Bloomberg The European Commission proposed a total ban on some single-use plastic products and measures to drastically cut the consumption of others, in the latest push by the EU to reduce carbon emissions and marine litter threatening its seas. The ban will apply to plastic cotton buds, cutlery, plates, straws, and sticks for balloons, according to the proposal unveiled and ...

Bloomberg A proposed class action lawsuit alleging Facebook’s ad placement tools facilitate discrimination against older job-seekers has been expanded to identify additional companies, further widening the latest front in claims that candidates are being filtered out by gender, geography, race and age. “When Facebook’s own algorithm disproportionately directs ads to younger workers at the exclusion of older workers, Facebook and ...

Bloomberg Investors will be watching PG&E Corp. after California investigators said the utility-owner’s equipment sparked four of the smaller wildfires that broke out in Northern California last year. In the first findings on the more than 170 fires that charred the region, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, said blazes in Butte and Nevada ...

Bloomberg Czech workers are slowly winning the war on low wages. Faced with the European Union’s lowest unemployment rate, companies are tackling a dearth of able bodies in the country of 10.6 million with bonuses and higher salaries. According to Josef Stredula, the head of the nation’s umbrella union, that will continue for several more years as labor costs lie ...

Bloomberg North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has dispatched one of his top aides to New York for talks ahead of his planned summit with Donald Trump next month, the president said on Twitter. “Meetings are currently taking place concerning Summit, and more,” Trump said in a Twitter posting that misspelled the envoy’s name. “Kim Young Chol, the Vice Chairman of ...

Bloomberg Libya’s competing powers reached a “consensus” on holding presidential and parliamentary elections in December, signalling a possible way out of the chaos that has gripped the nation for more than seven years. The leaders agreed to a statement that called for the “phasing out of parallel governments and institutions” and said that anyone who interferes in the election process ...

Bloomberg Italy’s Democratic Party signalled a return to campaign mode as it charged its rivals, the League and the Five Star Movement, with having prepared a plan to pull the country out of the euro if they had succeeded in forming a government together. The two parties gambled with the country’s well-being “with a project to take Italy out of ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump may have ordered the re-imposition of sanctions on Iran, but one of Asia’s biggest oil importers — and a strategic partner of the US — plans on ignoring them. India, a long-time buyer of oil from both Iran and Venezuela, only complies with UN-mandated sanctions and not those imposed by one country on another, said foreign ...

Bloomberg The European Union must reconstruct itself to protect its economies from euro-area contagion and attract the UK back after Brexit, investor George Soros said. “The economic case for remaining a member of the EU is strong, but it will take time for it to sink in,” Soros said in a speech in Paris on Tuesday. “During that time the ...

White House officials, back in December, widely criticized the Joint Committee on Taxation’s estimate of the cost of the soon-to-be passed tax cut. But if the first three months are any guide, the tax cut will end up being considerably more generous, not less, to corporate America than the committee and others forecast. How much? At least $300 billion, and ...