International News

Bloomberg Myanmar said a planned $2.5 billion redevelopment of the six-decade-old railway station in Yangon will get underway around June once contract negotiations are completed. Talks with the preferred bidder for the revamp of the 25.7 hectare (63.5 acre) site in the commercial capital will take about two months, U Win Khant, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Transport and ...

Bloomberg Japan’s labour unions have won pay rises for workers, although they’re still too small to generate the big increase in consumption that the Bank of Japan needs for inflation. Initial results for this year’s “spring offensive” wage talks show workers receiving a 2.16 percent increase in monthly pay, according to figures released by the Japanese Trade Union Confederation. This ...

Bloomberg Singapore is the world’s most expensive city for the fifth straight year in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) latest Worldwide Cost of Living report, with Paris and Zurich tied for second place. Asia Pacific and European destinations dominated the ranks of costliest cities identified in the report released this week. Tokyo and Osaka were conspicuous in their absence from ...

Bloomberg There’s about to be enough sugar piled up in warehouses to make three chocolate cakes for every person in the world, and that’s got the market spooked. Supplies are booming thanks to the outlook for record harvests in India and Thailand, the world’s No. 2 exporter. The glut has already sent futures in New York to the lowest since ...

Bloomberg National interests are starting to test the united front that the 27 remaining European Union members have shown so far during the Brexit talks, according to three people with knowledge of the process. Less than a week before EU leaders meet to consider a transition deal for the UK, their officials have aired their differences over the way forward, ...

Bloomberg Siemens Healthineers AG shares soared in their trading debut in Frankfurt after the health-equipment company’s German parent raised 4.2 billion euros ($5.2 billion) in the country’s second-biggest initial public offering in almost two decades. Stock in the maker of medical scanners and X-ray machines rose as much as 6.8 percent and was 5.8 percent higher at 29.63 euros on ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration is considering trilateral Nafta language to promote telecommunications competition that could help bring the issue to a close after Mexico rejected demands spurred by AT&T Inc. that it considered overly restrictive, according to three people familiar with the issue. The US Trade Representative’s office is weighing the proposal after receiving the backing of Mexican regulators, according ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook met with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin at the technology giant’s new Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, according to a tweet from Mnuchin. In the Twitter post, Mnuchin thanked Cook for a commitment to invest $350 billion in the US. Earlier this year, Apple said it would be investing that amount in the ...

Bloomberg UK labour costs are rising at their fastest pace in more than two years, latest figures showed. The cost of employing someone for an hour of work rose 3.7 percent in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier, up from 3.1 percent in the previous three months and the most since the July-September period in 2015, the Office ...

Bloomberg When Diane Greene first joined Google in late 2015, her first task was to assemble the company’s disparate and often-wayward cloud projects and whip them into a real business. Sales, marketing and engineering divisions didn’t work together well when pitching companies on Google’s internet-based computing power, storage and services. And some cloud offerings lacked proper credentials to sell to ...