Bloomberg As part of an ongoing $1.2 billion supply-chain upgrade, Home Depot Inc. has started same-day delivery across the US to help it stay relevant with consumers’ need-it-yesterday mentality. The home-improvement chain had already been using trucks to deliver large items such as building materials from stores in a day or so. Now, aided by startups Roadie Inc. and Deliv ...

Remember last month, when an agreement between the US and Mexico left the world thinking we were on the brink of a radical rewriting of the North American Free Trade Agreement?. Things haven’t quite gone to plan. With a touted September 30 deadline for an accord just days away, President Donald Trump went on a tirade about his dislike of ...

If you thought Emmanuel Macron would use his 2019 budget to rethink his increasingly unpopular presidency, think again. The French leader is doubling down on the pro-business agenda that he’s been pushing through since taking power last year. There’s nothing wrong with this. Macron’s pitch to voters was that he would speed up growth by cutting the role of the ...

As the UK stumbles towards leaving the European Union, domestic investors are becoming increasingly gloomy about the outlook for the nation’s stocks. With a no-deal Brexit looking increasingly likely, their growing pessimism is justified. Investment manager Hargreaves Lansdown Plc just published its latest survey of UK retail investors. Sentiment toward domestic stocks is even worse than it was during the ...

Italy’s new populist leaders appear to be sticking to the program that brought them to power: In their budget plans, they’re charting a course that could ultimately put the entire European project at risk. One can only hope that they will see reason. Since forming a government last spring, the coalition of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and right-wing League ...

Even for Chinese authorities, who have long tried to limit the influence of foreign media and ideas, last week marked an escalation. In the span of a few days, authorities blocked access to Twitch, the video-game live-streaming platform owned by Amazon.com Inc.; ordered a purge of foreign content from school textbooks; and proposed restricting foreign programming — especially current-events shows ...

A boon for Hong Kong’s banks could turn into an opportunity for the city’s hard-pressed savers. HSBC Holdings Plc, the biggest of Hong Kong’s banks, and its subsidiary Hang Seng Bank Ltd., raised their prime rate – the best lending rate on which most loans, including mortgages are based – by 12 basis points. Standard Chartered Plc quickly followed suit, ...

It’s been a bad year for Facebook Inc. OK, a truly terrible year. It just got even worse. The founders of Instagram, the photo-and-video app that Facebook agreed to buy shortly before its 2012 IPO, are leaving the company. Bloomberg News reported that the founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, grew frustrated as Facebook impinged on their autonomy. It’s not ...

GENEVA / WAM The Arab Federation for Human Rights studied the report by a group of experts on Yemen and considered it highly politicised and not in compliance with the fundamental standards and principles of international human rights reporting. The federation added the report aims to cover up crimes committed by Houthi militias and targets the Arab Coalition, instead of ...

ABU DHABI / WAM Adnoc LNG, a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), on Wednesday signed the Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contract for the second phase of the Integrated Gas Development Expansion (IGD-E) project with a consortium of Spain’s Tecnicas Reunidas and Abu Dhabi’s Target Engineering Construction Company. The contract is valued at AED3.16 billion ($860 ...