Bloomberg The economy lost nearly 2.5 million working days to strikes last year as Britain suffered its most severe industrial action since Margaret Thatcher was in power. The Office for National Statistics said Tuesday that 843,000 working days were lost due to labor disputes in December, making it the worst month in more than a decade. That took the total ...

Bloomberg Employment in Scotland hit a record high at the end of 2022 as tightness in the labor market spread to all corners of the UK. The portion of adults who have a job climbed to 76.6% in the three months ending December, up 2.4 percentage points from a year earlier. The figures from the Office for National Statistics on ...

  Bloomberg Norma Group SE, a German maker of hose clamps and pipe connections for everything from cars to washing machines, rejected several takeover approaches in recent months from bidders including Carlyle Group Inc., people familiar with the matter said. The company explored a potential sale with advisers toward the end of 2022, according to the people, who asked not ...

  Bloomberg Soaring inflation, higher interest rates and supply-chain snarls spurred by the war in Ukraine pushed most of the European Union’s biggest eastern economies into contraction in the fourth quarter. Poland’s economy shrank 2.4% from the previous three months — much worse than the 0.5% forecast in a Bloomberg survey — for its second non-consecutive decline last year. It ...

Bloomberg Nato countries may agree as soon as this summer to spend at least 2% of their economic output on defense, a slight shift from the alliance’s 10-year-old pledge to “move toward the 2% guideline.” North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the alliance’s defense ministers were supposed to discuss the target when they meet in Brussels for ...

Bloomberg Secretary of State Antony Blinken is considering a meeting with Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, at a security conference later this week, people familiar with the matter said, in what would be their first face-to-face talks since an uproar over a Chinese balloon led to a new spike in tensions. Blinken and Wang would meet at the Munich Security ...

  Bloomberg Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina Governor and Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, announced Tuesday that she’s running for president, casting herself as the Republican leader best positioned to usher in a fresh chapter for the GOP. “It’s time for a new generation of leadership – to rediscover fiscal responsibility, secure our border, and strengthen our ...

Bloomberg President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s embattled defense chief appointed three deputies as part of a shakeup aimed at quelling accusations over corruption in the top echelons of the government. Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who earlier this month confronted speculation that he would be removed from his post, is taking to damage control after officials under him were swept up in a ...

  Bloomberg The Philippines has protested China’s move to aim a military-grade laser at a Philippine ship in the South China Sea which the US said was “provocative and unsafe” and threatens peace and stability in the region. The diplomatic protest, filed with the Chinese Embassy in Manila on Tuesday, “condemned the shadowing, harassment, dangerous maneuvers, directing of military-grade laser, ...

  Bloomberg Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida nominated a Bank of Japan (BOJ) policy veteran and a former chief financial regulator as central bank deputies to support his pick of university professor Kazuo Ueda for the top job. The selection of Shinichi Uchida, the central bank’s executive director and Ryozo Himino, also a former finance ministry official known for his ...