Bloomberg As many as 69 active fires are burning throughout Queensland state in Eastern Australia, authorities said. “We know at this stage we have 17 homes lost,” Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said at a press conference in Brisbane. The main area of concern is around the Stanthorpe, and particularly Applethorpe in the Granite Belt. Bruce Gunn, the state’s manager for the ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump said that he cancelled secret meetings with major Taliban leaders and the president of Afghanistan, set for Sunday at Camp David, and discontinued peace negotiations after a US soldier was killed. The sudden demise of the talks may doom direct US negotiations with the Taliban that held out the prospect of ending 18 years of combat ...

Bloomberg France’s foreign and defense ministers will meet their Russian counterparts on Monday in Moscow, a further step in President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to refresh relations with Russia. It’s the first such visit since 2014, and follows Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to Macron’s summer residence, just before the Biarritz G-7 meeting. “We’re not going to Moscow to lift the ...

Bloomberg What was supposed to be a sleepy round of off-cycle regional elections on Sunday has turned into a referendum on President Vladimir Putin and his ruling United Russia party. Kremlin-backed candidates for governor are vulnerable in several regions across the country as stagnant incomes and unpopular reforms fuel discontent, while elections for Moscow’s largely toothless city council have sparked ...

Bloomberg Like many expatriates in Hong Kong, Madeline Bardin is thinking more and more about leaving. The 36-year-old entrepreneur has thrived in the city for seven years, but she worries that its summer of unrest isn’t going away anytime soon. She won’t go outside with her 8-month-old son without first checking chat groups and the news for reports of tear ...

Bloomberg Transportation companies in Japan are cancelling flights and train services as Typhoon Faxai approaches. The season’s 15th typhoon was heading north-northwest at about 30 kilometres per hour as of 4:45 pm Tokyo time on Sunday, the Japan Meteorological Agency said. It may reach the nation’s Kanto region, which includes Tokyo, by early Monday. Japan Airlines Co. said it canceled ...

Bloomberg Nobody knew it then, but this time last year, the rallying US stock market was about to begin a plunge that would erase $5 trillion from share values and convince a lot of people a recession was at hand. Then, as now, a trade war was raging, earnings in doubt and manufacturing losing steam. In the stock market, swings ...

Bloomberg Stablecoins, a fast-growing subset of cryptocurrencies designed to avoid the large fluctuations of Bitcoin and Ether, could fail to function properly in periods of stress, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. While the total value of all stablecoins is less than $5 billion, the low-volatility tokens are poised for rapid growth, and none more so than the Libra coin ...

Bloomberg Aviation executives are increasingly worried that a widening split between regulators in the US and Europe will extend the grounding of Boeing Co’s 737 Max, sowing confusion and fear as officials work to approve the resumption of commercial flights after two deadly crashes. Sounding the alarm over the increasingly tenuous alliance were Aengus Kelly, who heads the largest global ...

Bloomberg The ground staff of Air France-KLM’s Dutch arm cancelled their plan to strike work on Sunday at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, one of Europe’s busiest travel hubs, after KLM indicated willingness to redress their grievances, FNV union said in a statement on its website. “KLM has until the end of next week to come to an agreement on the most ...