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Ford to cut 20% of European workforce in sweeping overhaul

Bloomberg Ford Motor Co. will eliminate about 20 percent of its workforce across Europe in a sweeping overhaul to tackle the carmaker’s falling sales in the region and lift weak profitability. The restructuring, which has been announced piecemeal, will involve reducing its manufacturing footprint in Europe to 18 facilities by the end of 2020 from 24 at the beginning of ...

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Trump makes history with Kim, revives talks

Bloomberg Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un agreed to restart nuclear talks after an hour-long meeting on Sunday which saw Trump become the first American leader to set foot in North Korea while in office. Trump hailed ties with Kim, whom he has now met three times, and invited him to visit the White House. The meeting was hastily planned after ...

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Third round of Venezuela talks set to start

Bloomberg A third round of negotiations will be held between representatives of the two men struggling for the leadership of Venezuela, a once-wealthy oil state that has degraded into poverty, starvation and now deep political stalemate. The new round of talks was confirmed by people familiar with the earlier conversations — a tentative effort to clear a path towards an ...

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Luxembourg minister aims for Swiss-EU pact

Bloomberg Luxembourg’s foreign minister wants Switzerland to redouble its efforts to overcome labour unions’ opposition to a treaty with the European Union, so that it can be finalised this year, according to a newspaper interview. Bern and Brussels are at odds over an agreement to streamline relations, and the impasse has spilled over to stock trading, with the Swiss disallowing ...

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Vladimir Putin’s domestic comeback isn’t working

Russian President Vladimir Putin is a man of routine, and one might have been tempted to ignore his 17th annual call-in show with voters as another pointless set piece. This year, however, the context made it more important than most of the previous ones: Putin, who’s trying to return to pedestrian domestic concerns after a long foray into great-power politics, ...

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The trade myth Boris Johnson needs

One might have thought that Brexit debate could not be made any more confusing. But the Conservative Party leadership race is doing just that. The obfuscation serves a political purpose. Early this year, Brexiters who are happy for the UK to leave the European Union without a deal latched on to an argument that Britain, once it leaves, can keep ...

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Huawei’s ties to China’s military aren’t problem

At first blush, the optics of Huawei Technologies Co. staff working alongside China’s military aren’t great. Company employees teamed up with various organs of the Peoples’ Liberation Army on at least 10 research endeavors over the past decade, spanning artificial intelligence and radio communications, Bloomberg News reported, citing publicly available documents. Among the joint projects: extracting and classifying emotions in ...

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Currency wars are easy to start and tough to win

To President Donald Trump, and any other Group of 20 chief thinking about waging a currency war: It’s basically impossible to win. That’s partly because they don’t really happen in practice. If they did, everybody would lose because everyone would play. The surest way to affect the relative value of an exchange rate is through nudging interest rates up or ...

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Air conditioning is the world’s next big threat

The vast majority of Americans have air conditioning but in Germany almost nobody does. At least not yet. So when temperatures in Berlin rose to an uncomfortable 37 Celsius (99 Fahrenheit) this week – a record for the month of June – I was uncommonly delighted to go to the Bloomberg office, where it’s artificially and blissfully cool. By letting ...

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