Bloomberg Drugmakers in the UK led by AstraZeneca Plc increased payments to local health-care organizations, doctors and other workers by 25 percent last year, with most of that money going toward research and development, voluntary disclosures by the recipients showed. The spending climbed to 455 million pounds ($590 million) last year, according to a report on Friday from the Association …

Bloomberg Euro-area manufacturing expanded at the strongest pace in over six years as factories across the region took on more workers to deal with surging orders. A Purchasing Managers’ Index climbed to 57.4 in June, up from 57.0 in May and above a June 23 flash estimate, IHS Markit said on Monday. Growth rates improved in most of the surveyed …

Let’s imagine a Chinese ‘applied history’ project, similar to the one at Harvard’s Belfer Center that helped spawn Professor Graham Allison’s widely discussed book ‘Destined for War.’ Allison’s historical analysis led him to posit a ‘Thucydides Trap’ and the danger (if not inevitability) of war between a rising China and a dominant America, like the ancient conflict between Athens and …