International News

Bloomberg Facebook Inc acquired a small video-shopping startup earlier this year to help build a live shopping feature inside the company’s Marketplace product, according to a person familiar with the plans. The social media company bought Packagd, a five-person company founded by Eric Feng, a former partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and most of the startup’s team joined ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration came to the defense of T-Mobile US Inc in its fight to buy Sprint Corp, telling a judge overseeing an antitrust lawsuit brought by several states that blocking the $26.5 billion merger would harm consumers. The Justice Department’s antitrust division and the independent Federal Communications Commission said in a joint court filing that their approval of ...

Bloomberg Google was fined 150 million euros ($167 million) in a French antitrust case involving online advertising as regulators throughout Europe criticise the tech giant’s business practices. The French authority found Google abused its dominant position in search when it set “opaque and difficult to understand operating rules” for its Google Ads advertising platform that it applied unfairly and randomly. ...

Bloomberg A US judge decided it’s too risky to let an engineer stop wearing a device that tracks his whereabouts while he awaits trial on charges he stole trade secrets from Apple Inc’s autonomous-driving project before taking a new job in China. But, in a setback for federal prosecutors, the judge said in a separate ruling that electronic monitoring is ...

Bloomberg Karuna Therapeutics Inc may not be the year’s best-known initial public offering, taking a back seat to names like Beyond Meat Inc and Uber Technologies Inc. But for those on the hunt for generous returns, early bets on the mid-cap drugmaker paid off handsomely. Thanks to some positive study results in November, Karuna is 2019’s best-performing US IPO. Early ...

Bloomberg Alphabet Inc’s Google and Facebook Inc would face limits on the online tracking and data sharing that power their advertising businesses under a bipartisan House proposal to establish the nation’s first federal privacy law. The draft legislation from the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which oversees online privacy issues, could diminish companies’ ability to monitor users across the web ...

Bloomberg Elon Musk has moved a step closer to building his first car factory on the home turf of Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG and BMW AG as his company hammered out a contract to buy land in Germany. Officials in the state of Brandenburg said they agreed the text of a contract with Tesla Inc to sell a 300-hectare (741-acre) ...

Bloomberg A judge ordered Uber Technologies Inc’s operation in Colombia to suspend its ride-hailing business after a technology platform presented a lawsuit claiming the company was providing the service through unfair competition. A judge at the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce, which regulates the market, ruled that Uber’s app violated competition norms, the regulator said. Cotech SA, a taxi-service platform, ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump told Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro he won’t reimpose tariffs on steel and aluminum from the Latin American nation, a person familiar with the discussions said. Just had a great call with the President of Brazil, @JairBolsonaro. We discussed many subjects including Trade. The relationship between the United States and Brazil has never been Stronger!, Donald J ...

Bloomberg An Italian parliamentary body has told the government to “very seriously” consider banning Huawei Technologies Co and other Chinese equipment suppliers from the country’s fifth-generation mobile networks. In a report concluding a yearlong review, the intelligence and security committee said concerns about using Chinese companies to install and maintain 5G networks in Italy were “largely grounded,” given the Beijing ...