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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The UK is seeking to accelerate returns of migrants to 11 countries including Iraq, Ethiopia and Vietnam in a bid to reduce the number of people residing in the country without the right to work or study.

The government has posted a contract opportunity worth £15mn over three years for a commercial partner to support the “reintegration” of people returning from Britain to their home countries.

The Home Office intends to deliver the support in Albania, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Iraq, Jamaica, Nigeria, Pakistan, Vietnam and Zimbabwe, according to official documents.

Activists have highlighted human rights violations in Iraq where the UK government acknowledges that returnees’ without certain documentation are at real risk of serious harm at security checkpoints when attempting to travel internally.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to “smash the gangs” that traffic asylum seekers across the Channel on small boats. 

He has also vowed to significantly accelerate the return of irregular migrants to their home countries in a bid to reduce the increasing cost of supporting asylum seekers and foreign national offenders. 

The government has identified a £6.4bn overspend in the asylum budget for this year, which it blamed for decisions to cut public spending elsewhere and raise taxes in the autumn budget.

According to a report released on Thursday by the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, the previous Conservative government overspent billions each year on average on the asylum system between 2021 and 2023.

The contract released by the Home Office this month indicates where the government intends to focus its resources on migrant returns, including through bilateral agreements.

Previous administrations have struggled to significantly increase returns in part because of claims brought by migrants on human rights grounds and the large costs involved.

Home secretary Yvette Cooper announced last week that the government aimed to increase returns of migrants — which have dropped precipitously over the past decade — to levels last seen in 2018. 

She has set a target of returning 14,500 migrants over the next six months, which can include asylum seekers, foreign national offenders, and people living and working in the UK illegally.

Labour has formed a “returns unit” inside the Home Office to fast track cases of people from priority countries and hired around 300 of the planned 1,000 people to staff this unit.

One issue facing the government as it seeks to accelerate returns is that many of the people arriving in the UK to claim asylum are not from the country’s list of “safe states”.

Under international law, people seeking asylum cannot be returned to a country if it puts their safety in jeopardy. The return of people from countries not listed as safe are examined on a case-by-case basis.

The Home Office said the government was planning to deliver “a major surge in immigration enforcement and returns activity to remove people with no right to be in the UK and ensure the rules are respected and enforced”.

It added that continued international co-operation with partner nations played “a critical role”, and that it would be “working closely with a number of countries across the globe”.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway became the first publicly traded US company outside the technology sector to be valued at $1tn, as a small advance on Wednesday pushed its market capitalisation into a club that had been dominated by companies such as Apple and Microsoft.

The sprawling conglomerate has been transformed by Buffett over the past six decades into a force touching almost every corner of the American economy. Its rail cars traverse more than 32,000 miles of track that criss-cross the country, it owns a critical parts manufacturer for Boeing, and it runs one of the largest US auto insurers.

Buffett, who turns 94 on Friday, has spent the year selling off stocks — including half of the stake in Apple that generated a mammoth trading profit for Berkshire — and pumping the proceeds into cash and short-term Treasuries.

Shareholders have rewarded Berkshire, pushing its valuation up by more than $200bn this year. Its class A common stock is up nearly 30 per cent since the start of January, outpacing the broader S&P 500. The A shares stood at $697,225, up 0.9 per cent, in lunchtime trading on Wednesday.

Jeff Muscatello, a research analyst at Berkshire investor Douglass Winthrop, said the rise since Buffett took control of the company in 1965 was down to “the consistency of their approach” as well as Buffett’s investing rules.

“The first [rule] is don’t lose money,” Muscatello said. “The second is don’t forget rule number one and let the laws of compounding work over an incredibly long period of time.”

The surging valuations in Berkshire’s shares and the wider stock market have not been lost on Buffett. The billionaire in May slowed the company’s share buyback programme and disclosed in June that he had not repurchased a single share that month.

Buffett has sole discretion over the buyback programme and generally curtails buying when he believes the stock is overvalued.

The company’s cash pile soared to a record high of $277bn in June as Buffett found few appealing investments in public markets. While periods of relatively sparse dealmaking have troubled Berkshire investors in the past, few are ringing alarm bells now, as the company looks to have avoided some of the troubles that have befallen private equity buyers who were active in 2020 and 2021.

“Building the cash position . . . when I look at the alternative of what’s available in the equity markets and I look at the composition of what’s going on in the world, we find it quite attractive,” Buffett told the company’s annual meeting in May.

Buffett first invested in Berkshire in 1962, taking control of the struggling textile maker three years later. Over the following decades, he and his late-partner Charlie Munger turned the company into an insurance behemoth and used policy premiums as the source of capital to buy up companies and invest in stocks.

The business now encompasses a $285bn stock portfolio, Duracell batteries, a $141bn utility company, ice cream purveyor Dairy Queen and paint maker Benjamin Moore, along with dozens of other companies.

Buffett has anointed longtime Berkshire executive Greg Abel as his heir apparent.

Authorities got a lucky break when the murder suspect they’d been pursuing for months fell, so to speak, into their laps — through the ceiling of the building where he’d been hiding.

The U.S. Marshals Service said agents captured 20-year-old Deario Wilkerson on Monday, months after a warrant for his arrest — on charges of first-degree murder and reckless endangerment — was issued in connection with a fatal shooting in Memphis, Tenn.

The task force investigating his whereabouts tracked him to a residence in Memphis, the agency said in a release. Law enforcement agents didn’t have to look long once they were inside.

“Wilkerson attempted to hide in the attic as the USMS searched the residence; however, he fell through the ceiling,” it said.

Officials said Wilkerson was not injured in the fall and was taken into custody without further incident.

His dramatic arrest caps off a saga that started in early April, with a shooting that left a man dead and a woman injured. Wilkerson was one of three people ultimately arrested in connection with the incident, according to the Shelby County District Attorney’s office.

Memphis police were responding to a disturbance call near an apartment complex on April 2 when they heard multiple gunshots, the DA’s office said in May.

“The victim, Troy Cunningham, was discovered on the sidewalk near Peres and Merton Street, having sustained a fatal gunshot wound to the back of his head,” it added.

Gunfire also struck a passing vehicle with two female passengers, one of whom was shot in the shoulder. She was taken to the hospital in noncritical condition, WREG reported at the time.

The outlet cited surveillance video that allegedly shows Wilkerson lunging at Cunningham, setting the fight in motion.

It says the two other suspects shot at the victim as he ran away, and that Wilkerson can then be seen on camera “running to the victim and picking something up off the ground next to him before leaving the scene.”

The other suspects were taken into custody in May, the same month the warrant was issued for Wilkerson’s arrest. It just took a little longer to carry it out.

NPR has reached out to the Memphis Police Department and the Shelby County District Attorney’s office for comment.