Is Bernie Sanders a closet foreign policy “realist”? Reading his few pronouncements on foreign policy, you sense that he embraces the realists’ deep skepticism about American military intervention. But he has said so little about foreign policy that it’s hard to be sure. Foreign policy is the hole in Sanders’ political donut. We know what he doesn’t like — the ...

It is potentially an unusual business transaction. While the prospect of a Vietnamese company taking over a Russian group in of itself is unusual, the buyout of a strategic stake in a major fish distributor is also a reflection of changing attitudes to the management of the Mekong River. Food security is the priority issue dominating the political agenda surrounding ...

The Trans-Caspian transport route is many things to the many states involved. Transporting goods from Europe to China and back–at the moment crossing through Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan (as well as both the Black and Caspian Seas)–is an alternative to the Russian route. The clearest rationale behind the recent focus on the route is political, but that’s not the ...

KUWAIT/ AFP Kuwait and Italy will finalise a multi-billion-euro deal next week for the Gulf state to purchase Eurofighter jets, Kuwait’s defence minister has said. Sheikh Khaled Jarrah Al-Sabah did not specify the number of planes involved in the deal but the Eurofighter consortium said in September that Kuwait had agreed to buy 28 fighter jets. “Italian Defence Minister Roberta ...

New York / AFP US aerospace giant Boeing’s shares dived amid speculation that regulators are investigating its accounting for its 787 and 747 aircraft. In midday trade, shares in the Dow member were down about 10 percent at $104.44. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has opened a probe on Boeing’s profitability forecasts for the long-haul 787 and 747 jetliners, ...

Mexico / Bloomberg Wal-Mart de Mexico SAB, a bright spot for its struggling US-based parent company, will benefit this year as a weak peso spurs an increase in remittances while inflation remains in check, Chief Financial Officer Pedro Farah said. Latin America’s biggest retailer also plans to invest more in e-commerce and sell non-core businesses such as its Suburbia apparel ...

Berlin / Bloomberg Deutsche Lufthansa AG, the sole airline so far to take delivery of Airbus Group SE’s new A320neo model, will limit the plane to domestic German routes until glitches with the engine cooling system are resolved in coming weeks. Lufthansa has flown its first A320neo between Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich since receiving the aircraft in January, and the ...

BANGKOK / Bloomberg Thai Airways International Pcl will continue to ground 10 Airbus A340s it hasn’t been able to sell because flying the four-engine planes isn’t worth it, even after fuel prices plunged more than 40 percent in the past year. “The fuel consumption is so uneconomical,” Thai Airways International President Charamporn Jotikasthira said in an interview in Bangkok. “All ...

Washington / Bloomberg It’s Valentine’s Day today, and Americans will buy $1.1 billion of confectionery to mark the occasion, according to data from the Washington-based National Confectioners Association. That’s up 2.6 percent from last year and the most since at least 2011. About three-quarters of that will be chocolate. The volume of US retail chocolate sales is expected to drop ...

Bloomberg Trading volumes in the credit-default swaps market — where banks and fund managers go to hedge against losses on corporate and government debt — have surged. Transactions tied to individual entities doubled in the four weeks ended Feb. 5 to a daily average of $12 billion, according to a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysis of trade repository data. The ...