Bloomberg CVS Health Corp. completed the third-largest corporate bond sale on record to fund its acquisition of Aetna Inc., testing the appetite of a market that’s off to its worst annual start in decades. The pharmacy giant issued $40 billion of investment-grade debt in a nine-part offering, people with knowledge of the matter said. That’s surpassed only by Verizon Communication ...

Bloomberg The European Union voiced mounting concern over US President Donald Trump’s plan to impose punitive import tariffs, as Germany signalled alarm over the resignation of pro-trade Trump adviser Gary Cohn in an emerging trans-Atlantic dispute over protectionism. “We hope that eventually this initiative from the US side will not be followed through,” European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said ...

Bloomberg BlackBerry Ltd., seeking ways to stem revenue declines, is dusting off its old patents and asking other companies to pay up for using technology BlackBerry claims it invented years ago. The latest skirmish broke out, when BlackBerry sued Facebook Inc in federal court in Los Angeles, claiming the social media giant has built swaths of its empire on messaging ...

Bloomberg UK pension liabilities increased by 7.6 trillion pounds in the five years through 2015, government figures published on Wednesday show. They stood at 7.6 trillion pounds, with the state pension—a universal entitlement paid by the government—accounting for more than half the amount, the Office for National Statistics said. There were more than 2 trillion pounds of entitlements linked to ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump’s threat that he could tax cars imported from Europe was premised on the idea that German automakers pour Benzes and Bimmers into the US while making it “impossible” for American cars to sell there. General Motors Co., America’s largest carmaker, largely bailed from Europe last year for reasons that had less to do with protectionism than ...

Bloomberg South Korean President Moon Jae-in tried to tamp down expectations for his planned summit with Kim Jong Un, as he prepared to send envoys to Washington to discuss their meeting with the North Korean leader. “This is just a start, and we can’t be optimistic just yet,” Moon told leaders of five South Korean political parties in Seoul on ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump said Russia had “no impact on our votes” in the last presidential election and vowed to prevent any interference in the upcoming congressional elections. “We’ve actually been working very hard on the ‘18 election,” Trump said during a press conference at the White House with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven. He added that the US would ...

Bloomberg Strikes protesting Ethiopia’s state of emergency spread across the restive Oromia region ahead of US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s arrival for talks with the Horn of Africa nation’s embattled government. The closing of shops and roads by members of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group is the latest sign of discontent in Oromia state, where unrest has prompted the country’s ...

Bloomberg Voters in Sierra Leone are going to the polls to elect a successor for President Ernest Bai Koroma in a campaign where an unprecedented number of political parties is making the outcome too close to call. As Koroma nears the end of his second five-year term, 16 parties are competing in the elections in the West African nation. His ...

BEIRUT / Reuters Syrian government forces pounded a town in the eastern Ghouta with air strikes on Wednesday in an effort to slice the rebel enclave in two as they intensified a campaign to deal the opposition its biggest defeat since 2016. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group says 800 civilians have been killed by government bombing and ...