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  • A big data approach to artificial intelligence driven predictive modelling for optimizing material properties in additive manufacturing

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  • Bangladesh to demand T20 World Cup matches be moved outside India – France 24

    1. Bangladesh to demand T20 World Cup matches be moved outside India  France 24
    2. Bangladesh look to move T20 World Cup matches from India amid Mustafizur row  ESPNcricinfo
    3. ‘Days of slavery are over’: Bangladesh to demand its T20 World Cup matches…

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  • These 1980s Home Décor Ideas Are Suddenly Trending Again

    These 1980s Home Décor Ideas Are Suddenly Trending Again

    There is a particular pleasure in leafing through old magazine archives. You notice which interiors still feel timeless, which collectables did people value and what recipes appeared again and again.

    There are, of course, certain ideas best…

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  • Junior lawyers want their pound of flesh — or two pounds in a good year

    Junior lawyers want their pound of flesh — or two pounds in a good year

    Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

    The concept of “eat what you kill” common to many financial groups has been mostly unknown among lawyers, and especially those on the lower rungs of the ladder. In a change of tone, major US law firms are now forking over year-end holiday bonuses as high as $315,000 to associate lawyers, figures not seen before.

    Grunts typically get paid mostly in fixed salaries that vary little across the industry: typically from $225,000 to $420,000 annually based on year of service. But that system had already started to creak. For the top litigators and dealmakers, big firms have been paying as much as $25mn in the belief that future winners will be those with an all-star line-up of lawyers.

    Now the talent war has reached the junior ranks, even if the numbers on offer have fewer zeroes. Not only are large bonuses being doled out, but the so-called lockstep model, where pay varies little between peers and firms, is under threat. Pallas Partners, a litigation boutique, told the FT it was paying larger bonuses for associates — meaning those who aren’t yet partners — but was also giving special rewards to the highest performers.

    Law firms for decades had turned their noses up at the money-grubbing culture that defined their Wall Street clients, believing that theirs was a profession and not a career. To be sure, the firms that are today paying the biggest associate bonuses seem to be upstarts such as Pallas, which have less name recognition than old-school New York firms like Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which set the associate pay scale. As such, the newcomers must work harder to attract top talent.

    There is plenty to keep bonuses aloft, following the second-best year for global mergers and acquisitions on record. A survey conducted by Hildebrandt Consulting/Citigroup showed average revenue up more than a tenth in 2025 among nearly 200 law firm respondents. Future disruption from AI notwithstanding, junior staff are valuable since they do much of the heavy lifting on deals and pre-trial preparation.

    By venturing into the kind of pay associated with hedge funds or investment banks, law firms risk taking on the same problems. Bonuses are, by definition, elastic, so elation can turn into disappointment in a bad year.

    But it will be hard to go back to cozy former ways. Already, some law firms are turning to mergers to better compete. The venerable Cadwalader recently merged with Hogan Lovells after losing dozens of partners last year. A year earlier, New York’s Shearman & Sterling joined forces with London’s Allen & Overy. Creative destruction has come for big law; it’s no surprise if a wave of creative remuneration is coming too.

    sujeet.indap@ft.com

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  • Twitter and Pinterest founders launch app as antidote to social media

    Twitter and Pinterest founders launch app as antidote to social media

    Two Silicon Valley veterans behind Twitter and Pinterest have launched a new app that is designed to be an antidote to the “terrible devastation” they say has been caused by social media.

    Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, and Evan Sharp, who co-founded online scrapbooking site Pinterest in 2010, have raised $29mn in funding for their new start-up West Co, according to a regulatory filing.

    West Co, which the pair founded in 2023, launched its first app, Tangle, in November. It is pitched as a “new kind of social network, designed for intentional living”.

    Tangle, which is at present accessible on an invite-only basis, suggests users share personal objectives or “intentions” with their friends, support each other’s goals and “reflect” on how they are achieved.

    “It is a tool for meaning that helps people plan with intention, capture the reality of their days, and see the deeper threads that shape their life,” the company said in a recent job advertisement.

    West Co, which is headquartered in San Francisco, said on its website that its mission is to “build tools to help people live life more on purpose”. Spark Capital, an early Twitter investor, led West Co’s seed financing round in 2024, according to another job ad.

    Stone said the current version of the app — which sends users notifications every morning asking “What’s your intention for today?” — was still an early test and could change before a full public launch.

    “It turns out that creating something to help people navigate their lifetime is difficult work,” he told the Financial Times, “but I think it’s worth it.”

    In a recent podcast interview, Sharp — who is West Co’s chief executive — described his “eight-year-long obsession” with “really trying to understand what we fundamentally disrupted with the phone and social media so that I could . . . help make that a little bit better”.

    “What could I build that might help address just some of the terrible devastation of the human mind and heart that we’ve wrought the last 15 years?” he said.

    Stone and Sharp are among several Silicon Valley executives grappling with the side effects of the products and services that they built, even as their companies’ success made them wealthy.

    Sir Jonathan Ive, the former Apple designer who helped birth the iPhone, has described his project to develop an AI-based consumer device with OpenAI as a response to the “unintended consequences” of the smartphone. Sharp spent two years working at LoveFrom, Ive’s design firm, before launching West Co.

    Tangle is Stone’s latest attempt to capitalise on his earlier success. He is also a co-founder of Medium, an online publishing platform, and Jelly, a question-and-answer app that was later acquired by Pinterest. He launched investment firm Future Positive in 2019 and at present serves on the board of Mastodon, another social networking group.

    After leaving Twitter in 2021, Stone clashed with Elon Musk after the Tesla and SpaceX chief acquired the company, which the billionaire has now renamed X. Musk is “not a serious person”, Stone said in a post in December 2022, describing the changes Musk made to the service as “heartbreaking”.

    Several of West Co’s founding team previously worked at Twitter and Pinterest. Another early employee, Reverend Sue Phillips, a former Unitarian Universalist church minister turned tech company adviser, now serves as the start-up’s “head of wise AI and ancient technologist”, according to her LinkedIn profile.

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  • An adults-only enclave with private pools for all on a peaceful Greek island

    An adults-only enclave with private pools for all on a peaceful Greek island

    Keep it on the QT, but those looking for a spot of quiet time will love Celestial All Suites. Whether it’s a do-not-disturbathon honeymoon or dozey afternoons with a book on a daybed you’re after, the peaceful vibe here will put your mind at…

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  • Investor urges corporate Japan to get over bubble-era ‘trauma’

    Investor urges corporate Japan to get over bubble-era ‘trauma’

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    Japan’s executives have to change their mindset and exert more pricing power as the country moves on from an era of deflation, one of its biggest independent asset managers has said.

    Shuhei Abe, founder of asset manager Sparx, said he was looking to invest in companies and managers willing to emerge from a defensive crouch and raise prices in Japan’s changed economic landscape.

    “Investors in this country have waited for years for inflation to return and now the time has come,” he said in an interview in Tokyo. “One of the biggest catalysts for the coming years will be changes of management attitude.”

    His comments underline the change of mood among Japanese investors, who for years sought to pick stock market winners in an economy with barely any growth and entrenched deflation following the end of its asset price bubble in 1989.

    However, in 2025 Japan’s stock market index has climbed decisively beyond its previous peaks while rising inflation has allowed the central bank to raise interest rates to the highest level in 30 years.

    Managers of the previous era “suffered from the trauma of the past bubble” and had it instilled in them to cut debt and hoard capital rather than raise prices, Abe said.

    “Most of the top management guys who joined [Japanese companies] during this time were trained . . . to reduce the debt, to not waste capital,” said Abe, a former employee of George Soros. “But finally, now, they have started to understand they cannot continue like they have over the past 30 years.”

    Sparx has ¥2tn ($12.7bn) of assets under management. Among its investments Abe cites Morinaga, a confectioner benefiting from Japan’s boom in inbound tourism, and Shoei, a maker of premium motorcycle helmets, as benefiting from pricing power.

    Abe is also invested in Pilot, one of the largest pen companies in the world, which has recently moved to satisfy some of Abe’s demands, raising the price of its best-selling pen in Japan by 10 per cent.

    Most of Japan’s asset managers are riding the wave of stock price records over the past 18 months. Sparx, which was founded in 1989 just before the end of the bubble, managed in August to exceed its previous peak for assets under management, set 19 years earlier.

    Its funds have recorded, over their lifetimes, annualised returns of between 4.7 per cent for its long-short fund and 11.4 per cent for its active long-only strategy. The Topix returned about 4.6 per cent over roughly the same period.

    Japan’s average annual growth was less than 1 per cent for more than 30 years, Abe pointed out. “In this environment, it’s not easy to invest in any equity asset. So Sparx did very well in that sense. But, at the same time, no one else could do it, thus there was room for us.”

    Before founding Sparx, Abe was funded by Soros in 1985 to invest in Japanese railroad stock, in a bet that the market would start to apply more value to the sector’s vast real estate holdings — a variant on a strategy that some activists and private equity groups are using in Japan today.

    It is not just the end of a long period of stagnation that has put Japan back into investors’ sights. Regulators, the government and the stock exchange are pushing companies to pay more attention to shareholders.

    The government is also pushing to improve the quality and quantity of asset managers, convinced that they are crucial to improving corporate performance and getting capital flowing.

    Abe expects that a wave of retail investors will come into the market, with the side-effect that companies will have a powerful new constituency pushing them to perform.

    “Individuals will move the market. Individuals will eventually be . . . a most powerful activist,” he said.

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  • US to extend productivity lead on back of AI boom, say economists

    US to extend productivity lead on back of AI boom, say economists

    More than three-quarters of economists expect the US to maintain or widen its productivity lead over the rest of the world, because of artificial intelligence, deep capital markets and relatively low energy costs, a Financial Times survey has found.

    In the global poll, 31 per cent of 183 respondents thought the US would retain its advantage in productivity, while another 48 per cent expected the country to increase its dominance.  

    The economists were based in China, the Eurozone, the UK and the US.

    Productivity growth — which measures progress in converting inputs such as hours worked into goods and services — ultimately allows companies to increase wages and profits, improving living standards.

    US labour productivity rose 10 per cent between 2019 and 2024, thanks to rapid technological advances and the reallocation of workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. By contrast, it remained largely stagnant in the UK and Eurozone, according to OECD data.

    Jumana Saleheen, head of Vanguard’s investment strategy group in Europe, said US productivity was set to “pull away from other developed market economies” thanks to the country’s dynamic capital markets, flexible labour force and lead in emerging technologies.

    She added that Europe risked “falling further behind”, with research and development still heavily focused on traditional sectors such as automotive and pharmaceuticals.

    Saleheen also noted structural challenges for the EU, including fragmented infrastructure, more rigid labour markets and less supportive capital markets.

    The US economy is set for the strongest growth in the G7 this year, according to the OECD — buoyed by a tech-led investment boom and stock market gains that are bolstering wealth and spending among better-off households.

    The gains have helped counter some of the economic damage done by US President Donald Trump’s trade wars but have also raised fears of an unsustainable AI-related bubble.

    The FT survey, which was carried out in December, suggests economists do not expect the trends powering US outperformance to be reversed soon.

    AI and related digital technologies were the new productivity frontier, said Nina Skero, chief executive of the Centre for Economics and Business Research, and the US’s “position as a leader in investment and development of these technologies will extend the US’s productivity lead”.

    Some content could not load. Check your internet connection or browser settings.

    The trend is supported by a divergence in business investment. In the US, investment jumped 24 per cent in the second quarter of 2025 compared with the same period in 2019, before the pandemic. It contracted 7 per cent over that time in the Eurozone, according to Oxford Economics.

    Some economists surveyed by the FT warned that the surge in AI investment could reflect a “bubble” — a term mentioned 25 times in responses — and cautioned that a sharp correction might weigh on US output and productivity.

    A reversal in the stock market gains made by US tech could also have international repercussions via tighter financial conditions, softer external demand and rising risk aversion, some economists said.

    But the majority of respondents to the poll, which represented the UK and Eurozone more heavily than China and the US, still expected America to maintain its productivity edge globally. Overall, the poll surveyed 207 economists, although not all responded to every question.

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    The US was starting from a “position of strength” in the productivity race, said Thomas Simons, chief US economist at Jefferies.

    Respondents also pointed to the US’s structurally lower and more predictable energy costs, flexible labour market and large domestic economy.

    The US benefits from “structurally lower and more predictable energy costs than Europe and many Asian economies, underpinned by an administration that treats energy policy as a driver of economic prosperity rather than a vehicle for moral posturing at the expense of growth and living standards,” said Martin Beck, chief economist at the consultancy WPI Strategy.

    Line chart of 2026 GDP growth forecast, by date of forecast showing Economists expect stronger 2026 growth in the US

    Europe is widely seen by economists as constrained by over-regulation, weaker investment, rigid labour markets and a business environment less favourable to cutting-edge technologies. The UK had the additional weight of the Brexit legacy to deal with, some economists contended.

    “While the US and others have made major strides in AI, the UK has spent much of the last decade chasing the Brexit tail, diverting attention and resources from innovation,” said Evarist Stoja, professor of finance at the University of Bristol Business School.

    Experts acknowledge that the US faces rising AI competition from Asia. “Other countries — particularly in Asia — will move to the frontier, meaning that the relative advantage of the US will erode somewhat but will not be eliminated,” said Jagjit S Chadha, professor of economics at the University of Cambridge. 

    China has the second-largest cumulative venture capital investment in AI since 2012 after the US and over three times more than the EU, according to the OECD.

    The US may be at the forefront of the AI wave, but “much of this may prove a misallocation of resources,” said David Owen, chief economist at Saltmarsh Economics. “Ultimately, much of the benefits will go to the users of the technology (elsewhere), not the early-stage innovators.”

    Many economists also highlighted risks from US trade protectionism, restrictive immigration policies, fiscal imbalances and political instability that could eventually undermine productivity growth. 

    US productivity gains from trade “have been traded away for chump change tariff revenues”, warned Robert Barbera, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Financial Economics.

    Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College in London, warned that a “toxic combination” of tariffs, an erosion of the quality of US government administration and anti-immigration policy would “over time do significant damage to the US economy”.

    Additional reporting from Olaf Storbeck, Claire Jones and Thomas Hale

    Video: The AI rollout is here – and it’s messy | FT Working It

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  • the productivity hack for 2026

    the productivity hack for 2026

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    Time (to mangle the Rolling Stones lyric) is definitely not on my side. Like many Financial Times readers I’m sure, life for most of last year involved juggling a sheaf of to-do lists, with the clock as a permanent reminder that such a volume and variety of tasks would not and could not be completed.

    Procrastination is not one of my psychological quirks, so that’s not it. And I’ve become quite good at “eating the frog” — doing one of the most unpleasant things on the list first, to give yourself a boost from getting it over with. No, the problem is quite simple: there is too much to do. This may be particularly the case for those with both young and old people to look after, as well as work responsibilities.

    Luckily (if not happily), it seems that for many middle-aged women, large chunks of extra time open up in your diary around the same time as the tasks and responsibilities proliferate. But there is a catch — those hours are from about 3am to maybe five or six in the morning.

    Yes, that’s right. Insomnia — it’s my tried and tested productivity hack for 2026. We’ve all been bludgeoned by the competitiveness of “the 5am club”, the go-getters who boast of starting their day super early to steal a march on the losers who need eight hours’ sleep a night. Well, this year I’m already planning the 3am club — think less business elite, more frazzled sandwich generation.

    Here’s how it goes. Strange mid-life biological changes start to interrupt your sleep patterns, leading to some sort of internal alarm going off at approximately 3am, regular as clockwork. It’s not that you are sleeping badly (although a newfound sympathy for friends who have suffered with life-long insomnia is perhaps a moral gain from the experience). You are just plain awake. And judging by the number of times colleagues and friends have described the same phenomenon, joking that we could have sorted out our work questions in the small hours when we were both up, this is widespread.

    You then have a choice: either worry about how bad the next day will feel, thereby worsening your anxious state; or embrace the bonus of a couple of extra hours to get on top of things. Personally, I found, following advice from a counsellor, that getting up to put on a load of laundry or mopping the floors has the benefit of a physical task that will eventually summon sleep again. Then I rationalise my to-do lists for the following days, and often get my physio exercises done. If I’m incurably alert, I might do some work, but using screens is not conducive to winding down again (though many are the columns I have written after midnight).

    You could also get creative — but be warned the output may not be a gift to the rest of humanity. One of the moments of 2025 was surely Reform UK’s sequin-clad Andrea Jenkyns, on stage at the party’s conference belting out lines from her own composition — a bombastic rock anthem entitled “Insomniac”. “I’m an insomniac!/ Staring at the ceiling, waiting for my thoughts to switch off.”

    Unforgettable, for sure, but not in a good way — and you have to assume she wrote it at night. So make sure you take a good hard look at your own masterpiece after you have managed to get some sleep.

    Reading, somehow, doesn’t work for me — the mind stays too active and I’m still awake as the rest of the household gets up. Last year I took up Japanese visible mending for our socks and sweaters, with mixed but useful (and therapeutic) results. The aim is to eventually fall back into an emergency top-up sleep before the day really has to start.

    Clearly, none of this is ideal. The mental and physical health effects of a lack of sleep can be severe. And on those nights when the internal alarm fails to go off, I slumber on blissfully and wake refreshed, much like my old (for which read young) self. But since at least for now it seems to be inevitable, better to accept and adjust. Chances are that this productivity hack will not solve the insomnia. But hey, we can beat those layabout 5am-ers at their own game and carry the day. And the night.

    miranda.green@ft.com

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  • Europe’s renewables push slowed by waits for links to grid, operator warns

    Europe’s renewables push slowed by waits for links to grid, operator warns

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    The boss of one of Europe’s largest grid operators has warned that too many speculative and unprepared projects are holding up grid connections for critical energy projects and causing years-long queues.

    Bernard Gustin, chief executive of Elia Group, which operates the Belgian and parts of the German grid, said that operators of network infrastructure should be able to allocate connections to projects that are ready, rather than those that applied first.

    ‘‘I think in Belgium we have 10 times more projects [than] needed until 2030,” he said, referring to battery storage projects. “If you change from first come, first served to first ready, first served, then you will focus on the ones who are really serious because they have everything [ready].”

    Grid connections have become a huge issue for European countries. Many are trying to manage a rapid increase in demand for grid access as more industrial plants and households install wind and solar power that can go into the grid, as well as an increasing number of applications from data centres to use energy from it.

    In some countries, such as the Netherlands, queues to be connected to the grid stretch more than seven years. In Slovakia, about 50 per cent of capacity reserved for connection remains unused, according to commission figures. In Germany, there are twice as many requests to add battery storage to the grid as is planned in the country’s grid development plan, an Elia Group report found.

    The rollout of renewables in the EU has outpaced the infrastructure needed to support it, as countries race to meet renewable energy targets set by Brussels and move away from imported fossil fuels. The European Commission has estimated that €1.2tn needs to be spent on the EU’s grids by 2040 in order to support the transition.

    Gustin said that grid operators are competing for funding to rapidly build out networks and upgrade infrastructure to balance the volatility of wind and solar energy.

    After years of stagnant investment levels, “we all have huge capex plans, so big that you need to be able to finance them, which is a challenge”, he said.

    Bernard Gustin: ‘If you change from first come, first served to first ready, first served, then you will focus on the ones who are really serious because they have everything [ready]’ © Jonas Roosens/Belga/AFP/Getty Images

    Costs from grid congestion — where cheap electricity cannot flow to where demand is so people have to pay for higher cost sources — are rising. Acer, the EU energy regulator, has said that they reached €5.2bn in 2022 and could rise to €26bn by 2030.

    In a document published in December, Brussels set out recommendations to prioritise connections to the grid. The commission also said that it would take a more top-down approach to energy infrastructure planning in order to accelerate the build-out and ensure costs were shared between EU countries.

    “In Europe it’s a huge problem and we lose billions every year in lost value because of curtailment and bottlenecks,” EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen told the Financial Times.

    In a report on energy storage, Elia Group found that the first 100GW of installed batteries in Europe would reduce the curtailment of renewable power by 13 per cent, meaning that 13 per cent more power would be available.

    People observe a large control room screen displaying Belgium’s electricity grid data.
    A control room screen displaying Belgium’s electricity grid data © Jonas Roosens/BELGA MAG/AFP/Getty Images

    Elia plans to spend €31.6bn on grid upgrades until 2028, split roughly one-third to Belgium and two-thirds to its German arm. To deal with connection demands from batteries, data centres and renewable energy installations could cost an additional €10bn, Gustin estimated.

    “These are not small amounts . . . you have a lot of people saying we don’t want tariffs to go up on energy, electricity is not competitive. And so we have a first challenge [which] is how do we make sure, given the amounts we need to raise, that we have a competitive return on equity?”

    Gustin, who was formerly chief executive of Brussels Airlines, oversaw a €2.2bn capital raise earlier this year, bringing in investors such as BlackRock and the Canadian pension fund CPP.

    Often the length of time it takes to grant permits for infrastructure projects is seen as a risk factor by investors, he said, with permitting times in Belgium running up to eight years.

    “By [that] time inflation and the price have increased and some investors are telling you these were not the conditions we had at the start, we cannot continue,” he said.

    The EU’s recent legislation aims to speed up permitting times by setting time limits for permit deliberations and proposing that energy projects should be seen as having an overriding interest.

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