Bloomberg Escalating tensions between the US and China over trade, the South China Sea and recent arms sales are pushing Taiwan back into the American foreign policy spotlight, attracting Beijing’s ire. After a precedent-shattering phone call with Trump when he was president-elect, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has found a more receptive audience in the US during the recent disputes. She’s ...

Bloomberg Secretary of Defense James Mattis played down tensions with Beijing, saying the US was “not out to contain China” and was cooperating whenever possible, but that there would be times they would “step on each other’s toes.” “Obviously, we’re not out to contain China. We’d have taken an altogether different stance had that been considered. It has not been ...

Bloomberg Emmanuel Macron is changing his people, not his plans. The French president on Tuesday announced his long-anticipated cabinet overhaul prompted by the October 2 resignation of the interior minister and postponed numerous times. The reshuffled government will still be headed by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, since Macron wanted a “renewed team with the same political mandate,” his office said. ...

Bloomberg Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed named Ahmed Shide his finance minister in sweeping changes to the Horn of Africa nation’s government that included appointing women to half of cabinet posts. Abiy appointed Aisha Mohammed as defense minister and created the Ministry of Peace that will be headed by Mufuriat Kami, making them two of 10 women in his cabinet. ...

Bloomberg Brazil’s far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro stands 18 percentage-points clear of his rival in the latest opinion poll ahead of the final round of the presidential election. Bolsonaro won 59 percent of valid vote intentions versus 41 percent for the Workers’ Party candidate, Fernando Haddad, in an Ibope poll published Monday evening. The survey also showed Haddad’s rejection rating ...

Climate change is a menace. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a report showing how serious the situation is. If warming continues on its current trajectory, the report warns, then by the end of this century average temperatures will be 4 degrees Celsius higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution. That may not sound like a ...

These days it seems that virtually every phone call is either spam or a scam — someone is trying to sell you a cheap credit card, Lasik eye surgery or land someplace you can’t find on a map. And you don’t even get the pleasure of real human interaction — the call comes from a robot, who only puts a ...

Bank of America’s investors just got more evidence that taking the slow and steady road is paying off but that there is a trade-off as well. Profit for the nation’s second-biggest lender rose 32 percent in the third quarter to 66 cents a share. That’s 4 cents better than analysts were expecting. Revenue was also slightly higher than analysts’ expectations. ...

This week’s fall in stock prices was about as unsurprising as President Trump’s explanation for the setback — “The Fed has gone crazy,” he said. Expect more of the same over the coming weeks and months, as the US economy adjusts to the withdrawal of the Federal Reserve’s post-crash monetary stimulus, and a reckless administration persists in testing investors’ nerve. ...

There was only one plausible outcome in the long, tortured saga of Sears Holdings Corp., and it has finally arrived. The retailing giant, which includes its eponymous department store and the Kmart discount chain, said it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It is set to close 142 unprofitable stores near the end of the year and Eddie Lampert, the ...