News

  LONDON / AP Ex-London Mayor Boris Johnson has compared the European Union’s aims to those of Adolf Hitler, arguing that the 28-nation bloc is creating a superstate that mirrors the attempt of the Nazi leader to dominate the European continent. Johnson, the most prominent political figure arguing that Britain should leave the EU, says the past 2,000 years of ...

  Rome / AFP Italy’s health minister is proposing doubling a ‘baby bonus’ incentive for couples to have more children to combat what she calls a catastrophic decline in the country’s birth rate. “If we carry on as we are and fail to reverse the trend, there will be fewer than 350,000 births a year in 10 years’ time, 40 ...

  Athens / AFP Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said that Greece will return to the bond markets in 2017, seven years after losing access to the markets due to its debt crisis. “We will return to the markets in 2017,” Tsipras said in an interview with the Realnews weekly newspaper. While the eurozone country has continued to raise funds through short-term, ...

  Frankfurt / AFP The European Central Bank has become too powerful, but largely because politicians have foisted an increasingly political role onto it, one of the German government’s key economic advisors said in a newspaper interview on Sunday. “The ECB has gained enormous power, even though it is not answerable to any parliamentary control. I take a critical view ...

  Bloomberg Mark Carney defended the Bank of England against political critics furious at his warnings about the dangers posed by a European Union exit, and described the British economy as facing similar uncertainty to the early 1990s. “We’re taking a judgment as a committee, and we’re changing policy because of it, we’re putting out billions of pounds of liquidity ...

  Bloomberg A year of profit stagnation has left the S&P 500 Index’s price-earnings ratio flirting with some of its highest readings since the Internet bubble. Judged against bonds, though, stocks remain stubbornly cheap. Plotting the index’s per-share earnings against the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, a technique sometimes referred to as the Fed Model, shows the S&P 500 ...

  Bloomberg Williams Cos. said Energy Transfer Equity LP is breaching a merger agreement “through a pattern of delay and obstruction” and asked a court in Delaware to prevent the pipeline operator from terminating the deal. Energy Transfer — which offered $43.50 a share, or $37.7 billion, for rival Williams in September — said May 5 that the multibillion-dollar takeover ...

  SANTO DOMINGO / AP Dominicans faced a dizzying array of choices on Sunday in one of the most complex ballots in recent history, with eight candidates for president, all 222 members of Congress up for re-election and thousands of people vying for local offices around the country. For many voters it amounts to a referendum on whether to let President ...

  Bloomberg GN Store Nord A/S, the world’s third-largest listed producer of hearing aids, signed a conditional agreement to buy Audigy Group LLC in a deal that could value the U.S. audiology and hearing services company at as much as $151 million. GN will pay $91 million up front and as much as $60 million more depending on Audigy’s financial ...

  Bloomberg Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced undefined “military exercises” for the embattled nation, just a day after pledging to prolong his government’s special emergency powers. Speaking in Caracas’s Ibarra Square after a march on Saturday by several hundred supporters, Maduro said his opponents are orchestrating foreign military intervention in Venezuela. Exercises by the army and militia groups would prepare ...