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Sales have soared at English winemaker Chapel Down, as a growing number of Britons swap champagne for sparkling wines produced in the UK. Andrew Carter, Chapel Down’s chief executive, told the Financial Times that it was good to be a “leading English brand” following Brexit, adding that people were “very proud” to drink sparkling wines

The US has pledged to resume diplomatic operations in Ukraine and said it wanted to see Russia “weakened” by its war after a stealth trip to Kyiv by secretary of state Antony Blinken and defence secretary Lloyd Austin. Blinken and Austin met Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, in the Ukrainian capital on Sunday, disclosing the

Melvin Capital, the highest-profile hedge fund casualty from last year’s meme-stock rally, has rapidly backtracked on a controversial plan to start charging performance fees again in the face of an investor backlash. The US-based firm, which lost 53 per cent in January last year after betting against retail investor favourite GameStop, had written to investors

The Ukraine conflict is a certainty for news events this week but activity will be largely off diary — except for events such as the UK reopening its embassy in Kyiv — for the next seven days. Somewhat ironically there is a long list of other war anniversaries this week — from Monday’s Anzac Day

A sigh of relief from France’s European and Nato allies was heard after Emmanuel Macron won a convincing victory over his far-right challenger Marine Le Pen in the final round of the presidential election on Sunday. France’s status as a linchpin of the EU and a strong contributor to Nato in its support for Ukraine against

Emmanuel Macron is set to be re-elected for a second term as French president after defeating his far-right rival Marine Le Pen in the second round of voting on Sunday, according to projections by polling agencies based on early returns. Victory for the liberal internationalist Macron, first elected in 2017, will mean continuity in economic

One thing to start: Join us on April 26-27 for the FT’s first Crypto and Digital Assets Summit. Register today at: ft.com/cryptosummit James Anderson on Bezos, Musk and Zola James Anderson first came to Bologna as a postgraduate student at the European campus of Johns Hopkins University. Back then he was fresh out of Oxford

Good morning. Friday was horrific for markets — US indices down 2.5 per cent or worse — but not surprising. The markets are telling an increasingly if not completely consistent story. If we’re missing something, email us: robert.armstrong@ft.com and ethan.wu@ft.com.  What happened and why Sometimes the simplest story is the best. The US stock market

Good morning and welcome to Europe Express. There was a quick and near-audible sigh of relief last night among European leaders as French exit polls came in, confirming Emmanuel Macron’s second term as president. The feeling of Europe dodging a seismic populist upheaval — even as Marine Le Pen scored more votes than last time

Just Eat Takeaway.com is set for a showdown with investors at next week’s annual meeting, with one top shareholder alleging that the company misled shareholders on its financial firepower ahead of two crucial votes to approve last year’s $7.3bn Grubhub deal. Cat Rock Capital, one of the food delivery group’s top five shareholders, published an

Your browser does not support playing this file but you can still download the MP3 file to play locally. Emmanuel Macron has been elected for a second term as president of France, the EU will force Big Tech to police content online more aggressively after approving a major piece of legislation, and Sri Lanka is

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine looks increasingly likely to lead to Finland and Sweden applying to join Nato. But whereas Helsinki appears to be doing so with something resembling gusto, Stockholm is inching towards the western military alliance more reluctantly. As early as December and January, Finnish politicians started a national debate across party lines on

Henry VI: Rebellion Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Henry VI is a curiously muted presence in the second and third of his namesake plays, early works by Shakespeare. As reframed here, they split neatly into the chattering and the battering phases. In Rebellion, the Lancastrian monarch fails utterly to quell his cantankerous nobles. The next play,

In December 2020 Tiffany Dover, a nurse manager from Tennessee, was interviewed by reporters shortly after receiving her first Covid vaccination. Then, live on television, she fainted. A rumour subsequently took hold that Dover had died and the vaccine was to blame. A few days later, she gave another television interview announcing she was fine,

As the debate on a new Bretton Woods continues with the excellent article by Rana Foroohar (Opinion, April 18), it might be wise to remember what John Maynard Keynes, the “father” of the IMF and the World Bank, said at their inaugural meeting in March 1946. Drawing on an analogy with Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty

Meet the most powerful iPad ever I love an iPad. For the past year, I’ve used the Air 4 (released in 2020) as a laptop lite. I enjoy the ease of slinging the Air – which sits between the Mini and basic iPads, and the Pro – into my tote and sliding it out in cramped cafés.  So the release of

Balfour Beatty chief executive Leo Quinn has predicted a decade of UK “infrastructure growth” as the construction industry gears up for a potential boom because of the billions in investment set aside for the sector by the government. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has outlined a range of funding commitments, including £4.8bn for infrastructure investment in

We all deserve to have a day at work without having the fear of God put into us. Which is why one of the most striking recent examples of “a bad day at the office” remains alarmingly fresh in my memory, almost two months on. “Say what you mean,” snapped Vladimir Putin at Sergei Naryshkin,

It is more than 30 years since Robert Maxwell’s body was found at sea, but many remain fascinated by him. A new biography, Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell, by John Preston, published last year, brings the number of books about the late publishing magnate to at least 12. A three-part BBC series, House of

We’ve been writing about the international monetary system for long enough to be somewhat dubious about oft-repeated claims of the dollar’s demise. Sure, we can see why the greenback ought to be dethroned. The US is no longer the economic power it once was, inflation’s at multi-decade highs, and now Washington has frozen hundreds of