Bloomberg The venture capital firm led by LinkedIn Corp. co-founder Reid Hoffman has invested in Entrepreneur First, a London-based hub for start- ups, alongside Mosaic Ventures and Founders Fund. Greylock Partners led the $12.4 million funding, which also included Lakestar Capital, and Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, the founders of DeepMind, according to a statem- ent from Entrepreneur First. Hoffman’s ...
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Trump plans aggressive road show to sell tax overhaul
Bloomberg President Donald Trump plans an aggressive travel schedule, taking him to as many as 13 states over the next seven weeks, to sell the idea of a tax overhaul as the administration tries to avoid repeating the communications failures of its attempt to repeal Obamacare. With a make-or-break legislative battle looming on taxes, the White House is moving to ...
Read More »UN passes N Korea sanctions sans oil embargo
Bloomberg  The United Nations Security Council approved new sanctions aimed at punishing North Korea for its latest missile and nuclear tests after the US dropped demands such as an oil embargo to win support from Russia and China. The 15-member council passed the resolution unanimously following a week of talks that began when Kim Jong Un’s regime tested its ...
Read More »Trump’s bid to end Gulf crisis spurred by Iran focus
Bloomberg President Donald Trump’s renewed push to resolve a three-month showdown between Qatar and a Saudi-led coalition was spurred by a conviction that the impasse has distracted US Gulf allies from his attempt to challenge Iran. Trump told Kuwaiti officials visiting the White House last week that Gulf Arab nations can’t effectively counter growing Iranian regional influence if they’re busy ...
Read More »Norway’s PM clinches a second term as insurgency against oil exploration fizzles
Bloomberg Prime Minister Erna Solberg became Norway’s first Conservative Party leader in over three decades to be re-elected as a movement to stop further oil exploration in western Europe’s biggest petroleum producer fizzled. “We won support for four more years because we have delivered on what we have promised and also because we have met tough challenges,†Solberg said at ...
Read More »Clock ticks for Kenya as squabbles overshadow rerun of election
Bloomberg Kenya is running out of time to ensure a credible rerun of presidential elections that were annulled by the nation’s top court after the main opposition party alleged that they were rigged. With the next vote due in just five weeks, the electoral commission is mired in infighting over who should take the fall for last month’s botched contest. ...
Read More »US high court temporarily preserves refugee ban
WASHINGTON / Reuters US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy provided a temporary reprieve for President Trump’s order blocking most refugees from entering the United States, putting on hold a lower court’s ruling loosening the prohibition. Kennedy’s action gave the nine justices more time to consider the Justice Department’s challenge filed to the lower court’s decision allowing entry to refugees from ...
Read More »Will Congress be stirred from its slumber?
“Congress has been dropping in relative power along a descending curve of 60 years’ duration, with the rate of fall markedly increased since 1933. … The fall of the American Congress seems to be correlated with a more general historical transformation toward political and social forms within which the representative assembly — the major political organism of post-Renaissance Western civilization ...
Read More »How much have banks really cut their risks?
The Trump administration is looking to ease financial-strength requirements for big banks, on the grounds that they’ve already done enough to avert another crisis. But how much safer have they really become? In recent posts, I’ve offered some less-than-encouraging evidence. Levels of loss-absorbing equity, although higher than before the crisis, still fall far short of what’s needed. And despite the ...
Read More »A unanimous vote for soft power
In a sharp and welcome rebuke to President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy, a Senate committee voted last week in favor of more diplomacy. Support was unanimous. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved $51.2 billion for the State Department, the US Agency for International Development and other overseas assistance — more than a third greater than the $37.6 billion the ...
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