International News

  London / AFP The British government stepped back on Sunday from a plan to make employers list their foreign workers as it talks tough on immigration following the Brexit vote, after a backlash among business leaders. “We are not going to be asking companies to list or name or publish or identify their foreign workers,” Defence Secretary Michael Fallon ...

  Bloomberg U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May will begin a diplomatic offensive on Monday amid mounting international concern and domestic opposition to her so-called hard Brexit rhetoric for leaving the European Union. May will go to Denmark and the Netherlands for talks with other EU leaders as comments suggesting that her priority will be to curb immigration spurred concern of ...

  Bloomberg Merck & Co.’s cancer treatment Keytruda was almost twice as successful at shrinking lung cancer tumors than a standard chemotherapy regimen, a study of the drug in previously untreated patients found. In the 123-patient study, 55 percent of those on Keytruda plus two chemotherapy drugs saw their tumors get smaller, compared with 29 percent on just the chemotherapy ...

  Bloomberg Unlike many pension investors, Sweden’s 300 billion-krona ($34 billion) AP7 fund, can to a large extent stay away from the bond markets. It’s manager, Richard Grottheim, is remarkably positive. As political risk mounts in Europe and the U.S., and as central banks are greasing financial markets with ever more free cash, Grottheim says it will likely all work ...

  WASHINGTON / AFP President Barack Obama lifted US economic sanctions on the former pariah state of Myanmar, the culmination of years of rapprochement that Obama has worked to facilitate. The Southeast Asian nation, also known as Burma, has pursued political reforms over the last five years following decades of oppressive military rule. Obama had announced plans to lift the ...

  Bloomberg The Philippines’ new government plans to court Chinese investment to fund an ambitious infrastructure programme, the latest sign of warming ties between the two nations that have been at loggerheads over territorial claims in the South China Sea. “The last administration hardly spoke to them,” Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez said in an interview in the World Bank’s headquarters ...

  Hanoi / AFP A Vietnamese court has rejected hundreds of lawsuits filed by fishermen who demanded more compensation from a Taiwanese-owned steel plant responsible for a devastating toxic leak, a leading activist said on Saturday. In a rare case of civic action in authoritarian Vietnam, crowds of fishermen swamped a court house last month to file 506 lawsuits against ...

Bloomberg China watchers are starting to put a price tag on what any collapse in the nation’s red-hot property market could cost banks. A drop of 30 percent in housing prices could cause 4 percent of total loans worth 4.1 trillion yuan ($615 billion) to sour, according to DBS Vickers Hong Kong Ltd. Commerzbank AG said such a drop could ...

  Tokyo / AFP A fifth of the Japanese workforce faces the risk of death from overwork, according to a new government survey into the country’s notoriously strenuous working culture. Hundreds of deaths related to overwork — from strokes, heart attacks and suicide — are reported every year in Japan, along with a host of serious health problems, sparking lawsuits ...

Londres / AFP British business leaders on Saturday urged the government to rule out a hard break with the European Union, saying the uncertainty over the terms of Brexit was impacting investment decisions. “What we would like is the ruling out of the really worst options,” Carolyn Fairbairn, the director general of CBI, Britain’s biggest business lobby group, told BBC ...