Bloomberg Facebook Inc. plans to attach its name to Instagram and WhatsApp, branding them “Instagram from Facebook” and “WhatsApp from Facebook.” The move is controversial because both of the apps were born outside of Facebook, have very different corporate cultures and have thrived, in part, by having their own identities with consumers. Founders of the photo-sharing app and the messaging ...

Bloomberg Russia is acting on a pledge by President Vladimir Putin to shrink the role of dollar in international trade as tensions sour between Washington and Moscow. The shift is part of a strategy to “de-dollarize” the Russian economy and lower its vulnerability to the ongoing threat of US sanctions. But while the central bank was able to quickly dump ...

Bloomberg Economic activity in the euro area’s private sector weakened further as still-solid services couldn’t make up for rapidly deteriorating manufacturing. A composite Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) dropped to 51.5 in July, with goods output falling for a sixth months and at the greatest extent since 2013. “The service sector continued to sustain the expansion of the overall euro-zone economy ...