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Shoreditch has suffered. Stagnated even. Its edge needs serious sharpening after the devastation of the pandemic. One of the early symptoms was the surprising closure of the Ace Hotel, an imprimatur of the area’s global cool, in 2020. Now it has been reincarnated as One Hundred Shoreditch, relaunching last month in a move many are
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When Jacqueline Bouvier married John F Kennedy in 1953, every detail of her ivory wedding gown was pored over by journalists. But one critical fact was overlooked. The gown’s designer was not credited by name; one writer referred to her as “a colored woman dressmaker”. That designer was Ann Lowe, the couturier who had also
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Jean Monnet, one of the European Union’s founding fathers, wrote that “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” And the coronavirus pandemic appears to have proven his adage correct, once again. EU health policy has advanced at breakneck speed in the last two years,
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French police have raided the Paris offices of Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance and a metalworks it formerly owned in an escalation of a criminal probe into the metals magnate’s empire. The Paris Prosecutor’s Office last year launched an investigation into Gupta’s French operations over allegations of “misuse of corporate assets” and “money laundering”, mirroring a
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A new European framework for assessing medicines has the potential to speed up access to groundbreaking treatments and reduce the administrative burden on pharmaceutical companies, according to its developers. Health technology assessments, which examine the clinical effectiveness of a new medicine or medical device compared with existing technologies, are currently conducted by individual EU member
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Aircraft leasing companies have launched a multinational effort to persuade safety authorities to allow grounded planes that were returned from Russia without full maintenance records back into commercial service. Declan Kelly, chair of Aircraft Leasing Ireland, said the trade body had begun an “asset preservation study” with regulators in Europe, the US and Bermuda to
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Months of acrimony and division over the future of Generali will culminate this week in a shareholder vote in Trieste, the Italian port city that gave the country’s largest insurer its nickname. At stake is not just the fate of Generali, the almost 200-year old group with 75,000 employees and 67mn customers, but the credibility
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Mainland Chinese property companies are scaling back their presence in Hong Kong as they struggle to deal with a liquidity crisis that has rocked the sector and forced the world’s most indebted developer Evergrande to default. Cash-strapped property company Kaisa, the Chinese sector’s second-biggest offshore bond issuer after Evergrande, sold an entire floor at The
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The chief executive of Mizuho, SoftBank’s main lender, said he was “totally unconcerned” about the Japanese technology conglomerate’s financial health despite the sell-off in tech stocks forcing it to slow down investments. Mizuho, Japan’s third-largest lender, is part of a consortium of banks that provided SoftBank with a syndicated loan of $8bn this month as
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Explosions struck the building housing the security services of the breakaway Moldovan republic of Transnistria on Monday, days after Moscow said the Russian-backed region could be drawn into the war in Ukraine. Transnistria, which is controlled by pro-Russian separatists and hosts Russian troop bases and arms depots, borders western Ukraine. It is seen as a
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Hello dear readers, I hope you all had a good Easter break. Last week’s State of Fintech report from CB Insights had some striking stats. The first quarter of the year saw an 18 per cent quarter-on-quarter drop in funding, the largest since 2018 (though it was still the fourth strongest quarter on record). At the
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European sanctions being imposed on individuals and companies believed to have ties to the Kremlin increases the danger that the internet could be split and siloed along political divides, according to the main internet registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. RIPE NCC, a non-profit which hands out IP domain names
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