International News

Bloomberg A US House committee has begun a new investigation into allegations of overseas emissions cheating by Volkswagen AG and was seeking testimony from the automaker’s chief executive officer Herbert Diess. In a letter, House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, said the committee was investigating reports that Volkswagen “continues to circumvent global emissions requirements” ...

Bloomberg Britons were only beginning to use steam engines, canals and factories the last time the UK experienced such a poor decade of productivity. Total factory productivity since 2007 was the worst since the late eighteenth century, around the time of the industrial revolution, according to a Bank of England blog post on Wednesday. Average productivity growth was negative for ...

Bloomberg Twitter Inc.’s push into live video and more personalised content is finally starting to pay off, boosting revenue and profit more than projected in the first quarter by luring users and advertisers. The shares rose. Sales jumped 21 percent, the most in two years, to $664.9 million, Twitter said on Wednesday in a statement. That surpassed the average analysts’ ...

Bloomberg Prominent US business lobbies are begging the Trump administration not to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, but some small manufacturers are pushing the other way: Trying to get more products on the proposed list. Makers of steel wheels, safes and other products want the US to impose tariffs on goods by their Chinese competitors, which aren’t among the products ...

Bloomberg It might be the most dynamic region in the world but the Asia Pacific isn’t meeting its economic potential, and some of that has to do with gender equality, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. Targeted policies to achieve more women’s equality in Asia-Pacific economies could add $4.5 trillion to the region’s combined annual gross domestic product by 2025, ...

Bloomberg Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. is nearing a preliminary agreement to acquire Shire Plc after the Japanese drugmaker sweetened its roughly $60 billion bid for the biotechnology company, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The two companies have been working on a tentative agreement on price and might announce a preliminary accord as early as Tuesday, the people said, ...

Bloomberg Investors hunting for clues to the iPhone X’s reception can take a deeper look at its main manufacturing partners. And the latest doesn’t look good. Apple Inc.’s five largest device assemblers reported a sharp slowdown after peaking at the end of last year, suggesting demand for the high-end device may have faded just a quarter after its release. While ...

Bloomberg Alphabet Inc. is pushing efforts to roll back the most comprehensive biometric privacy law in the US, even as the company and its peers face heightened scrutiny after the unauthorised sharing of data at Facebook Inc. While Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were publicly apologising this month for failing to protect users’ information, Google’s lobbyists were drafting measures to ...

Bloomberg AT&T Inc. attacked the US government expert who disputes the company’s claim that its takeover of Time Warner Inc. would lead to $2.5 billion in annual cost savings, forcing him to admit on the witness stand that such a deal would probably result in efficiencies. Rob Walters, a lawyer for AT&T, tried to undermine the Justice Department’s expert, Ronald ...

Bloomberg SAP SE increased its sales outlook for the year to reflect a major acquisition and an accelerating cloud business, as Europe’s biggest software company benefited from increased global IT spending. New cloud bookings, a keenly watched metric because it indicates future sales growth, grew 25 percent at constant currencies in the first quarter, the Walldorf, Germany-based company said on ...