Bloomberg Marathon Petroleum Corp, the largest US independent oil refiner, said it won’t restart two refineries in California and New Mexico amid concerns that demand for fuels is unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels this year. Marathon said in a statement it will convert its 166,000 barrel-a-day Martinez, California, refinery near San Francisco into a terminal facility and may add ...

New US sanctions against the Chinese telecom giant Huawei are beginning to bite hard, with a British assessment predicting that the firm may begin running out of complex, US-designed semiconductors and other gear during the next year. The shortage could devastate parts of its business. The Huawei battle is the leading edge of a broad US campaign against Chinese efforts ...

The queens of the skies have fallen on hard times. As Covid-19 has frozen the international travel on which they once thrived, double-decker, four-engine planes like the Airbus A380 and Boeing 747 are more likely to be found in storage than soaring through the skies. Carriers such as Pan Am Corp used the 747 to turn aviation into a global ...

Back in April, Britain’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam told a news conference that the UK’s relative performance in combating the coronavirus would become clear only once there were comparative figures on excess mortality (deaths above a five-year average). Shortly afterward, the government stopped showing charts with comparative death rates altogether. It wasn’t hard to see why: The emerging ...

Joe Biden wants to change the way the Federal Reserve is governed for the first time in four decades. In 1977, Congress set “maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates” as the central bank’s goals. It’s called the dual mandate, since everyone forgets the bit about interest rates. In a recent speech, Biden mentioned the goals of low ...

Bloomberg Air Canada escalated a fight with the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the country’s stringent travel rules, threatening to suspend more routes and cancel orders of locally made planes. Chief Executive Officer Calin Rovinescu lambasted the government during the airline’s second-quarter earnings call, saying that current restrictions — especially a mandatory 14-day quarantine for all travellers coming ...

Bloomberg United Airlines Holdings Inc will boost flights modestly in September as it resumes service on more than 25 international routes and begins skewing its network towards leisure traffic. The September schedule will amount to 37% of last year’s level, a slightly higher portion than the plan for August, United said in a statement. Destinations in Mexico and the Caribbean ...

Bloomberg British Airways pilots accepted a pay cut of 20% in a deal to limit job losses, resolving a bitter dispute at the IAG SA unit as carriers seek to weather the global slump in air travel caused by the coronavirus. Just over one-fifth of the 1,255 redundancies initially planned will now go ahead, and some of those may also ...

Bloomberg Kenya Airways Plc will resume flights to Tanzania after talks by the two nations’ transport ministers, rescinding a decision by the country’s Civil Aviation Authority. The Tanzanian regulator had cancelled plans to allow the airline to resume flights because it said Kenya excluded Tanzanians from the list of nationals allowed into its territory under revised coronavirus restrictions. “We managed ...

Bloomberg Walmart Inc might be one of the few big winners in the pandemic, having posted surging sales month after month, but that isn’t stopping the company from tightening its belt. The world’s biggest retailer has laid off hundreds of workers in units including store planning, logistics, merchandising and real estate, according to people familiar with the matter. It is ...