International News

Bloomberg AT&T Inc. named three new divisional chiefs to lead the company when its $85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner Inc. closes later this year. As reported earlier by Bloomberg News, John Stankey, who ran AT&T’s DirecTV division, will supervise integration planning for the merger and lead the Time Warner businesses after the deal closes, the company said. John Donovan, ...

Bloomberg Since the financial crisis, it pays to be old in the UK. While the disposable incomes of retired households have risen 15 percent since 2008, for working households it’s been almost a decade of stagnation. Median UK household disposable income rose 5.7 percent to 27,170 pounds ($35,570) in the 12 months through March from its pre-crisis level, the Office ...

Bloomberg SoundCloud Ltd. is close to a deal to sell stakes in the company to a pair of private equity firms, according to people familiar with the matter, an investment that will help the beleaguered music-streaming service keep operating for the foreseeable future. The two firms would be acquiring stakes via separate deals, said the people, who asked not to ...

Bloomberg Charter Communications Inc. is cool to Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son’s proposal to combine with his Sprint Corp., though talks remain active, according to a person familiar with the matter. Son, who is Sprint Corp.’s chairman, proposed a cash and stock merger of his money-losing wireless company with Charter, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified ...

Bloomberg Apple Inc. has removed some virtual private network applications from its stores in China, a move that could block users ability to bypass a local web firewall and access overseas sites. “We have been required to remove some VPN apps in China that do not meet the new regulations,” Carolyn Wu, Apple’s China spokeswoman told Bloomberg in an emailed ...

Bloomberg Japan’s key price gauge was unchanged in June, helped by rising power costs. The tight labour market may also start to help inflation, which remains far from the central bank’s 2 percent target. Highlights of Data Core consumer prices, which exclude fresh food, increased 0.4 percent in June from a year earlier (estimate +0.4 percent). Excluding fresh food and ...

Bloomberg At least one winner has emerged from India’s crackdown on so-called black money: the country’s richest banker. Uday Kotak, billionaire chairman of Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd., is reaping broad benefits as the government’s efforts to withdraw the biggest bills from circulation pushes savings into the formal financial sector — including his group’s banking, insurance, brokerage services and asset management ...

Bloomberg When Indian architect Rahul Maini and his parents embarked on their first trip abroad in May, Singapore was their destination of choice. But the trio wasn’t going for the hawker food or even the city-state’s casinos — they were there to get on a ship. The equatorial island has become a flourishing entry point for Indian cruise-ship passengers, bolstering ...

Bloomberg Eight years after it was given the power to meaningfully change smoking in America, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) moved to do so. The FDA announced it would take advantage of powers in the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act — a law enacted under a Democratic Congress and then-President Obama — to cut the level ...

Bloomberg German’s major automakers were accused in a US lawsuit of acting as a cartel, colluding for nearly two decades to limit the pace of technological advances in their vehicles and stifle competition — allegations that widen the scope of the latest scandal to hit the nation’s auto industry. BMW AG, Daimler AG, Volkswagen AG and its Audi and Porsche ...