Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
A cross-industry coalition of businesses has urged the UK prime minister to make financial education compulsory in all English schools, adding pressure on the government to ensure children are taught how money works from an early age.
Financial education was added to the curriculum for local authority-run secondary schools in 2014, but it is largely incorporated in non-core subjects, such as citizenship. The subject is optional for academies and free schools.
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In an open letter, the Financial Education Council (FEC), a subcommittee of The Investing and Saving Alliance (TISA), said implementation of the subject “remains inconsistent and its impact limited.”
The call to boost personal financial education comes as the Labour government consults on a proposed overhaul of the school curriculum. A review is being led by Becky Francis, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation charity.
The letter has been signed by groups including L&G, Schroders, GoHenry, NatWest Cushon, Rathbones, Foresters and Bank of Ireland.
The businesses said they backed recommendations made earlier this year by the House of Commons education select committee, who asked ministers to review the contents of the current maths curriculum to expand “the provision and relevance” of financial education.
The crossparty group of MPs called on the government to make the “personal and societal elements” of financial education compulsory at both primary and secondary school level.
Campaigners have warned that confidence in basic numeracy is at a low level among young people, which only compounds pressure on them during a cost of living crisis.
Carol Knight, TISA CEO said: “There is clear evidence that the delivery of effective financial education during childhood is of great benefit both from an individual and a societal perspective: helping to increase financial inclusion, financial confidence and, ultimately, increase economic growth.
“For these reasons, TISA is calling on the prime minister to add financial education to the curriculum so that all children can benefit from a high-quality and effective financial education.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said financial education already forms a compulsory part of the national curriculum covering personal budgeting, calculating interest, financial products and services, and how public money is raised and spent.
“The Curriculum and Assessment Review led by Becky Francis recently launched a call for evidence and we encourage experts, teachers, parents and key organisations like the Financial Education Council to respond to help shape their recommendations to government,” the spokesperson added.
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In July this year, the NBA announced a blockbuster new media rights deal worth $76bn over 11 years. As part of that deal, Amazon will pay the NBA $1.8bn per year to screen a selection of live games in the US and internationally. It’s just another example of the way streaming platforms are pushing into live sport globally. Amazon has other deals to show the UEFA Champions League, the NFL, and the French Open tennis tournament.
Apple TV+ carries Major League Baseball matches in the US, and has global rights to Major League Soccer. Last year YouTube began showing NFL matches through a seven-year contract worth $14bn. And earlier this year Netflix announced it would be screening live WWE wrestling for $500mn a year from 2025.
Until recently, streamers had often avoided live sports, largely due to the high costs of rights and technical challenges involved. But the technology has improved to the point where former sticking points, such as picture quality and time lag, are now acceptable to many fans. And while expensive, live sports are a powerful way of targeting multiple demographic segments and driving new subscriptions. Ad revenues are also becoming an increasingly important component of streamers’ income. And few things can attract advertisers like live sporting events.
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For the sports leagues, streamers have a global reach that is particularly attractive. Netflix alone has more than 270mn subscribers worldwide. But traditional broadcasters are fighting back.
Earlier this year, Fox, Disney, and Warner Bros announced the launch of a new streaming platform, Venu Sports. Although the venture is tied up in the legal challenge, alleging it is anticompetitive. Those three companies own 55 per cent of US sports rights. Meanwhile, in the UK, Sky Sports launched a new streaming service this summer to run alongside its traditional broadcast platform.
Another challenge for streamers is that their interest in sports rights has helped drive up prices. For example, between 2019 and 2024, the value of the US sports rights market grew by 54 per cent, compared to an overall TV industry revenue growth of just 15 per cent. While streamers’ spending on sports rights has soared recently, that explosive growth may ease off in the coming years, not least because many of the major sports rights deals still have years to run before renewal. But despite that, we may have reached a tipping point in the way viewers consume live sports.
New Canaan, Connecticut, features several of the best-known modern houses in the US. There’s Philip Johnson’s Glass House, as well as designs from the rest of the Harvard Five who made their names here in the 1940s. Of the same era, Edward Durell Stone’s Celanese House is now for sale.
This four-bedroom house has an unusual past. It was built as a display home amid a brief mid-century phase when companies would commission houses as a way of showcasing their products. Some, such as Charles M Goodman’s Care-free Homes designed for Alcoa, were intended to be replicated, with each one incorporating up to 7,500lb of Alcoa aluminium. Others were standalone showhomes, such as the Celanese House.
Originally a show home, the Celanese House has been meticulously refurbished
The company Celanese (a portmanteau of cellulose and ease) produced synthetic fabrics but also branched out into wallpaper, linoleum, carpets, paint and furniture, all of which were used liberally throughout the house. They hired Edward Durell Stone for the project, co-architect of MoMA in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and the US Embassy in New Delhi.
Stone’s approach set him apart from the Modernist architects of his day. While he embraced International Style Modernism in the 1930s, he ultimately felt that Modernism was too austere for American sensibilities. His son and fellow architect Hicks Stone explains: “My father was a progenitor of a trend in architecture called New Formalism. New Formalist buildings were typically symmetrical and monumental, and the work made references to classical architecture. It was this rejection of austere Modernism that made him commercially successful.”
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Ornamental lattice screens help preserve privacy, while allowing light in to the building
Stone’s classically-influenced projects made trademark use of ornamental screens and brise-soleil, most prominently at the embassy in New Delhi but also at the Celanese House. The lattice surrounds offer both privacy and light, while 12 pyramidal skylights provide light to the interior. Floating panels beneath (once filled with hanging plants) ensure illumination without glare.
The soft light was a selling point for Joel Disend who bought the house in 2008. “The panels diffuse the light coming from the skylights so it never gets in your eyes,” he says. Disend conducted a lengthy search for a modern home after his retirement. When he found the Celanese House he asked architect Nicholas Karytinos who had renovated his prior property if he would be willing to undertake the refurbishment without affecting the property’s original design.
Edward Durell Stone rejected austere Modernism in favour of classical references
Many of the Celanese details — which Stone did not care for — were already gone. A linoleum floor was replaced with oak. Sliding glass internal doors, no longer necessary to keep the house warm, were removed. A covered passageway, only occasionally needed in Connecticut’s climate, was subsumed into a new kitchen.
The renovation sought to respect the clean geometry of the interior. “The kitchen had no skylight and it was quite dark so we cut one into the roof,” Disend explained. They chose not to add another pyramid to avoid affecting the symmetry of the roofline. Meanwhile the existing pyramid shingles were in poor shape and were replaced.
The original exterior landscaping has now been sensitively updated as part of the refurb
The exterior was a blank canvas. “There was no landscaping and it needed something,” said Disend, who hired a historically-minded firm to work on the house. Stephen Lederach of Arnold Associates — a company that had worked with Stone previously — planted a meadow around the existing trees and created a formal entrance with eight symmetrical Linden trees.
Hicks Stone described Disend’s renovation as “immaculate”, adding that it “extends the Modernist vocabulary with skilful details, more so than the original home, which was fundamentally a speculative house meant to showcase a manufacturer’s product line”. A historic space, sensitively updated for the modern day.
The Celanese House is on sale for $4.7mn through Melissa Rwambuya of William Raveis Real Estate.
The restive Indian-controlled territory of Jammu and Kashmir is poised for the results of its first regional election since being stripped of autonomy by Narendra Modi in 2019, a contest being closely watched for signs of the future direction of one of Asia’s most intractable conflicts.
Voting closed on October 1 in the Himalayan territory, which is part of a region also claimed and partially controlled by Pakistan and a perennial flashpoint between the nuclear-armed neighbours. The votes will be counted and results announced on Tuesday.
Wrapping up a peaceful election would represent a public relations coup for India’s governing Bharatiya Janata party, which says it has brought peace to Jammu and Kashmir since downgrading what was India’s only Muslim-majority state to a union territory under direct federal rule.
“The peaceful and participative elections are historic wherein democracy is taking root . . . driven by the will of the people of Jammu and Kashmir,” said Rajiv Kumar, India’s chief election commissioner, as voting closed.
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Modi’s government five years ago revoked a constitutional article that guaranteed significant regional autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir.
Unlike past regional elections, which were subject to boycott campaigns by Kashmiri separatists, this vote was marked by vigorous campaigning and strong participation by large national parties, smaller regional rivals and independent candidates.
To ensure order during voting, which was carried out in phases beginning last month, paramilitaries in security vehicles mounted with guns patrolled towns that have previously been hotbeds of Kashmiri separatist militancy.
Opposition politicians have accused New Delhi of ruling the disputed region by fear and oppression. After downgrading the state, the government blocked the internet there for months and carried out mass arrests of separatists, activists and others.
“The BJP’s jackboot policy has created fear,” said Tariq Hameed Karra, Jammu and Kashmir president of the Indian National Congress, India’s biggest opposition party. “There’s anger in every part of the state over the legal, constitutional, cultural, religious and economic oppression of the people.”
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People are “not allowed to air their grievances”, he said.
Iltija Mufti, a candidate for the regional People’s Democratic party, which wants restoration of statehood and autonomy, said the Modi government had “disempowered and dispossessed” people in the territory.
While deadly encounters between Indian security forces and insurgents remain common, the number of people killed has fallen, according to security analysts.
They said this was in part because Pakistan, which backs Kashmiri separatism, had in the past few years been focused more on Afghanistan and on its own economic problems, according to Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi.
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“There is a very sustained downward trend in fatalities because of improvements in Indian security force capabilities and a weakening of the economy and security force capacity in Pakistan,” Sahni said.
According to the institute’s South Asian Terrorism Portal, 134 fatalities among Indian security forces, insurgents and civilians were reported in the region in 2023, down from an average of well over 1,000 per year at the height of the conflict from 1990-2006.
In Sopore, a town in lush northern Kashmir, farm workers took time off from the harvest season to queue early at a polling station surrounded by willow trees used to make cricket bats.
Mohammad Ramzan Ganai, 78, a supporter of Kashmir’s oldest party, the National Conference, said people wanted elected representatives who would defend their basic interests, including seeking the restoration of the territory’s statehood and autonomy. “This vote is different because we want our basic rights back,” Ganai said.
While the election will allow some transfer of power to a 90-seat regional assembly, Jammu and Kashmir’s status as a union territory means New Delhi will have much more direct control than it does in Indian states.
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Bringing Kashmir under the same regime as India’s other states has long been a pet project for the BJP. But while Modi has voiced support for restoring statehood, the party has dismissed any suggestion it could give Jammu and Kashmir back substantial autonomy and the special rights previously granted to people defined as permanent residents.
Analysts said New Delhi’s direct rule by handpicked bureaucrats had left a gap in public representation. “People feel a disconnect with governance,” said Nisar Ali, an economist on a central government data committee. “Their motivation is to elect local representatives so that they can access government services through them.”
Intense development of roads and other infrastructure over the past five years has converted swaths of the picturesque mountainous territory into construction sites. But residents complain of high electricity tariffs, drinking water shortages and high unemployment under the current administration, which has had only limited results from its efforts to promote business and inward investment.
A parliamentary committee said in a report last year that about 1.35mn people in the territory — about 8 per cent of the population — were addicted to drugs.
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The Jammu and Kashmir election, along with several state ballots across India in coming months, will test popular support for the Hindu nationalist BJP after it lost its majority in the national parliament in June.
The BJP won two seats in Jammu and Kashmir in June, with National Conference also taking two and an independent winning one.
Exit polls — while not always accurate, as June’s parliamentary elections proved — suggested no party or grouping was expected to win a majority in the regional vote. Abhijeet Jasrotia, a local BJP spokesperson, said the party would win “30-plus” of the 43 seats in Hindu-dominated Jammu, and two or three of 47 in Muslim-majority Kashmir.
“We will definitely emerge as the largest grouping, and I hope we are not too far from the halfway mark,” said Omar Abdullah, vice-president of National Conference, which ran a joint campaign with Congress.
Analysts said lasting peace and stability for Jammu and Kashmir would require more than democratic elections. India also needed to improve relations with Pakistan, according to Ali. “We cannot think of the future of Jammu and Kashmir in isolation,” he said.
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