Texas Capital Bancshares, Inc. 5.75% DEP PFD Bpr ( TCBIO ) declares $0.3594/share quarterly dividend , in line with previous. Forward yield 6.88% Payable March 16; for shareholders of record March 2; ex-div March 2. See TCBIO Dividend Scorecard, Yield Chart, & Dividend Growth. More on Texas Capital Bancshares Texas Capital Bancshares, Inc. (TCBI) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript Texas Capital Banc...
Texas Capital Bancshares, Inc. 5.75% DEP PFD Bpr ( TCBIO ) declares $0.3594/share quarterly dividend , in line with previous. Forward yield 6.88% Payable March 16; for shareholders of record March 2; ex-div March 2. See TCBIO Dividend Scorecard, Yield Chart, & Dividend Growth. More on Texas Capital Bancshares Texas Capital Bancshares, Inc. (TCBI) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript Texas Capital Bancshares, Inc. 2025 Q4 - Results - Earnings Call Presentation Texas Capital Bancshares: The Preferred Stock Is More Attractive Texas Capital projects mid- to high single-digit revenue growth and $265M–$290M noninterest income for 2026 while expanding fee income streams Texas Capital Bancshares GAAP EPS of $2.12 beats by $0.35, revenue of $327.48M beats by $4.19M
Eoneren Mitsubishi Electric ( MIELY ) on Monday said that its ME Innovation Fund has invested in Lucend, a U.S. -based startup that provides an AI platform to optimize data center operations. This is the fund’s fourteenth investment to date. More on Mitsubishi Electric Mitsubishi Electric partners with Tulip Interfaces to bolster manufacturing digitalization Seeking Alpha’s Quant Rating on Mitsubi...
Eoneren Mitsubishi Electric ( MIELY ) on Monday said that its ME Innovation Fund has invested in Lucend, a U.S. -based startup that provides an AI platform to optimize data center operations. This is the fund’s fourteenth investment to date. More on Mitsubishi Electric Mitsubishi Electric partners with Tulip Interfaces to bolster manufacturing digitalization Seeking Alpha’s Quant Rating on Mitsubishi Electric Historical earnings data for Mitsubishi Electric Dividend scorecard for Mitsubishi Electric Financial information for Mitsubishi Electric
In this article GM Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT The General Motors global headquarters in Detroit, Jan. 12, 2026. Jeff Kowalsky | Bloomberg | Getty Images DETROIT — General Motors is set to report its fourth-quarter and year-end earnings before the bell Tuesday. Here's what Wall Street is expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG: Earnings per share: $2.20 adjusted expect...
In this article GM Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT The General Motors global headquarters in Detroit, Jan. 12, 2026. Jeff Kowalsky | Bloomberg | Getty Images DETROIT — General Motors is set to report its fourth-quarter and year-end earnings before the bell Tuesday. Here's what Wall Street is expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG: Earnings per share: $2.20 adjusted expected Revenue: $45.8 billion expected Those results would mark a 4% decline in revenue compared with a year earlier and a more than 14% increase in adjusted earnings per share. GM's 2024 fourth-quarter results included $47.7 billion in revenue, net loss attributable to stockholders of roughly $3 billion, and adjusted earnings before interest and taxes of $2.5 billion. GM is expected to record $7.1 billion in special charges for the fourth quarter of 2025 related to its pullback in electric vehicles and restructuring efforts in China. The charges, which GM announced earlier this month, will impact the automaker's net income but not adjusted results. Aside from the company's results, investors will be watching the company's guidance for this year. GM CEO Mary Barra earlier this month reconfirmed that the automaker expects 2026 will be better than 2025. GM's 2025 guidance included adjusted earnings before interest and taxes of between $12 billion and $13 billion, or $9.75 to $10.50 adjusted EPS, and adjusted automotive free cash flow of $10 billion to $11 billion, up from $7.5 billion to $10 billion. GM executives will host an earnings conference call at 8:30 a.m. EST. This is developing news. Please check back for additional updates.
Strategic investment extends partnership advancing privacy-first legal AI on Qualcomm processors NEW YORK, January 27, 2026--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SpotDraft, the leading AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, has raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B extension. The investment follows SpotDraft’s $56 million Series B raise in February 2025 and reflects accele...
Strategic investment extends partnership advancing privacy-first legal AI on Qualcomm processors NEW YORK, January 27, 2026--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SpotDraft, the leading AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, has raised $8 million from Qualcomm Ventures in a strategic Series B extension. The investment follows SpotDraft’s $56 million Series B raise in February 2025 and reflects accelerating enterprise demand for secure, high-performance legal AI that can run directly on-device. The funding will be used to deepen SpotDraft’s product and AI capabilities and expand its enterprise presence across the Americas, EMEA, and India, and the relationship extends beyond capital. SpotDraft was featured at Qualcomm Technologies’ Snapdragon Summit 2025, showcasing fully on-device contract review running on Snapdragon® X Elite laptops without cloud connectivity, validating the viability of privacy-first AI for enterprise legal operations. "This investment validates the architectural direction we've taken with SpotDraft," said Shashank Bijapur, Co-founder and CEO, SpotDraft. "Legal teams handle some of the most sensitive business information, yet most AI tools still require sending that data to external cloud models. We've developed the SpotDraft platform to run core contract intelligence workflows locally on device, giving legal teams AI capabilities without compromising performance, privacy, security, or control." VerifAI, SpotDraft's AI-powered contract review tool, runs entirely on device, including embeddings, clause extraction, risk scoring, and applying edits directly on Snapdragon processors. While the application requires internet connectivity for sharing, login, and license checks, contract review, risk scoring, and editing execute completely offline on the local machine. "AI is driving a fundamental shift in how legal workflows are executed, bringing new levels of efficiency to an inherently text-intensive domain," said Quinn Li, Senior Vice President, Qualco...
New analysis kicking off US$4 million collaboration reveals a 124% increase in MDB financing, while Chinese finance began to flow out of developing countries, with Africa hit hardest WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- At a time when international funding to developing countries is in decline, ONE Data announced the "Development Finance Observatory," with US$4 million total funding from Goog...
New analysis kicking off US$4 million collaboration reveals a 124% increase in MDB financing, while Chinese finance began to flow out of developing countries, with Africa hit hardest WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- At a time when international funding to developing countries is in decline, ONE Data announced the "Development Finance Observatory," with US$4 million total funding from Google.org and The Rockefeller Foundation, to help maximize the impact of every dollar. This first-of-its-kind, interactive data collaboration launching this year will improve the accessibility of development finance data and reduce data fragmentation, while integrating both financial inflows to and outflows from developing economies. The platform is being developed with technical infrastructure support from Google's Data Commons and produced by ONE Data. An initial analysis finds that over the last decade, China shifted from a net provider of finance for low- and middle-income countries (transferring $48 billion) to a net extractor (pulling $24 billion out). Meanwhile, multilateral lenders stepped up—boosting net financing by 124% and now providing 56% of net flows, or $378.7 billion between 2020-2024. Today's development finance data is often fragmented and siloed – with different datasets optimized for different audiences and blind spots that make it hard to answer straightforward questions quickly. Produced by ONE Data, the Observatory will integrate both financial inflows and outflows to developing economies. Inflows in this analysis include Official Development Assistance (ODA) and new lending to governments – offset by outflows from governments, such as debt servicing. David McNair, Executive Director at ONE Data, said: "To make better decisions we need accurate, timely facts. This partnership is about harnessing the latest technology to build a public-good data backbone that reduces fragmentation and improves accountability so that everyone from policy-makers to investo...
It’s too bad “AI” is so hard to CTRL-F, because investors will have to scan earnings reports for every mention this week — or maybe, they can just ask AI to do it. As major tech companies tee up their earnings reports, shareholders will be looking to see whether massive investments in artificial intelligence have begun to generate returns. Companies spent hundreds of billions on AI last year, and ...
It’s too bad “AI” is so hard to CTRL-F, because investors will have to scan earnings reports for every mention this week — or maybe, they can just ask AI to do it. As major tech companies tee up their earnings reports, shareholders will be looking to see whether massive investments in artificial intelligence have begun to generate returns. Companies spent hundreds of billions on AI last year, and Wall Street analysts expect that to rise further, with AI spending on track to break past $500 billion in 2026. Investors started feeling jittery about spending last fall as concerns about an AI bubble grew, and their fears haven’t dissipated so far. Meta and Microsoft report on Wednesday (along with Tesla), and Apple follows on Thursday. Spinning Round and Round Heading into the big earnings week, Microsoft debuted its next generation of AI chips yesterday, which it said have 30% higher performance for the price than competing products. The new chip shows how tech companies are jockeying for position in the AI race, and increasingly, pushing into territory Nvidia has dominated. The new Maia 200 chip comes with a software tool called Triton that could rival Nvidia’s Cuda, a major selling point for Nvidia’s chips. Microsoft’s chip is also packed with SRAM, a type of memory that Cerebras Systems and Groq depend on. While companies like Microsoft are competing with each other to win AI biz, they’re also depending on each other for profits from the AI biz in a circular-spending vortex: Who’s sourcing server power from whom for whose AI is an increasingly tangled web that even Charlie Day with a chalkboard would struggle to sort out. Take Meta: Earlier this month, it announced plans to build tens of gigawatts of AI power in the next decade and, eventually, hundreds. At the same time, Meta’s said to be sourcing power from several companies. It reportedly signed a $10 billion deal to tap into Google’s cloud network and a $20 billion deal with Oracle. On the front end, Apple’s expe...
The United States agrees to impose 15% tariffs on imports from South Korea under a trade deal for the vast majority of South Korean products, seen in this photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on August 1, 2025. Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images South Korea's ruling Democratic Party said it would pass a special act on the U.S. trade deal by end- February, according to Yonhap, after U.S. Presid...
The United States agrees to impose 15% tariffs on imports from South Korea under a trade deal for the vast majority of South Korean products, seen in this photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on August 1, 2025. Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images South Korea's ruling Democratic Party said it would pass a special act on the U.S. trade deal by end- February, according to Yonhap, after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened higher tariffs on South Korean exports. Earlier on Tuesday, Trump said he was raising tariffs on South Korean exports to 25% from the current 15%, citing a delay in the country's parliament approving the Washington-Seoul trade deal agreed in July last year. Spokesperson of the ruling Democratic Party Kim Hyun-jung said Trump was likely referring to the Special Act on Strategic Investment Management between Korea and the United States, according to a Google translation of the statement in Korean, submitted to the country's parliament last November. The bill aims to establish a state-run investment corporation to manage Seoul's planned $350 billion investment pledge to Washington. Kim said that five related bills have been submitted to the National Assembly, and are scheduled to be reviewed, adding that "the fact that both the Democratic Party of Korea and the People Power Party have proposed these bills will likely expedite their passage." The ruling DP currently holds 162 seats in the 300 seat National Assembly with four vacant seats, while the PPP holds 107. "What is needed now is to quickly confirm the intent and facts of the U.S statement and correct any misunderstandings," she said. Earlier in the day, South Korea's presidential office said it had not received any official notice or explanation from the U.S. regarding the announcement, according to South Korean media outlet Yonhap. South Korea's finance ministry said that it will keep the U.S. informed on the legislative process, while Seoul's trade ministry said that industry minister Kim Ju...
California governor Gavin Newsom has accused TikTok of suppressing content critical of president Donald Trump, as he launched a review of the platform’s content moderation practices to determine if they violated state law, even as the platform blamed a systems failure for the issues. The step comes after TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said last week it had finalised a deal to set up a majority...
California governor Gavin Newsom has accused TikTok of suppressing content critical of president Donald Trump, as he launched a review of the platform’s content moderation practices to determine if they violated state law, even as the platform blamed a systems failure for the issues. The step comes after TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, said last week it had finalised a deal to set up a majority US-owned joint venture that will secure US data, to avoid a US ban on the short video app used by more than 200 million Americans. “Following TikTok’s sale to a Trump-aligned business group, our office has received reports, and independently confirmed instances, of suppressed content critical of President Trump,” Newsom’s office said on X on Monday, without elaborating. “Gavin Newsom is launching a review of this conduct and is calling on the California Department of Justice to determine whether it violates California law,” it added. In response, a representative for the the joint venture for TikTok in the US pointed to a prior statement that blamed a data centre power outage, adding, “It would be inaccurate to report that this is anything but the technical issues we’ve transparently confirmed.” Users may notice bugs, slower load times or timed-out requests when posting new content due to the impact of the outage, the joint venture added. “While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we’ve been working to resolve,” it said in the statement posted online before Newsom’s remarks. Newsom, a Democrat, and Trump, a Republican, have long been critical of each other. Newsom’s accusation on Monday came as a number of users on TikTok reported abnormalities and accused the platform of censoring their posts. Steve Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Law, said a video he recorded about reports federal immigration officers could use sweeping power to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant had been placed...
Thailand’s economy is poised to expand at its slowest pace in three years in 2026 as exports and domestic demand moderate, according to the Finance Ministry. Gross domestic product is forecast to expand 2.2% in 2025, the ministry said Tuesday, cutting its earlier estimate of 2.4%. That would mark a deceleration from the 2.5% growth in 2024. The ministry maintained its 2026 forecast of a 2% expansi...
Thailand’s economy is poised to expand at its slowest pace in three years in 2026 as exports and domestic demand moderate, according to the Finance Ministry. Gross domestic product is forecast to expand 2.2% in 2025, the ministry said Tuesday, cutting its earlier estimate of 2.4%. That would mark a deceleration from the 2.5% growth in 2024. The ministry maintained its 2026 forecast of a 2% expansion, which is faster than Bank of Thailand’s 1.5% growth estimate. Economists in a Bloomberg survey expect the economy to grow at 1.7%. Should the weaker outlook materialize, Thailand would record its weakest growth since 2014, outside the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. That’s a challenge facing Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul , who rolled out consumption stimulus measures before dissolving parliament and is now seeking to return to power after the Feb. 8 election . The outlook is clouded by multiple headwinds, including US trade policies, a surging baht and weakening domestic demand . Government spending, which typically helps support local activity, is likely to be subdued at least in the first half, as coalition talks following the election may delay the formation of a new administration. Merchandise exports this year will likely increase by 1% compared with the forecast 12.7% growth in 2025. Growth in private consumption will likely slow to 2.5% from a forecast 3.3% in 2025, according to estimates from the ministry. The baht has gained more than 8% over the past 12 months, making it the second-best performer among Asian currencies tracked by Bloomberg. Its strength — amplified by dollar selling linked to gold trading — has weighed on exports and tourism, adding another drag on growth. The rally has prompted authorities to tighten oversight of baht-denominated bullion transactions in effort to curb speculative flows. The Finance Ministry said GDP growth in the fourth quarter was likely at 1.8% from a year ago. The country’s official growth figures are due on Feb. 16.
Marinela Malcheva/iStock via Getty Images FOMC Meeting Begins 9:00 AM Case-Shiller Home Price Index The S&P Corelogic Case-Shiller home price index tracks monthly changes in the value of residential real estate in 20 metropolitan regions across the nation. 9:00 AM FHFA House Price Index The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) House Price Index covers single-family housing, using data provided by...
Marinela Malcheva/iStock via Getty Images FOMC Meeting Begins 9:00 AM Case-Shiller Home Price Index The S&P Corelogic Case-Shiller home price index tracks monthly changes in the value of residential real estate in 20 metropolitan regions across the nation. 9:00 AM FHFA House Price Index The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) House Price Index covers single-family housing, using data provided by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. 10:00 AM Consumer Confidence The Conference Board's confidence report surveys consumers on their assessments of the labor market, business activity, and their own financial conditions. Confidence indicator expected better at 90.0 for January from 89.1 in December. 10:00 AM New Home Sales New home sales measure the number of newly constructed homes with a committed sale during the month. 10:00 AM Richmond Fed Manufacturing Index This survey tracks business conditions in the Richmond Fed's manufacturing sector. 1:00 PM 5-Yr Note Auction The US Treasury Department will hold an auction for $70 billion of 5-year Notes. 1:00 PM Money Supply The monetary aggregates are alternative measures of the money supply by degree of liquidity. More on U.S. Markets Another Government Shutdown Looms, I'm Buying Gold Traders Defensively Positioned As Equities Retrace From Record Highs Whale's Methodology: Investing Through The Lens Of Volatility (I) Morgan Stanley’s 10 predictions for investing in 2026 Earnings season has been good but not great, BofA says
On Thursday 8 January, in a midsize Iranian town, Dr Ahmadi’s* phone began to buzz. His colleagues in local emergency wards were getting worried. All week, people had taken to the streets and had been met by police with batons and pellet guns. With treatment, their injuries should not have been too serious. But emergency room staff believed many wounded young people were avoiding hospitals, terrif...
On Thursday 8 January, in a midsize Iranian town, Dr Ahmadi’s* phone began to buzz. His colleagues in local emergency wards were getting worried. All week, people had taken to the streets and had been met by police with batons and pellet guns. With treatment, their injuries should not have been too serious. But emergency room staff believed many wounded young people were avoiding hospitals, terrified that registering as trauma patients would lead to their identification and arrest. Quietly, Ahmadi [who remains anonymous due to fear of reprisals, but whose identity, credentials and presence within Iran during the unrest have been verified by the Guardian] and his wife began treating patients at a location outside Iran’s government hospital system. Alerted by a local whisper network, wounded young people flocked to them. Mostly, they brought superficial injuries – laceration wounds needing stitches and antibiotics. As Thursday evening wore on, more and more arrived to be patched up. The next day, everything abruptly changed. Protesters kept coming, but their injuries were close-range gunshots and severe stab wounds, typically to the chest, eyes and genitals. Many proved fatal. Ahmadi was shocked by the number being killed – more than 40 in his small town alone – but with the internet blacked out, no one knew what the national picture was. To piece it together, Ahmadi assembled a network of more than 80 medical professionals across 12 of Iran’s 31 provinces to share observations and data, and to build a clearer picture of the violence. They’ve mass murdered people. No one can imagine … I saw just blood, blood and blood Their observations, shared with the Guardian and combined with accounts from morgues and graveyards across the country, begin to reveal the vast scale of violence inflicted on Iranians during the state’s crackdown. Ahmadi and his colleagues are hesitant to provide a figure for the toll but agree “all publicly cited death tolls represent a severe underest...
Last week, a UN report declared that the world has entered an era of ‘global water bankruptcy’ with many human water systems past the point at which they can be restored to former levels. To find out what this could look like, Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, who has been reporting on Iran’s severe water crisis. And Mohammad Shamsudduha, professor of wa...
Last week, a UN report declared that the world has entered an era of ‘global water bankruptcy’ with many human water systems past the point at which they can be restored to former levels. To find out what this could look like, Madeleine Finlay speaks to the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, who has been reporting on Iran’s severe water crisis. And Mohammad Shamsudduha, professor of water crisis and risk reduction in the department of risk and disaster reduction at University College London, explains how the present situation arose and what can be done to bring water supplies back from the brink Era of ‘global water bankruptcy’ is here, UN report says Climate crisis or a warning from God? Iranians desperate for answers as water dries up Continue reading...
Hamish Wilson lives a few miles away from me, in a cosy farmhouse in the damp hills of mid Wales. He makes good coffee, tells great stories and is an excellent host. Every summer, dozens of Somali guests visit Wilson’s farm as part of a wonderfully wholesome project set up to celebrate their nation’s culture, and to honour his father’s second world war service with a Somali comrade-in-arms. Inadve...
Hamish Wilson lives a few miles away from me, in a cosy farmhouse in the damp hills of mid Wales. He makes good coffee, tells great stories and is an excellent host. Every summer, dozens of Somali guests visit Wilson’s farm as part of a wonderfully wholesome project set up to celebrate their nation’s culture, and to honour his father’s second world war service with a Somali comrade-in-arms. Inadvertently, however, the project has revealed something else: a deep unfairness in today’s global financial system that not only threatens to ruin the Somalis’ holidays, but also excludes marginalised communities from global banking services on a huge scale. The origins of the story lie in 1940, when the then 27-year-old Capt Eric Wilson led a doomed stand against an Italian invasion of the British colony of Somaliland. Suffering from malaria, massively outnumbered and under heavy artillery fire, Wilson and a small band of Somali comrades – like the Spartans at Thermopylae, but wearing khaki shorts rather than leather drawers – held off the Italians for an astonishing five days. After their position was overrun, Eric won a posthumous Victoria Cross, which came as a nice surprise when he was liberated from a prisoner of war camp a few months later. It was an extraordinary honour, the highest a British soldier can receive, but he was always troubled by it. Why had he been recognised, while his sergeant – an old friend called Omar Kujoog who had died in the battle – received nothing? Wilson, my neighbour in Wales, inherited his father’s passion for east Africa, and spends a lot of time there himself. He and his friends, who included Kujoog’s son and grandchildren, became increasingly concerned that young Somalis in the UK were losing touch with their traditions, and only learning about their homeland from the media’s negative coverage of it. So, before Eric’s death in 2010, they sold the Victoria Cross and bought the farm to create a centre for Somalis to learn about their nation...
How best to portray the evil of Stutthof camp witnessed by my grandfather? The Zone of Interest and Twin Peaks could have the answer When I was nine years old, my grandfather took me to the museum at the former Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, in northern Poland. Established by the Nazis in the German-annexed territory of the Free City of Danzig, he had been imprisoned there as a teenager....
How best to portray the evil of Stutthof camp witnessed by my grandfather? The Zone of Interest and Twin Peaks could have the answer When I was nine years old, my grandfather took me to the museum at the former Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, in northern Poland. Established by the Nazis in the German-annexed territory of the Free City of Danzig, he had been imprisoned there as a teenager. It was his first visit since the second world war. When we went through the gate, he began to cry, to shout, to reconstruct scenes. The past returned all at once and he fell into a state of trauma. During his imprisonment he had been responsible, among other things, for carrying bodies from the camp infirmary. Most of the most infamous Nazi death camps have been turned into memorials like Stutthof, in the hope that they can teach something to future generations and avert a repeat of this darkest of chapters in Europe’s history. But it is a fact that few visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau , Dachau or Stutthof are shaken like my grandfather was. Sites of memory increasingly fail to reach new generations. Visitors learn facts, dates, perpetrators. But knowledge of past crimes does not automatically prevent future ones. Many institutions still teach a reassuring lesson: there were evil people once, they were defeated, we are different. Evil is placed safely in the past. The visitor leaves morally intact. Continue reading...
QKThr, an obscure cut from Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs, sounds like an ambient experiment recorded on a historic pirate ship. Shaky fingers caress the keys of an accordion to create an uncanny tone; clustered chords cry out, subdued but mighty, before scuttling back into dreamy nothingness. This 88-second elegy has always been overshadowed by another song on Drukqs, the Disklavier instrumental...
QKThr, an obscure cut from Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs, sounds like an ambient experiment recorded on a historic pirate ship. Shaky fingers caress the keys of an accordion to create an uncanny tone; clustered chords cry out, subdued but mighty, before scuttling back into dreamy nothingness. This 88-second elegy has always been overshadowed by another song on Drukqs, the Disklavier instrumental Avril 14th, which alongside Windowlicker is the Cornish producer’s best-known track. But QKThr has become a weird breakaway success, featuring on nearly 8m TikTok posts, adorning everything from cute panda videos to lightly memed US presidential debates, and a fail video trend dubbed “subtle foreshadowing”. Aphex Twin has even overtaken Taylor Swift in monthly YouTube Music listeners, with 448 million to her 399 million. Electronic music DJ and producer RamonPang noticed the milestone last week, and credits the uptick to QKThr. “It really puts in perspective how popular Aphex Twin’s music is in short-form content,” he tells me. “It’s not like there was a cultural shift and everyone’s suddenly listening to ambient techno over the grocery store speakers. The actual shift has been way smaller: Aphex Twin’s back catalogue is having a renaissance through gen Z.” Those QKThr posts are just a sample of gen Z’s apparent addiction to Aphex. Whether it’s Dagestani men joyfully line dancing to Pulsewidth from Selected Ambient Works 85-92, corecore edits – the wistful internet trend that processes post-Covid melancholy through video collage – set to Avril 14th, or even a fart remix of Alberto Balsalm from I Care Because You Do, Richard D James’s music has become the backdrop to life online. Chloe Saavedra, an LA-based musician and drummer for the band Chaos Chaos, who has also played with Lee Ranaldo, Caroline Polachek and Conan Gray, has been an Aphex superfan since the 2010s, and often posts drum covers of his songs to TikTok. She describes his largely programmed music as “not writt...
Cognac makers are nursing a hangover. After years of strong demand, tariff tensions and the sober-curious movement have taken a toll on the industry. Angelina Rascouet explains how that could affect the world's largest cognac brand, Hennessy and its parent company LVMH. (Source: Bloomberg)
Cognac makers are nursing a hangover. After years of strong demand, tariff tensions and the sober-curious movement have taken a toll on the industry. Angelina Rascouet explains how that could affect the world's largest cognac brand, Hennessy and its parent company LVMH. (Source: Bloomberg)
Cate Blanchett, Sandra Oh and Letitia Wright will form part of the National Theatre’s starry, female-led lineup for its 2026 season that its artistic director promises will “theatrically explode”. Oh, the Killing Eve and Grey’s Anatomy star, makes her National Theatre debut in an adaptation of Molière’s social satire The Misanthrope, which is directed by the theatre’s director and joint chief exec...
Cate Blanchett, Sandra Oh and Letitia Wright will form part of the National Theatre’s starry, female-led lineup for its 2026 season that its artistic director promises will “theatrically explode”. Oh, the Killing Eve and Grey’s Anatomy star, makes her National Theatre debut in an adaptation of Molière’s social satire The Misanthrope, which is directed by the theatre’s director and joint chief executive, Indhu Rubasingham. The Oscar winner Cate Blanchett and the German actor Nina Hoss lead an experimental combination of Sophocles’ myth Electra and Ingmar Bergman’s classic film about a mute actress and her psychiatric nurse, Persona, into one show that is directed by Benedict Andrews. The British stars Wright, Lesley Manville and Francesca Mills are also part of the lineup. Wright leads Tracey Scott Wilson’s newsroom thriller The Story, directed by Clint Dyer; Manville joins the adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Lyttleton in spring; and Mills stars in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, which opens in December. The big names could leave the National open to accusations of star-casting, something which the co-chair of the Casting Directors’ Guild, Nadine Rennie has said is “killing” the industry by making life hard for mid-scale theatres and destroying “audiences’ intellects”. But Rubasingham, the first woman and the first person of colour to be appointed boss of the National Theatre, has not hidden her intention to create an agenda-setting programme that also proudly puts bums on seats. Rubasingham grew up in Mansfield and went to the University of Hull to study drama before making her name at the Kiln Theatre, where her programme included Florian Zeller’s Family Trilogy, Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet and Zadie Smith’s Chaucer adaptation The Wife of Willesden. She told an interviewer shortly after getting the job at the National that she was not “petrified” of the position as she had been when she started at the Kiln. “There’s a sense I’ve done the job,” ...
‘I don’t like cauliflower cheese,” says Howard Donald (57), prodding at a hillock of cheddar-festooned florets as he tackles an otherwise inoffensive backstage repast during Take That’s 2024 stadium tour. Gary Barlow OBE (55) is aghast. “You don’t like cauliflower cheese?” he splutters between mouthfuls of pie. “What’s wrong with you?” “Cheesy,” mumbles his carefully bearded bandmate. “It’s too ch...
‘I don’t like cauliflower cheese,” says Howard Donald (57), prodding at a hillock of cheddar-festooned florets as he tackles an otherwise inoffensive backstage repast during Take That’s 2024 stadium tour. Gary Barlow OBE (55) is aghast. “You don’t like cauliflower cheese?” he splutters between mouthfuls of pie. “What’s wrong with you?” “Cheesy,” mumbles his carefully bearded bandmate. “It’s too cheesy.” “Whaaaaaaat?!” gasps Barlow, his award-winning vowels slowing to a thunderstruck crawl. “What’s wrong with cheese?” The question is of course rhetorical. This is, after all, Gary Barlow. And that is Howard Donald. Alongside elfin retainer Mark Owen (not present during the above transaction but presumably close to hand – possibly frolicking in a nearby woodland glade) they are Take That. They of the Barry Manilow cover versions and crop-topped Lulu “collabs”. They of the oiled thighs, be-jumpered ballads and A Million Love Songs (“Here I am, just for you, girl!”). Cheese is the very least of it. View image in fullscreen ‘Here I am, just for you, girl!’ … Take That. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix “What’s wrong with cheese?” would in fact make a fitting subtitle for Netflix’s excellent three-part documentary about the veteran boyband, a weighty wheel of narrative camembert that takes in the last 35 years of the Take That experience. It’s all here: the early-90s teen hysteria, the record-breaking string of No 1 hits, the behind-the-candelabra rivalries, the perpetual pendulum swings between pop magnificence (Pray) and po-faced naffery (Babe), the soul-searching, the bum cheeks and, ultimately, the bogglingly successful “circle of life” manband reunion that has, against considerable odds, proved to be about far more than merely nostalgia. That said, there is not much in the way of revelations. There are fleeting admissions of anxiety (Howard), creaking knees (Mark) and discomfort at the ongoing demands of success (Howard again). But there is little here we don’t already ...
A new cargo and passenger ferry service directly linking Scotland and France could launch later this year as the port of Dunkirk embarks on a €40bn (£35bn) regeneration programme it claims will mirror the second world war resilience for which it is famed. The plans could include a new service between Rosyth in Fife and Dunkirk, eight years after the last freight ferries linked Scotland to mainland...
A new cargo and passenger ferry service directly linking Scotland and France could launch later this year as the port of Dunkirk embarks on a €40bn (£35bn) regeneration programme it claims will mirror the second world war resilience for which it is famed. The plans could include a new service between Rosyth in Fife and Dunkirk, eight years after the last freight ferries linked Scotland to mainland Europe, and 16 years after passenger services stopped. Political and industrial leaders have laid out their Dunkirk plans, already backed by about €4bn (£3.5bn) in private and public investment, that will lead to the 60-year-old port area being transformed into a vast hub including low-carbon energy projects, battery factories and maritime logistics to cater for the new industrial era. “We are betting on the energy and ecological transition to redevelop an industrial region,” the former transport minister and second-time mayor of Dunkirk, Patrice Vergriete, said on launching a plan for the area over the next four years. Redevelopment at the port, just north of Calais, is being closely watched around Europe as a potential model for reindustrialisation for communities hollowed out by the closure of heavy and dirty industries including coal. Marie-Pierre de Bailliencourt, the director general of the Paris-based thinktank Institut Montaigne, described the area as a “laboratory” and “testing ground for European industrial renewal”. View image in fullscreen Dunkirk port in 1990. Thousands of people were employed in heavy industry in the postwar years, but this dwindled by the 1980s. Photograph: Michel Setbourn/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images Vergriete said Dunkirk, the site of the huge allied evacuation in the second world war, was “a fairly good representation of what deindustrialisation has been like in western Europe”, with thousands of jobs in heavy industry in the postwar years down to just a few hundred by the 1980s. “Not many regions in western Europe have done this: aligning ar...
In 2019, when Sajid Javid was home secretary, he spoke about growing up on “the most dangerous street in Britain” and said how easy it would have been to fall into a life of crime. Fortunately, he said, he managed to avoid trouble. But it turns out that Javid was being a little economical with the truth. He did get into trouble. Serious trouble. Now 56, he has just published his childhood memoir, ...
In 2019, when Sajid Javid was home secretary, he spoke about growing up on “the most dangerous street in Britain” and said how easy it would have been to fall into a life of crime. Fortunately, he said, he managed to avoid trouble. But it turns out that Javid was being a little economical with the truth. He did get into trouble. Serious trouble. Now 56, he has just published his childhood memoir, The Colour of Home. It’s crammed with incident – arranged marriages, savage beatings and boys behaving badly. I think there’s one key moment in your story, I tell him. “What, just one?” he hoots. Javid is not lacking for confidence. Thirteen-year-old Sajid is sitting in a police station with his younger brother Bas, who went on to become one of Britain’s most senior police officers, after they’d been caught red-handed swindling an amusement park. It’s an astonishing Sliding Doors moment when you can see the future banker and politician becoming trapped in a life of scuzzy, low-level crime. View image in fullscreen Eight-year-old Javid (left) in Rochdale with his cousin Rozina (8) and brother Tes (4). Photograph: Courtesy of Sajid Javid They had discovered how to cheat fruit machines with a J-shaped piece of wire. Before long, Javid had opened a savings account with his ill-gotten gains. Eventually they were caught by the manager of an arcade in Weston-super-Mare. Javid describes the incident in the book: “‘Right, you little Paki bastards, I know you’ve been ripping me off,’ he crouched to get as close to our faces as possible. ‘You’ve been stealing from the machines. If you weren’t kids I’d kick the shit out of you, but I’ve called the police instead. They’re on their way and you’re going to jail, you little fuckers.’” The boys were arrested and held in a cell. They confessed, their winnings were confiscated, and the police gave them enough money for the bus back to Bristol. When they got home their father beat them. Two months later, the boys were ordered to attend a polic...