(Reuters) – Goldman Sachs-backed (GS.N) British broadband operator CityFibre has tabled a bid for rival TalkTalk’s (TALK.L) network company, FibreNation, Sky News reported on Wednesday. TalkTalk launched FibreNation last year and said it would connect 60,000 more homes in northern England with fibre, underlining its ambition to build its own ultrafast network reaching three million […]

(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.) Good morning. We’re covering a proposed settlement with the Sackler family, the use of LinkedIn to recruit spies and Tropical Storm Dorian. Developing A surprise maneuver by Prime Minister Boris Johnson would give Parliament less time to block a “no-deal” Brexit. Sacklers in talks to […]

A couple of months back, newly elected Dublin City councillors voted to keep all revenue raised from property tax collected from homeowners living in the capital. The vote was more symbolic than anything, as councillors know that they will have to hand over 20pc of all property tax they raise to the Department of Housing. […]

Summers in New Orleans are always rough — hot, rainy, swelteringly muggy, then sunny and hotter again. But it has been an especially hard one this year, as the high temperatures and flood-inducing thunderstorms have been paired with what has felt like a weekly loss of cultural anchors. It’s always worrying for a town when […]

Europe was stricken with a series of bad weather events recently, including a tornado that touched down in Málaga in southern Spain on Tuesday. One local managed to capture a video of the twister that careened across the area of Campillos, 80 kilometres outside of the city of Málaga. At one point, it took out […]

Is there anything worse than being a political Wag? It’s all the hassle of public life with little of the power – a Stepford life of hairspray, dinner parties for people you don’t like and being on constant display. World leaders gathered in Biarritz for the G7 summit over the weekend and as their husbands […]

Hong Kong — Thirty years ago, I covered a lot of democracy rallies. They were held in the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Central Europe, South Africa and the Middle East. Last week, I covered some more, this time in Hong Kong. In many ways the Hong Kong rallies felt exactly like the rallies I covered as […]

The Amazon, the greatest reservoir of fresh water and biodiversity on the planet, is burning. Its degradation, which threatens to reach a catastrophic tipping point, means less oxygen and rain as well as warmer temperatures. Human actions have been the driving cause. In Brazil, which holds 60 percent of the Amazonian rain forest, wildcat land […]

The “very stable genius” in the Oval Office is, in fact, extremely unstable, in word and deed. That’s not a psychological diagnosis, although you can make that case too. It’s just a straightforward description of his behavior. And his instability is starting to have serious economic consequences. To see what I mean about Trump’s behavior, […]

After news leaked last week that President Trump had expressed interest in acquiring Greenland from Denmark, his critics predictably derided him as crazy. But once again, the president is crazy like a fox. The acquisition of Greenland would secure vital strategic interests for the United States, economically benefit both us and Greenlanders, and would be […]