The Tories introduced the 50% strike ballot threshold to make industrial action harder. MATT WRACK argues that a Labour government has no justification for leaving it on the statute book
IN August 2019, Larry Fink, co-founder of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management group, flew to Alaska for a fishing holiday with his mates, Philipp Hildebrand, the former Swiss Central Bank governor and Mike Corbat, the former head of Citibank.
When they arrived, Fink was taken aback to find the water levels very low and wreaths of smoke were drifting across the narrow Bering Strait from Siberia, where the peat in the tundra was on fire.
During his four-decade career, he had worried about the planet in a vaguely do-gooding way, he says, and he used to assume that personal and philanthropic conviction should stay out of his profit-seeking business.
Marking milestones in the histories of China and the United States, this week offers a chance to examine two very different visions of the international order, says CARLOS MARTINEZ
Friedrich Merz’s call for a new Plaza Accord ignores how Washington’s 1985 currency ambush destroyed Japan without fixing US deficits — China, a sovereign socialist state with 1.4 billion consumers, cannot be bullied the same way, writes CARLOS MARTINEZ
One of the major criticisms of China’s breakneck development in recent decades has been the impact on nature — returning after 15 years away, BEN CHACKO assessed whether the government’s recent turn to environmentalism has yielded results


