International News

  Bloomberg Telecom Italia SpA, the phone carrier targeted in November by KKR & Co, is weighing reducing its Italian workforce by as much as one fifth amid faltering profit during the pandemic and heightened competition in its home market. Pietro Labriola, who took over as the ex-monopolist’s chief executive officer last month, is mulling a three-year restructuring plan that ...

  Bloomberg Colombia’s economy blew away forecasts as it grew at the fastest pace in more than a century last year, driven by a rebound in consumer demand after pandemic curbs were eased, and soaring prices for the nation’s oil, coal and coffee. Gross domestic product (GDP) expanded 10.6% in 2021, the nation’s statistics agency said Tuesday. That’s the fastest ...

  Bloomberg Meta Platforms Inc. was finally allowed to complete its acquisition of Kustomer, a customer service software company, after more than a year of antitrust scrutiny. Meta, which owns Facebook, announced that the deal “complied with all regulatory requirements” in a blog update. Meta first announced the acquisition, valued at more than $1 billion, in November 2020, but the ...

  Bloomberg Oceans along the US coastline will rise faster within the next three decades than they did in the past 100 years, bringing more flooding to coastal cities such as New York and Miami, according to the latest projections. Sea levels are expected to rise as much as 12 inches by 2050, according to a report led by the ...

  Bloomberg The UK economy expanded at the fastest pace since World War II last year after suffering a milder hit than expected in December. The 7.5% expansion was the largest since 1941 and made Britain the fastest-growing advanced economy in 2021. The economy nonetheless remained smaller in the fourth quarter than at the end of 2019, before the pandemic ...

  Bloomberg There’s a big upside to record used-car prices: Auto lenders like GM Financial are cashing in. General Motors Co.’s lending unit booked a $2 billion gain last year reselling the vehicles that came back from expired leases and anything the company repossessed, according to a regulatory filing. That helped GM Financial to nearly double its annual profit to ...

  Bloomberg Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Germany could loosen some pandemic restrictions next week as the country’s outbreak shows signs of peaking. While contagion rates are continuing to post records on a daily basis, the pace of the increases have slowed. Meanwhile, Covid-19 cases in intensive-care facilities are less than half the level in early December. That’s prompted calls for ...

  Bloomberg Federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies across the US are bracing for the possibility of a protest by truckers that could begin this weekend and carry into March, potentially including a cross-country caravan and disruptions to cities and major transportation routes. Although it’s still not clear how serious the threat is, the US Department of Homeland Security warned ...

  Bloomberg Hungarian inflation surged to an almost 15-year high as government-imposed price caps on goods ranging from sugar to gasoline failed to rein in price growth. Consumer prices grew an annual 7.9% in January, the fastest pace since August 2007 and exceeding the 7.4% median estimate in a Bloomberg survey, the Budapest-based statistics office said in a statement. The ...

  Bloomberg French President Emmanuel Macron’s price caps to stop a cost-of-living crisis colliding with April’s elections will slow inflation by about one percentage point at the start of 2022, according to Insee. The government has earmarked 15.5 billion euros ($17.7 billion) to curb the impact of inflation for households, most of which for mechanisms to limit the effect of ...