Singapore dials down on air‑con as oil crunch grips Asia

Zac Sherratt,South East, Adrian Harms,Dorkingand Jack Fiehn,Farnham BBC Pub landlord Martin Groves said the Budget ‘could have been a lot worse’ Businesses in Surrey have given mixed reactions to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Budget, which outlined spending and taxation plans for the years ahead. Key measures announced on Wednesday include scrapping the two-child benefit cap, freezing…

Just 50 miles from the thriving Somerset grapevines, in a field near Devizes, Phil Collins shows me a much sadder sight. “Six and a half thousand cauliflowers here, which have just basically cooked,” he explained. The leaves are brown and crispy. Inside there are tiny cauliflowers, brown and dried up. We walk on, through a…

Patrick Crehan buys fuel on behalf of a 3,500 member consortium, who are mainly agricultural farmers. Before the conflict, he was paying around 70p a litre. Just before the ceasefire, he was paying around 130p a litre, though that has fallen back a little since Wednesday.

Personal data may have been stolen in the ransomware attack that forced Asahi to halt beer production, the company has said. Japan’s biggest brewer was forced to halt production at the majority of its 30 factories in the country, after a cyber-attack late last month disrupted everything from beer shipments to its accounting system. All…

US giants ExxonMobil and Chevron saw their earnings fall compared with the same period last year, due to supply disruption from the Middle East, but both beat analysts’ forecasts and expect their profits to grow further as the year goes on, with the price of oil still significantly higher than when the war broke out.

Since Truth API was announced, some have raised the potential for insider trading to occur. The practice, which is illegal, involves people making market trades or bets based on information that is not available to the general public. Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer to President George W Bush, told the BBC even if Trump…