Bloomberg India has become the first nation to subsidize the use of digital cash after the government unveiled a raft of measures including discounts on online payments for insurance policies, rail tickets and highway toll charges. Exactly 30 days after junking existing high-value 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley sought to draw Indians toward digital payments ...

  Bloomberg Dutch electronics giant Philips announced on Monday the sale of a majority share in its Lumileds LED lighting business for $1.5 billion, after cancelling the spinoff earlier this year over US regulatory concerns. “Royal Philips announced that it has signed an agreement to sell an 80.1-percent interest in Lumileds to certain funds managed by affiliates of (US-based) Apollo ...

  Bloomberg Maropost Inc., a Canadian marketing technology startup, is nipping at the heels of Salesforce.com Inc. and Oracle Corp., going from zero to C$30 million ($23 million) in revenue in just three years. The Toronto-based firm sells software that makes it easier for companies to set up and run online marketing campaigns, competing directly with some of the products ...

  Bloomberg Amundi SA agreed to buy Pioneer Investments from Italy’s UniCredit SpA, accelerating the French investment company’s growth in the US and European markets including Germany and Austria. Amundi will pay about 3.5 billion euros ($3.7 billion) in cash, the Paris-based company controlled by Credit Agricole SA said in a statement on Monday. It will pay for the purchase ...

  LONDON / AP Like many foreign scientists in Britain, Joanna Bagniewska was devastated when Britons voted to leave the European Union. The biology lecturer, a Polish migrant who found Britain a welcoming place to build her academic career over a decade, is suddenly seeing her job security and research prospects up in the air. “I’m worried that after my ...

  Bloomberg 21st Century Fox Inc. and Sky Plc executives are working with their advisers to nail down final terms of an 11.2 billion-pound ($14.1 billion) deal that would consolidate Rupert Murdoch’s television empire across two continents. Fox’s co-chairmen, the 85-year-old media baron and his son Lachlan, have been intimately involved in discussions to purchase the 61 percent of UK ...

  The surprise deal in which Qatar’s sovereign wealth and the commodities trader Glencore are acquiring 19.5 percent of Russia’s state-controlled oil company, Rosneft, has broad implications for Middle Eastern geopolitics, Russia’s domestic politics and the oil market. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his old associate, Rosneft chief executive officer Igor Sechin, have both won big on the deal, even ...

  The beatings will continue until morale improves, the saying goes. That’s one interpretation of the European Central Bank’s somewhat convoluted rejig of its quantitative easing program this week. By insisting he’s not tapering bond buying while simultaneously reducing the monthly purchases and extending the time frame, President Mario Draghi is sending a mixed message that likely reflects disagreements among ...

  In a speech to her party this week, Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany, “wherever legally possible,” ought to ban veils that cover the face, and emphasized that German law should not give way to Shariah law. Her audience cheered —but that only confirmed Merkel’s mistake. Pandering to grievances, real or imagined, rarely works. Sometimes it’s meant to soothe ...

  Rebel-held east Aleppo continues to be blitzed. The Syrian army tightened its grip on rebels besieged in Aleppo with thousands of civilians. The regime and Russian assaults on rebel enclave go unabated even as US Secretary of State John Kerry warned that regime’s ‘indiscriminate bombing’ amounted to crimes against humanity. US and Russian officials were expected to continue talks ...