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Bloomberg Asian nations gave up hopes of completing a 16-nation trade bloc this year, with Chinese and Australian officials now looking to finalise the deal in 2019. Singapore, which is chairing the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations this year, had pushed for a substantial conclusion to the agreement this year. Known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. stood its ground after Singapore called the social media giant unreliable for declining a request to remove a post, which the government had said was false and defamatory. “We have a responsibility to handle any government request to restrict alleged misinformation carefully and thoughtfully, consistent with our approach to government requests around the world,” Facebook said in ...

Bloomberg PT Semen Indonesia, the country’s top cement maker, is acquiring LafargeHolcim Ltd.’s local business in a deal valuing the unit at about $1.75 billion including debt. LafargeHolcim agreed to sell its entire holding in PT Holcim Indonesia as part of a continuing review of its portfolio, according to a statement. Semen Indonesia will conduct a tender offer for remaining ...

Bloomberg Amid a banner year for Hong Kong listings, cracks are starting to show in the world’s biggest market for initial public offerings. A parenting website part-owned by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. delayed the launch of its Hong Kong IPO, while one of China’s top travel-booking sites started taking orders for an offering in the city that’s a fraction of ...

Bloomberg India’s first inland voyage by a container ship since it gained independence from Britain 70 years ago ended when the vessel docked in the holy city of Varanasi today, a development officials hope will help shift cargo from the country’s congested road and rail networks. The 1,390 kilometres Ganga watercourse is one of the 111 waterways spanning 20,276 kilometres ...

Bloomberg California utilities are facing the very real possibility that billion-dollar blazes could become an annual occurrence, and they don’t know how to pay for them. Shares of the state’s two largest utilities plummeted after both PG&E Corp. and Edison International released reports suggesting their equipment may have started the deadly fires now burning at both ends of the state. ...

Bloomberg General Electric Co.’s new chief executive officer tried to reassure investors but the effort failed as a deep rout worsened and Wall Street’s confidence in the beleaguered company’s future continued to collapse. The shares tumbled as much as 10 percent as Larry Culp expressed a “sense of urgency” in cutting debt and selling assets. Speaking publicly for the first ...

Bloomberg Vodafone Group Plc shares jumped 7.1 percent after the mobile phone company’s new chief executive unveiled stro-nger than expected results in a fiercely competitive market and kept the dividend stable while he tries to rein in debt. Investors were already bracing for CEO Nick Read to end Vodafone’s policy of constant dividend growth after the $22 billion takeover over ...

Bloomberg UK wage growth accelerated to a near 10-year high, backing the Bank of England’s view that there is now no spare capacity in the labour market. Average earnings excluding bonuses rose 3.2 percent in the three months through September from a year earlier, the most since December 2008, the Office for National Statistics said on Tuesday. Unemployment unexpectedly rose ...

Bloomberg In a world where iPhone demand is on the wane, Apple Inc. has a Plan B. As customers wait longer between upgrades and the smartphone market saturates, Apple can fall back on charging higher prices for each handset and raking in more money from services such as streaming music, digital videos and data storage. But there’s no back-up for ...