Bloomberg The Royal Mail Pension Plan is handing BlackRock Inc. an £8.8 billion ($10.9 billion) mandate to be its outsourced chief investment officer. The world’s largest asset manager will lend its trading capabilities and technology to the pension plan, while using staff from the in-house investment team, according to a statement on Thursday. The plan pays for the retirements …

Bloomberg The US is launching a new initiative to identify and invest in climate adaptation for Africa’s most nutritious crops in a bid to deal with growing hunger on the continent. The program, announced by the US State Department together with the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the African Union on Wednesday, will seek to identify crops in …

  Bloomberg KKR & Co. has made a non-binding bid for a stake in Telecom Italia SpA’s multi-billion-euro network, the Italian carrier said on Thursday, as Chief Executive Officer Pietro Labriola seeks to turn the business around. The shares gained as much as 14% in Milan on Thursday following the announcement of the bid. Telecom Italia has struggled under a …