International News

  Bloomberg Britain’s referendum on EU membership entered its final day of campaigning with opinion polls and financial markets at odds about the likely outcome. Money has piled into bets on “Remain” winning over the past week. The pound has surged to a five-month high and an index of betting flows compiled by Oddschecker shows the chance of Brexit has ...

  Bloomberg Paintings by Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani gave the auction market a much-needed boost on Tuesday when they fetched the highest prices for Sotheby’s in London since 2010. Picasso’s 1909 Cubist painting “Femme Assise” sold for £43.3 million ($63.5 million), surpassing the estimated target of £30 million. Moments later, Modigliani’s “ Jeanne Hebuterne (au Foulard)” took £38.5 million, ...

  London / AFP Bosses from more than half of Britain’s biggest companies on Wednesday urged Britons to vote Remain on the eve of a critical EU membership referendum. Almost 1,300 business executives — including those from 51 of London’s top FTSE 100 listed companies —wrote in a letter to The Times newspaper that Britain leaving the EU could cause ...

  Bloomberg The U.K. could find itself hard pressed to replicate access to Asia’s lucrative markets — from New Zealand to India — should voters in the world’s fifth-biggest economy opt to leave the EU. With Asia accounting for two-thirds of global growth, the U.K.’s trade ties with the region are crucial for it. While some politicians such as Boris ...

  Beijing / Bloomberg Tencent Holdings Ltd. will lead an $8.6 billion acquisition of gamemaker Supercell Oy, getting its hands on some of the industry’s most popular mobile titles through potentially its largest-ever overseas deal. China’s largest internet company is leading a group that will buy 84 percent of Supercell, including shares held by SoftBank Group Corp. and current and ...

  Sydney / AFP A huge cattle station that pours sediment into the Great Barrier Reef was bought on Wednesday by the government as efforts are stepped up to help the World Heritage site bounce back from mass bleaching. Global warming has been wreaking havoc on the reef, contributing to an unprecedented bleaching event this year that saw much of ...

  Singapore / AP Singapore’s central bank said Wednesday it will make financial investments in the Chinese yuan as part of its official foreign reserves from June, reflecting the currency’s increasing international acceptance. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said its decision “recognises the steady and calibrated liberalisation of China’s financial markets, and the growing acceptance of (yuan) assets in the ...

  New Delhi / AFP The gleaming glass atriums and blue-clad “geniuses” that herald the arrival of an Apple store could soon be landing in India, after the government cleared the way for it to open in the rapidly growing smartphone market. Before now, the Silicon Valley giant has been just a bit-player in the country of 1.2 billion, selling ...

  Bloomberg Canadian provinces have reached an agreement with the federal government to expand the Canada Pension Plan, adding new payroll taxes to boost benefits while fulfilling a key pledge made by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the 2015 election campaign. The expanded CPP is aimed at countering dwindling workplace pension access for younger generations pinched by a weak economy ...

Bloomberg The real dropped after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen signaled renewed doubts about the strength of the world’s largest economy, offsetting local optimism that Brazil’s government is making inroads toward cleaning up its fiscal house. The currency dropped 0.4 percent to 3.4083 per dollar at 5:10 p.m. in Sao Paulo, after earlier advancing as much as 1.2 percent following ...