Bloomberg Korea Electric Power Corp (Kepco) approved a plan to participate in an Indonesian coal power project despite mounting global pressure to move away from the most-polluting fossil fuel. The board of directors on Tuesday cleared the $51 million purchase of a 15% stake in the joint-venture developing the Jawa 9 & 10 project, according to a company spokesman. The ...

Bloomberg Sasol Ltd expects binding bids within weeks for its stake in a natural gas pipeline running from Mozambique to South Africa, as the company accelerates asset sales to pay off debt, according to people familiar with the process. The bidding round underway for the Rompco 865-kilometre (537-mile) gas pipeline stake concludes in late July, according to two of the ...

The road to a successful reopening of the US economy is strewn with hopeful intentions — and formidable obstacles. The biggest and most important obstacle is a surge in new coronavirus cases, which presumably will lead to more hospitalisations and more deaths as well as more firms shutting down. The closings will reflect lost customers who are either sick or ...

Why all the fuss about face masks? Why won’t people just wear them? “Masking has become controversial. It shouldn’t be,” former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on “Face the Nation.” To health experts, masks seem like a simple, apolitical precaution. In medical jargon, they’re personal protective equipment, or PPE, like surgeons’ gowns, gloves and face screens. Nobody ...

There were two obvious losers in France’s runoff round of local elections, held after a three-month delay caused by the Covid-19 epidemic. One was democracy. Only about 40% of eligible voters bothered to turn up, a record low. The other was President Emmanuel Macron, whose core urban fan base went Green. The eco-friendly EELV party snatched control of several big ...

Boris Johnson wants Britons to lift their eyes to the horizon, forget Covid for a while and dream again. No longer cast as a Churchill at war, the British prime minister seems more inclined now to conjure up the healing figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the US president whose New Deal sought to pull America out of the Great ...

Bloomberg India banned ByteDance Ltd’s viral short-video service TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps, citing threats to its sovereignty and security as relations between the world’s two largest populations worsened. The unprecedented moratorium, announced days after border tensions in the Himalayas left 20 Indian soldiers dead, deals a blow to the most prominent names in Chinese technology. The banned services ...

Bloomberg Singapore’s government has issued a correction notice to a Facebook post by a page called ‘State News Singapore,’ which is often critical of the ruling party and its leaders, contesting its description of a recent call between PM Lee Hsien Loong and Malaysia Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin over easing travel restrictions. The post in question says Singapore’s Lee personally ...

Bloomberg Vietnam’s economy unexpectedly grew in the second quarter, though at the slowest pace in at least a decade, as exports slumped because of the coronavirus pandemic. Gross domestic product rose 0.36% from a year earlier, compared with a revised 3.68% in the first quarter, the General Statistics Office said on Monday in Hanoi. The median estimate in a Bloomberg ...

Bloomberg Japan’s industrial production dropped again in May even as a nationwide state of emergency was lifted, showing the severity of the pandemic’s impact on the export-reliant manufacturing sector. Factory output fell 8.4% from April, the economy ministry reported on Tuesday. Production slid from the prior month for a fourth time in a row, something that hasn’t happened since 2012. ...