Bloomberg Vladimir Putin is trying to cash in the gains of the biggest military wager of his career. Russian forces have helped Putin’s Syrian ally Bashar Al Assad drive back rebel forces after five years of fighting. The momentum clearly established, the Kremlin gave the green light to an agreement with the US and other powers on a partial cease-fire ...

Bloomberg Turkish stocks declined the most in the world and the lira slid after an eruption of violence on the border with Syria triggered concern security risks were escalating. The Borsa Istanbul 100 Index fell 1.5 percent, the most among more than 90 gauges tracked globally by Bloomberg. The currency had the biggest decline in a week as Turkish artillery ...

Tokyo / AFP Japan’s economy contracted in the last quarter of 2015, official data showed on Monday, dealing another blow to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s faltering bid to boost growth. The figures will fan talk of fresh Bank of Japan measures, after policymakers shocked markets last month with an unprecedented negative interest rate policy—widely seen as a desperate move to ...

Bloomberg Poland’s new leaders are eroding the country’s democratic record through laws that give the government new powers, three US senators said in a letter to Prime Minister Beata Szydlo. The dispatch by Senators John McCain, Benjamin Cardin and Richard Durbin follows an unprecedented move by the European Union’s executive last month to start a probe into whether rule of ...

PYONGYANG / AP The United States and Japan have already announced plans for new sanctions over North Korea’s recent nuclear test and rocket launch, and the UN Security Council is likely to deliver more soon. Cross-border tensions with Seoul are escalating quickly and even China is starting to sound more like an angry neighbour than a comrade-in-arms. But with a ...

Bloomberg Democrats pushed for Congress to vote upon a Supreme Court nominee from President Barack Obama, sharpening a fight with Republican leaders who said they won’t consider a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia until after the 2016 election. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in a Twitter message, said Obama will occupy the White House until January. “It’s his job to nominate ...

Bernie Sanders, greedy for power to punish people he considers greedy, has occasioned 2016’s best joke (reported in Bloomberg Businessweek): “In the Bernie Sanders drinking game, every time he mentions a free government program, you drink someone else’s beer.” But neither Sanders’ nor Hillary Clinton’s hostility to the First Amendment is amusing. Both have voted to do something never done ...

As information and technology (IT) advances and the world moves steadily towards the digital economy, challenges grow tenaciously with similar pace, posing serious difficulties that should be addressed to keep hackers at bay. Cyber-threats have been growing across key sectors such as financial services, oil and gas, technology, government, retail, construction, healthcare, among others. With resolve to enhance the cyber ...

Imagine if Ford remotely disabled the engine on your new F-150 pickup because you chose to have the door locks fixed at a corner garage rather than a dealership. Sound absurd? Not if you’re Apple. Since 2014, the world’s most profitable smartphone company has — without warning — permanently disabled some iPhones that had their home buttons replaced by repair ...

Did the Great Recession inflict permanent damage on the US economy? Or was it just a deep hole that took a long time to climb out of? Evidence now says that it was mostly the latter. Based on how fast the US recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed, the speed hasn’t been too different from ...