Bloomberg European Union President Charles Michel sought to build momentum towards lifting a French veto on membership talks with North Macedonia and Albania. Michel hosted a dinner in Brussels for top representatives of western Balkan countries including North Macedonia and Albania. Last October, France blocked the EU’s goal of starting accession talks with both nations during the first half of ...

Bloomberg China is considering delaying its most high-profile annual political meeting for the first time in decades, as the government attempts to contain an outbreak of a deadly new strain of coronavirus. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) will meet on February 24 to consider a delay of the annual meeting of the full parliament planned to ...

President Donald Trump’s new budget proposal makes some heady economic projections — 3% annual real economic growth for the first half of the decade — to justify his policies and make the budget deficit look smaller than it might otherwise be. That’s a lot higher than mainstream economists at the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office believe is likely based ...

Defying the gloom around the financial services industry in post-Brexit Britain, the UK has maintained its edge in fostering the industry’s digital revolution. Lured by friendly regulators, fintechs have proliferated and investors have poured billions into companies that have rattled centuries old, high-street lenders. The battleground is becoming so fierce, however, that it’s proving too much for some of the ...

Is Sprint Corp. a duck or a rabbit? Bear with us. Earlier, SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son showed investors a bemusing slide with an ambiguous image of a duck and rabbit. If you look at the picture from the right, you see a different critter than the view from the left. In his characteristically gnomic fashion, he was trying ...

Overall, it’s good news that President Donald Trump has declared he’s in favour of planting trees — it’s perhaps the one thing he has in common with people who care about the long-term future of the planet. Trees not only provide a habitat for wildlife, they can mitigate global warming, to an extent. Promises to plant trees came up at ...

Is the world losing its collective mind about coronavirus? So far 1,665 people have died from the infection — all but 45 of them at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan province, and only two of them outside China. By contrast, some 10,000 people have died this winter from influenza in the US alone, and worldwide between 290,000 and ...

If it involves a flurry of announcements, filings, subpoena disclosures, a stock with Lebowski levels of insouciance, a surprise equity raise and Larry Ellison backing up the truck, then we must be talking about Tesla. It’s been busy for the electric-vehicle phenomenon. Not long after Tesla Inc. filed its 10-K annual report, the company announced it would sell up to ...

When the history of our era is written, scholars will search for larger causes to explain its bitterness and contradictions, despite so much wealth. Was it globalisation? Populism? Economic inequality? Polarisation? Greed? To this list you can now add an unlikely candidate: the nuclear family. In a powerful essay for The Atlantic — “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” — ...

Bloomberg European stocks rose on Monday after Chinese shares advanced with the yuan as investors took encouragement from the Asian country’s pledges to support the world’s second-biggest economy in the face of the coronavirus outbreak. The yen and gold both dipped. Gains in the Stoxx Europe 600 Index were led by automakers and miners. US equity-index futures climbed, though Wall ...