Last year, Donald Trump won the election for president by bemoaning the disappearance of the American factory and pledging to bring back manufacturing from other countries. Now in power, he might have to start worrying about the decline of another traditional pillar of the US economy — the American shopping mall. Fears that the rise of online shopping will lead to substantial dislocation in the retail sector […]
By Pavel Polityuk and Alessandra Prentice | AVDIYIVKA/KIEV AVDIYIVKA/KIEV Ukrainian government troops and separatist fighters have drawn closer to each other at several places along the tense front line in eastern Ukraine, monitors say, raising the risk of violent flare-ups that could wreck a shaky ceasefire. At some points, the sides have drawn within shouting distance of each other. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, […]
Gold ETFs or gold bars? Bars including one kilo gold bar at bullion dealers Goldcore, in London, U.K. (March 11, 2010). Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg Considering the public’s waning trust in the banking system, many investors find themselves wondering how GLD stacks up to owning the real thing. When you look at both assets more closely, it’s clear that gold ETFs and gold bullion are very different investments. […]
By Susan Cornwell and Richard Cowan | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON U.S. Republican lawmakers struggling to overcome differences over new healthcare legislation confronted a stark choice after President Donald Trump delivered an ultimatum: pass the bill on Friday or keep Obamacare in place. Trump, a real estate magnate who touted his dealmaking prowess in the 2016 presidential campaign, faced the first major test of how well his skills would […]
At the start of the year, I was part of a panel that aimed to offer career guidance to graduating students at a local secondary school in Singapore. The panel dished out the usual advice about the need to have passion, work hard, and always strive to do better. A student then posed a question that struck a chord: “How can I ensure the skills I learn […]
By Farah Master and Venus Wu | HONG KONG HONG KONG As visitors sip champagne at Hong Kong’s Art Basel event this week and take selfies with replicas of deceased leaders Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong, a more urgent issue is rumbling through dealers exhibiting – how big an impact China’s capital controls will be in the coming year. Over the past six months, Chinese buyers have […]
Alibaba has joined forces with AusPost, Blackmores, and PwC to explore the use of blockchain technology to combat food fraud. The Chinese ecommerce giant said the goal is develop a “Food Trust Framework” to help improve integrity and traceability on its global supply chains. Australia was chosen to be the test bed for the new framework. Alibaba believes blockchain, best known as the technology behind bitcoin, is […]
Democrats criticised Donald Trump’s choice to run the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, saying that Jay Clayton, a veteran securities lawyer, is too deeply entangled with Wall Street to be an effective markets cop. SEC ethics rules will require Mr Clayton, a partner with Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, to recuse himself for two years from enforcement actions involving his former clients or anyone represented […]
Interactive MARCH 24, 2017 After earning $800,000 in 2015 by sneaking migrants into Turkey, a smuggler says he has left the guilt and complications of his business behind — mostly. And a Syrian refugee boy, homeless and out of school, must keep roaming the country to find farm work and help his family survive. This is the third part in the State of Emergency series, in which […]
Before she became Facebook’s Head of News Partnerships, Campbell Brown had to deal with a low-tech filter bubble. As a host on CNN, she was competing every night with the likes of left-leaning MSNBC and right-leaning Fox News. Battling low ratings, she left her 8 p.m. slot in 2010 with a rare hat tip to her partisan competitors. “I hosted a show on CNN, and I had […]
While the American Healthcare Act, President Trump’s first major legislative effort, is going to a vote in the House of Representatives on Friday – no matter what; for many years now, the American healthcare system has been flawed. As Statista’s Feliz Richter illustrates in the chart below, U.S. health spending per capita (including public and private spending) is higher than it is anywhere else in the world, […]
By Henning Gloystein | SINGAPORE SINGAPORE Oil prices edged up on Friday, supported by a fall in Saudi exports to the United States, but overall markets remained under pressure on the back of a world market awash with fuel. Prices for front-month Brent crude futures LCOc1, the international benchmark for oil, were at $50.63 per barrel at 0343 GMT, up 7 cents from their last close. In […]
By Venus Wu and Jess Macy Yu | HONG KONG HONG KONG Hong Kong on Sunday will likely select Beijing’s favoured candidate for its next leader who some say will further divide a city where middle class families have become increasingly disaffected by political tension and economic hardship. The former British colony, governed under a “one country, two systems” arrangement, was promised a high degree of autonomy […]
Federal investigators are looking at whether the $81 million stolen from a Bangladesh central bank account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year has links to North Korea. This is due to similarities in the code used in the online heist and in an earlier breach of Sony Pictures, according to two insiders quoted by Bloomberg and who asked to remain unidentified since the […]
Chu Jeong Woo and his tour group from South Korea were supposed to visit Britain’s Houses of Parliament on Thursday. But with the area cordoned off, they had to settle for selfies with the symbol of British democracy — and the scene of Wednesday’s lethal terror attack — as a backdrop. “Change in plans,” Mr Chu, a student, explained as many in his group snapped pictures of […]
SYDNEY China is not militarising the South China Sea, Premier Li Keqiang said on Friday, although he acknowledged that defence equipment on islands in the disputed waterway had been placed there to maintain “freedom of navigation”. China has drawn international criticism for large-scale building in the South China Sea, although Li told reporters in Australia the development was for civilian purposes only. “China’s facilities, Chinese islands and […]
Following a day of narrative twists and turns ahead of what was supposed to be a Thursday night vote to repeal Obamacare, a vote which was pulled in the last moment when over 30 conservative and moderate House republicans threatened to vote against the Ryan/Trump plan, Trump has had enough with the Freedom Caucus dissenters and has issued an informal ultimatum: vote to repeal Obamacare on Friday […]
According to Wikileaks documents the CIA can inject a undetectable bug deep into the essential firmware of an Apple Mac computer that will not be erased even when the computer is reformatted The Central Intelligence Agency is able to permanently infect an Apple Mac computer so that even reinstalling the operating system will not erase the bug, according to documents published Thursday by WikiLeaks. In its second […]
By Jane Chung and Geert De Clercq | SEOUL/PARIS SEOUL/PARIS South Korea’s KEPCO (015760.KS), the likeliest suitor for Toshiba Corp’s (6502.T) troubled nuclear business, is holding off from making an approach because of question marks over the scale of damage at the unit and political uncertainty in both South Korea and the United States, people with direct knowledge of the matter say. Japanese TV-to-rail conglomerate Toshiba has […]
Do you need software-defined storage (SDS) for your enterprise virtualization, analytics, and enterprise sync and share workloads? If so, then Red Hat has the program for you: Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.2. Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.2 looks to be one hard-working storage ant. Red Hat likes to say its open-source Gluster SDS Scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) is for the modern enterprise workload. It’s not wrong. You […]
Donald Trump suffered a big blow as Republican leaders postponed a vote on the party’s healthcare bill following their failure to unite conservatives around the effort to replace the Obamacare law that they had spent years vowing to repeal. Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House, abandoned the vote on Thursday afternoon after a final effort by the White House to convince conservative rebels to support […]
So-called actor Shia LaBeouf is fleeing (with his controversial anti-Trump art exhibit) to Liverpool – in the north of England – claiming America isn’t “safe enough” for his work. As PageSix reports, the “He Will Not Divide Us” webcam exhibit has been adopted by the Liverpool-based Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, the group said Tuesday. “Events have shown that America is simply not safe enough for […]
When Flavio Evers Cassou, an employee of the world’s biggest meatpacker, JBS, dropped off a large cooler of meat at a friend’s home last year in southern Brazil, he could not have foreseen the crisis of confidence it would cause in the industry and the country’s wider corporate sector. The friend in question happened to be Maria do Rocio Nascimento, the chief inspector of products of animal […]
BlackRock and Pimco are refusing to take part in the first bond sale by a Portuguese bank in more than a year, because of a legal battle with the country’s central bank over losses sustained in 2015. Caixa Geral de Depósitos, the state-owned Portuguese bank, is this week courting investors in London and Paris, as it seeks to sell a €500m subordinated bond, in what would be […]
