Bloomberg Hong Kong International Airport’s September passenger traffic volume increased by 133% from a year earlier, after authorities scrapped some of the city’s harshest travel restrictions, including requirements for hotel quarantine and a pre-boarding Covid test. Passenger throughput climbed to 525,000, 10% higher than in August. The growth was boosted by visitors to and from Southeast Asia, the Airport ...

  Bloomberg Giving out treats this Halloween will be a lot more expensive than usual. The cost of candy and chewing gum jumped 13.1% in September from last year, the most ever, according to US inflation data. This comes just before what’s arguably candy’s most important holiday — Halloween. The culprit is expensive sugar. US refined sugar prices have soared ...

Bloomberg A senior Nato official confronted a Chinese diplomat over China’s failure to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, injecting tension over the war into an international conference about the Arctic. The unusually frank exchange between Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of the alliance’s Military Committee, and He Rulong, China’s ambassador to Iceland, followed a speech by Bauer on Nato’s role ...

Bloomberg Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged his nation will prevail in its fight to develop strategically important tech, underscoring Beijing’s concern over a US campaign to separate it from cutting-edge chip capabilities. “We will focus on national strategic needs, gather strength to carry out indigenous and leading scientific and technological research, and resolutely win the battle in key core technologies,” ...

Bloomberg Pakistan’s former premier Imran Khan faces a crucial popularity test as he contests in seven of the eight by-elections on Sunday, looking to build momentum for his campaign to pressure the six-month-old government into calling an early national vote. The seats fell vacant after all 131 lawmakers from Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party resigned from parliament’s lower house in April ...

  Bloomberg Former President Barack Obama will travel to Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin at the end of October to rally voters in key battleground states to support Democrats in the Nov. 8 midterm elections that will decide the balance of power in Washington for the next two years. Obama will be in Atlanta on Oct. 28 to campaign with candidates ...

  Bloomberg President Joe Biden cast Donald Trump as a factor in state-level contests across the country, telling Democrats those were crucial battlegrounds to defend their agenda in November’s elections. “As long as Trump controls the Republican Party, he’s going to have an incredible impact on state legislative bodies,” said Biden at an event in Portland, Oregon, for Tina Kotek, ...

  Bloomberg The Indian currency will withstand the recent strengthening of the dollar, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, reiterating a central bank forecast that the South Asian economy will grow at 7% in the year to March, 2023. “The Indian rupee has performed much better than many other emerging market currencies,” Sitharaman said at a media briefing in Washington DC. ...

  Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. set aside an additional $2 billion to resolve a variety of legacy regulatory and legal woes as Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf continues wrestling with the costly fallout from scandals he was hired to resolve. The charge hampered a third quarter that was better than expected on some metrics. Net interest income, for example, ...

  Bloomberg JPMorgan Chase & Co. reported its highest quarterly net interest income ever and raised its guidance for the year as the biggest US bank reaps rewards from the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes. The firm generated $17.6 billion in third-quarter NII, the money it earns on loans minus what it pays out for deposits. Expenses also came in lower ...