Bloomberg The Hong Kong government is scrapping an extra stamp duty levied on commercial property purchases in an effort to bring the lackluster market back to life. The government will abolish the additional duty for non-residential properties effective from Thursday, Chief Executive Carrie Lam said during a speech. The levy of as much as 8.5% of a property’s value was ...

Bloomberg The Philippines has set a price cap for Covid-19 swab tests amid complaints of exorbitant and wide price disparity, Health Secretary Francisco Duque said. The price for real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction or RT-PCR test is capped at 5,000 pesos ($104) in private hospitals and 3,800 pesos in government laboratories, Duque said in a briefing. Some testing centres ...

Bloomberg Fears that a civil war raging in neighbouring Ethiopia’s northern Tigray Region will reverberate across eastern Africa are playing out in Sudan, which is contending with a massive influx of refugees who’ve fled the fighting. More than 40,000 people have streamed across the border from Tigray into eastern Sudan since November 7, the United Nations said. Sudan itself is ...

Bloomberg President-elect Joe Biden said his transition team will not be “so far behind the curve” now that the Trump administration has begun cooperating on the fight against the coronavirus and providing access to intelligence reports after a three-week delay. “We’re already working out meeting with the Covid team in the White House,” Biden said in an interview on “NBC ...

Bloomberg Last year, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam only made it through a few lines of her annual policy address before pro-democracy lawmakers forced her to flee the chamber and deliver it virtually. On Wednesday, she spoke for more than two hours to a legislative body with no members of an opposition that has long resisted the city’s integration ...

Bloomberg China confirmed it’s compiling a global watch list of Taiwanese independence backers it plans to “punish,” marking an escalation in Beijing’s pursuit of its critics. “The list is only targeting the extremely few stubborn Taiwan independence activists and their funders, not targeting the majority of Taiwan compatriots,” Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said at a ...

Bloomberg When Linda Thomas-Greenfield was held at gunpoint on a diplomatic assignment in Rwanda in 1994, she tried her best to look calm as she explained to a “glazed-eyed young man” that she wasn’t the woman he was told to kill. “I was afraid, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t panic,” Thomas-Greenfield, now one of America’s most experienced diplomats ...

Bloomberg Amazon.com Inc is doling out hiring bonuses as high as $3,000 to make sure it has enough people to squeak through the busy holiday shopping season. That’s stoking resentment among existing workers who recently got coupons for Thanksgiving turkeys as a thank you for their hard work. Social-media chatrooms where Amazon workers congregate have lit up. One worker shared ...

Bloomberg The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) affirmed its decision to designate ZTE Corp as a national security threat over concerns telecommunications gear made by the Chinese company could be used for spying. The action shows that the FCC remains determined to drive ZTE and fellow Shenzhen-based manufacturer Huawei Technologies Co from the US market, where small rural carriers rely ...

Bloomberg The UK lost a “crucial month” in its fight against coronavirus because it was too slow to respond to a shortage of ventilators, while the delay in sourcing protective equipment came at a cost of 10 billion pounds ($13.3 billion) to the taxpayer, according to two spending reports. Ministers only started efforts to buy more ventilators on March 3, ...