraction colonies. They remind me of West Virginia in the 19th century and the coal companies, or the way the British Empire would run colonies in Africa.

But what this really means is we're not doing anything about climate change in the food system. I mean, all of our solutions for addressing climate change in the food system are a joke.

This book is intellectually two things. First this is what neoliberalism did to the food system. But also, where do we go from here? I mean, it's easy to complain, but what should a post-neo-liberal food system look like? And that to me is where the hope is. What does a multicultural democratic system look like?

The focus needs to be on labor. So many more people work in the food system when you include people like my parents. I'm also of the opinion that we need to abolish the Farm Bill. I think the system is to just too corrupted. It's designed for Wall Street. It picks winners and losers. It's incredibly expensive. So I'd rather take all the money in the Farm Bill, and I'm not talking about the food assistance programs, but just actual farm programs and just put it into conservation. Go from there. And then, to me, a silver lining, especially for rural America, is putting animals back on the land.

One of the beautiful things of writing a book like this is I just spent a lot of time with different people doing it right. And what you quickly realize is throughout the food system, there's a lot of people trying to do the right thing, trying to implement reforms to get us to a better, healthier, more sustainable, inclusive, multicultural food system. We just have a few greedy people holding us back.

• Book excerpt: 'Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry' - "But the New Deal Farm Bill had devastating flaws. Black farmers, especially those in the South, did not enjoy the same support. Sharecropping, adopted in the South after the Civil War, replaced slavery as an institution for perpetuating white control. Wealthy landowners who had virtually no connection to the land and rarely farmed relied on the labor of tenant sharecroppers for most of the planting and harvesting. These landowners accrued nearly all the profits while sharecroppers endured perpetual poverty."

Yet for all its flaws, the New Deal Farm Bill accomplished its goal of protecting white farmers, and for a while, it produced a relatively balanced farm economy. For Cargill, the New Deal Farm Bill did not threaten the company's power or force it to pay a penny to limit overproduction.

But as soon as these policies were put in place, Cargill and its corporate brethren still worked to destroy them. Even without a tax on processors, the New Deal Farm Bill placed a ceiling on the growth of companies such as Cargill that benefited from processing commodities on a large scale. After all, the incentives in the New Deal Farm Bill that limited the production of commodities in turn limited the grain crops that companies like Cargill could store, process, and transport. For decades, their allies slowly took it apart, and 50 years on, they found a way to pass what I call the Wall Street Farm Bill.

Meet the uber-wealthy families who control much of the food system in the US and Australia - "The average American farmer doesn't fix fences and drive tractors. Thanks to market concentration, there is now a handful of companies that dominate the US food system, and they are impacting Australia too."

Germany's Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) on Friday said 5,209 companies filed for bankruptcy in Germany in the first three months of 2024 -- with the trend expected to continue. From a report: Experts think the number of corporate insolvencies in Germany will increase to about 20,000 cases this year as part of a longer-term pattern. The latest figure means corporate insolvencies are up 26.5% compared with the first quarter of 2023. They are also 11.2% more than in the first quarter of 2020 when 4,683 corporate insolvencies were filed before the COVID-19 pandemic had its full impact. The coronavirus pandemic period itself saw special, temporary regulations introduced and low insolvency rates. The transport and warehousing sector accounted for most insolvencies per 10,000 companies, with 29.6 cases at the start of 2024. This was followed by the construction industry with 23.5 cases, and other economic services such as employment agencies on 23 cases. Manufacturing saw 20.3 insolvencies per 10,000 companies. Local courts estimated the creditors' claims from the corporate insolvencies until the end of March was about $12.07 billion compared with $7.16 billion last year. There were also 17,478 consumer bankruptcies in the first quarter of 2024 â" an increase of 4.8% compared to the period in 2023.

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