International News

Bloomberg Indonesia is foregoing billions of dollars on offer from American companies eager to invest in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, US Ambassador to Indonesia Joseph Donovan said. As the US tries to arrest a deteriorating trade balance with Indonesia, which in 2017 found itself in President Donald Trump’s cross-hairs, Donovan has also rejected complaints of increasing American protectionism. Indonesia had ...

Bloomberg The UK has warned that its promise to pay the Brexit bill depends on getting good trade terms from the European Union, as Theresa May’s team draws up plans to hold back money if the bloc backslides on a deal. Senior British officials have privately discussed the idea of halting payments to Brussels as a fall-back option that could ...

Bloomberg UK manufacturers scaled back their expectations of output prices in February as the pound gained. Expected prices, production and export orders are still well above long-term averages, though have slipped from the highs seen at the end of 2017, the Confederation of British Industry reported on Tuesday. The measure of average prices seen in the next three months fell ...

Bloomberg The UK has sold Royal Navy flagship HMS Ocean to Brazil for about 84 million pounds ($117 million) as new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth prepares to take over as leader of the fleet. HMS Ocean will be modified by BAE Systems Plc and Babcock International Group Plc, with the work funded by Brazil, before the 21,500 metric-ton ship ...

Bloomberg After a cyberattack and a botched product launch spoiled Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc’s 2017, a pricing squeeze threatens to make this year almost as tough. The Slough, England-based maker of Nurofen painkillers said comparable sales will rise by only 2 percent to 3 percent in 2018, and profitability will be curtailed by deflationary conditions in the consumer-goods business. That ...

Bloomberg A Trump administration plan to replace food-stamp spending with boxes of “100 percent American grown food’’ landed on Congress’s doorstep with a thud. But the public attention heaped on the Agriculture Department’s plan to deliver “Harvest Boxes” to poor families also obscured the administration’s other efforts to cut the number of people eligible for the nation’s biggest food-aid programme. ...

Bloomberg India’s dependence on imported components for electric vehicles could make the country vulnerable to cyber-security breaches, according to the government’s chief policy think-tank. India should manufacture the majority of the parts needed for its electric vehicle fleet as equipment shipped from overseas could be compromised, VK Saraswat, a member of the think tank, Niti Aayog, said. All of the ...

Bloomberg British tycoon Richard Branson-backed Virgin Hyperloop One is proposing to build a super-fast transportation system in India that would connect the city of Pune with the planned new airport in Mumbai in 25 minutes, saving about three hours. The founder of Virgin Group signed a preliminary agreement in Mumbai for a broad hyperloop framework, the company said. A demonstration ...

Bloomberg Noble Group Ltd., the commodity trader battling to survive, warned that it’ll report another vast loss including from the operations meant to sustain a revamped business, and while it signalled progress in debt-restructuring talks, hurdles to a deal remain. The Hong Kong-based company will report a net loss of $1.73 billion to $1.93 billion for the final quarter of ...

Bloomberg Chinese and Indian tourist arrivals in Australia jumped to a record in 2017 as growing middle-class wealth in the world’s most populous nations fuels the travel bug. Almost 1.4 million visitors from mainland China travelled to Australia in 2017, a 13 percent increase from a year earlier, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Tourists from India climbed to ...