International News

Bloomberg Walt Disney Co will start its streaming service in India later this week, after a coronavirus lockdown upended its previous plans in one of the world’s biggest emerging markets for online video. The US entertainment giant planned to kick off Disney+ in India at the start of the wildly popular Indian Premier League cricket season on March 29. That ...

Bloomberg China reported 130 people over the past day who were infected with the novel coronavirus but don’t have symptoms, a sign that the group of people who can spread the virus without being detected is sizable. The tally, the first daily count of so-called asymptomatic patients, establishes a new benchmark to measure the scope of the outbreak amid a ...

Bloomberg Peru is moving to fend off economic catastrophe with a record fiscal stimulus and plans for a contingency line of up to $18 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to contain the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. The government is putting together a package of economic measures totaling 90 billion soles ($26 billion), including health-care spending, tax breaks ...

Bloomberg Denmark’s central bank drastically cut its forecast for gross domestic product, and now sees a painful recession this year, after the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic brought the economy to a near standstill. GDP will contract somewhere between 3% and 10%, the Copenhagen-based bank said on Wednesday. The bank “has listed three scenarios, illustrating how severely the Danish ...

Bloomberg Aston Martin Lagonda Global Holdings Plc said it may need to tap into high-interest notes it was trying to avoid drawing down, even after a 536 million-pound ($663 million) capital infusion from a group led by billionaire Lawrence Stroll. The UK luxury carmaker doesn’t have sufficient working capital based on European Securities and Markets Authority rules, because the coronavirus ...

Bloomberg Russia spent more than $40 billion building a war chest of bullion over the past five years. Now, it’s calling it quits. The central bank announced that it would stop buying gold starting April 1, but didn’t explain the move. Analysts say Russia already has a lot of gold stashed in reserves and likely doesn’t need more. Plus, with ...

Bloomberg Johnson & Johnson (J&J) surged after the company said it would begin a $1-billion-plus effort with the US government to develop and manufacture a vaccine against the new coronavirus. J&J will work with Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) an arm of US Department of Health and Human Services, to further develop a vaccine the company said it’s ...

Bloomberg Ford Motor Co. is speeding up plans to produce ventilators in cooperation with General Electric Co. by selecting a simpler design of the medical devices and will aim to churn out 50,000 units in the next 100 days. The automaker will convert an auto-parts plant in Michigan to make breathing machines designed by Airon Corp. and licensed by GE ...

Bloomberg Chinese manufacturing activity rebounded strongly in March, signalling that the world’s second-largest economy is restarting just as it faces a growing threat from slumping external demand. For manufacturing, the official purchasing managers’ index rose to 52.0 this month, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Tuesday. That’s up from a record low of 35.7 ...

Bloomberg India’s coronavirus response has unwittingly done away with the endless paperwork that has come to define bureaucracy, as electronic files replace physical records and technology makes in-person meetings redundant. The Finance Ministry is practicing the government’s 21-day social distancing order to prevent the spread of coronavirus by moving all communication online, while keeping minimum staff on roster to attend ...