Bloomberg An advance team for North Korea arrived in Seoul on Sunday as Pyongyang reversed a decision to cancel the visit, a day after signing an agreement with the South to march under a unified flag at next month’s Winter Olympics. North and South Korea solidified plans to march together and agreed to compete with a joint wom-en’s ice hockey ...

Bloomberg China’s National Defense Ministry said the US should abandon a “Cold War” mindset and view Chinese national security and military efforts “rationally and objectively.” The instigators of militarisation of the South China Sea are “other countries” that don’t seem to want to see peace in the region and are using the banner of “navigational freedom” to undertake military activities ...

Bloomberg South Africa’s ruling party is intensifying pressure on Presid-ent Jacob Zuma to step down and allow his deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, to accelerate his efforts to stamp out corruption and restore investor confidence in the economy. The African National Congress’s top leadership decided at a meeting that Zuma, 75, must leave office but didn’t set a deadline for his exit, ...

BAGHDAD / Reuters Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi met with the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani for the first time since conflict broke out over a Kurdish independence referendum, officials said. The Kurdish referendum on Sept. 25, which produced an overwhelming ‘yes’ for independence, angered Baghdad and Iraq’s neighbours Turkey and Iran, which have their own restive Kurdish ...

The National Science Foundation and the National Science Board have just released their biennial ‘Science & Engineering Indicators,’ a voluminous document describing the state of American technology. There are facts and figures on research and development, innovation and engineers. But the report’s main conclusion lies elsewhere: China has become — or is on the verge of becoming — a scientific ...

I think we can all agree that, absent a war or some deliberate strategy, a 14 percent drop in a country’s oil production in the space of one year is not a good thing. Even worse, though, is a 29 percent drop. These two realities, both undesirable, were presented for Venezuela in OPEC’s latest monthly report, out recently. The oil-exporters’ ...

If you’re hung up on the potential upside (or pitfalls) of Bitcoin mining for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., then you may be missing an even bigger story. Cash. Yup, good old cash. You remember the stuff; it’s used for tipping bellhops, filling red envelopes and shoving under mattresses. TSMC, which makes chips for Apple Inc. and for Bitcoin miners, is ...

The performance of US Treasuries in 2017 confounded many, as the bonds kept to range-bound trading in the context of both higher growth and rate tightening by the Federal Reserve that went beyond initial market expectations. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the recent move up in yields has triggered so many reactions, including warnings that we may ...

What to do if you’re a 95-year-old billionaire and you live in a country with inheritance taxes as high as 65 percent? That’s the challenge facing the family of coffee baron Kim Jae-myeong, honorary chairman of Dongsuh group, who built a fortune valued at $2 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Kim, who’s never appeared on an international wealth ranking, ...

What do carpets and coffins have in common? They are both suffering as the internet makes prices more transparent and consumers shop around. That’s the message from both Carpetright Plc, which has been floored by a slump in demand, and funeral director Dignity Plc, whose earnings will be six feet under this year. Analysts’ expectations for Dignity’s 2018 earnings are ...