Bloomberg Sichuan Airlines Corp suspended one of its employees after contentious comments he posted online were unearthed, highlighting growing jitters in China after a deadly air crash last month. An internet user took to Weibo to ask the carrier to prevent the staff member in question — identifiable as an ethnic Mongolian Chinese national called Ayingga — from flying …

  Bloomberg Clearpay Finance Ltd is partnering with mall landlord Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield in the UK, continuing the buy-now-pay-later provider’s expansion into brick and mortar retail globally. Customers at 13 stores in Westfield’s pair of giant London shopping centers will be given the option to pay in installments through Clearpay, which is known as Afterpay outside Europe. It adds to Clearpay’s UK …

  Bloomberg London’s Heathrow airport will ramp up hiring “as fast as possible” after passenger numbers surged last month to the highest since the Covid-19 pandemic began. The 4.2 million travellers passing through the facility during March represents a more than seven-fold jump from a year earlier, according to a statement on Monday. The hub, once Europe’s busiest, is racing …

Bloomberg JD.com Inc’s billionaire founder Richard Liu has stepped down as chief executive officer of China’s No. 2 online retailer, joining tech tycoons that exited top management roles after Beijing’s sweeping internet-sector crackdown. Xu Lei, who was recently promoted to president after more than a decade at the company, takes the helm of the e-commerce titan effective immediately. Liu’s lieutenant …

  Bloomberg European equities started the week on a negative note as investors weighed an array of risks from China’s Covid-19 flare up to an uncomfortably tight race for the French presidency, surging bond yields and the war in Ukraine. The Stoxx 600 Europe Index falls 0.2% as of 8:52 am in London, tracking Asian stocks lower. Technology stocks were …

  Bloomberg Bitcoin’s tendency to move in tandem with technology stocks means the biggest cryptocurrency may slump to $30,000 by June, according to Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of crypto trading platform BitMEX. Hayes, in a blog post on Monday, also said the same dynamic could drive Ether to $2,500. The tokens traded at around $42,300 and $3,180, respectively, at 12:43 …

Bloomberg Oil retreated for a second week in the wake of plans for massive stockpile releases, a demand-sapping virus outbreak in China and a hawkish turn from the US Federal Reserve. West Texas Intermediate fell 1% this week, with the US benchmark giving back most of its gains since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. Oil rallied to the highest …

  Bloomberg Britain’s unemployed face a further blow when the value of their welfare benefits is set to fall the most in half a century, according to new research. Analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows the decline comes with the real value of out-of-work benefits already at historically low levels because the Treasury froze payouts or increased them by …

  Bloomberg Isolated from any other country’s power networks, Iceland has this winter faced a new predicament: running out of electricity. Sitting in the Atlantic Ocean, 850 kilometres (530 miles) from the Scottish coast, the country had to be self-sufficient in electricity generation, and power was always so plentiful that a large aluminum-smelting industry emerged half a century ago to …

  Bloomberg Promoters of a stalled project to build a C$9 billion ($7.2 billion) terminal to export liquefied natural gas from Quebec in Canada are seeking to revive the plan by garnering support from Europe, which is scrambling to find alternatives to Russian supplies. GNL Quebec Inc’s Energie Saguenay project was rejected by both the federal and provincial authorities recently …