business

Hooters, the US-based restaurant chain known for chicken wings and skimpy waitstaff outfits, has filed for bankruptcy protection. HOA Restaurant Group filed the motion for chapter 11 protection Monday in the north Texas bankruptcy court in Dallas. The company – whose outlets are often derisively called “breastaurants” and are known for their so-called “Hooters girls” … Read more

France’s far-right National Rally (RN) party is calling for nationwide demonstrations against a court decision to ban Marine Le Pen from public office for five years, seemingly wrecking her hopes of becoming president in 2027. Jordan Bardella, the RN president, said French people “must be outraged” after what he called a “disproportionate, political and partisan” … Read more

Australian police officers have been given the green light to testify in the US trial of a man accused of links to the deadly Wieambilla shootings in rural Queensland. The Queensland officers will be allowed to testify in an Arizona court but will have to stick to “neutral factual” accounts of the incident. A US … Read more

A pair of UK entrepreneurs selling refillable deodorant cases and manuka honey lip balms made from natural ingredients have reportedly landed a near-£100m payday from the sale of their brand to the global consumer goods group Unilever. Wild, founded by childhood friends Freddy Ward and Charlie Bowes-Lyon, has been bought by Unilever, the maker of … Read more

A sense of chaos has gripped the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), one of the world’s premier research agencies, with key staff hastily fired and then rehired, cuts to vital weather forecasting operations and even a new, unsecured server that led to staff being deluged by obscene spam emails. Noaa is currently being upended … Read more

Good morning. As Donald Trump prepared to unveil a swathe of reciprocal tariffs, global markets braced themselves and some Republican senators voiced their opposition to a strategy that critics warn risks a global trade war, provoking retaliation by major trading partners such as China, Canada and the EU. The US president said on Monday he … Read more

The Football Association has stepped up its lobbying of the government to make forced entry into football stadiums, so-called “tailgating”, a criminal offence before the United Kingdom and Ireland host the 2028 men’s European Championship. The policing minister Dame Diana Johnson was a guest of the FA at Wembley for last month’s Carabao Cup final, … Read more

Housebuilders in the UK are failing to supply much-needed new homes not because of restrictive planning laws, but because they are “very bad” at building houses, the head of one of the UK’s biggest nature charities has warned. “There’s planning permission today for a million new houses,” said Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife … Read more

A 17-year-old boy from the West Bank who was held without charge for six months in an Israeli prison has died after he collapsed in unclear circumstances, Palestinian officials have said. According to his family, Walid Ahmad was “a healthy high schooler” at the time of his arrest last September for allegedly throwing stones at … Read more

US voters are headed to the polls on Tuesday in Wisconsin and Florida in elections that some see as a test of Donald Trump’s popularity and the political clout of his billionaire ally Elon Musk. The most closely watched contest is a battle for a seat on Wisconsin’s seven-member supreme court. Conservatives are trying to … Read more