Bloomberg Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 helped boost Vladimir Putin’s approval rating to stratospheric levels. Since then, he’s fuelled an ongoing conflict in Ukraine, interfered with America’s elections and ordered strikes on behalf of the Assad regime in Syria. Through all of these foreign adventures, 87 percent of Russians continued to support him. But those days may be coming ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. has removed accounts and pages linked to Myanmar’s top military officials as a new United Nations report accused the country’s armed forces of committing war crimes against the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority. On Monday, Facebook removed 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages that were followed by nearly 12 million people, the company said ...

Bloomberg US stocks added to all-time highs, and Mexico’s peso rallied versus the dollar as the Trump administration closed a bilateral trade deal with America’s southern neighbor. Treasuries fell. The S&P 500 Index rose as President Donald Trump unveiled details of the agreement that he says will replace Nafta. The peso rallied Mexico. European shares advanced, though a British holiday ...

Bloomberg One of the world’s top-performing global stock funds is betting against Amazon.com. It’s not so much that Amazon won’t flourish, but that the recent rally in global technology behemoths has made brick-and-mortar retailers cheap in comparison, according to Norwegian fund Storebrand Global Multifactor. The valuations right now are “too pessimistic for the retailers and too optimistic for Internet retailers,” ...

Bloomberg Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said foreigners won’t be allowed to buy property at Country Garden Holdings Co.’s $100 billion project, or be granted visas to live there. The Forest City project near Singapore had targeted buyers from China for its mixed-residential development, as well as investors from Indonesia and Thailand. Malaysia’s My Second Home programme allows wealthy foreigners ...

Bloomberg Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s energy unit is nearing a deal to acquire a 1,370-megawatt thermal power plant backed by GMR Infrastructure Ltd., according to people with knowledge of the matter. Adani Power Ltd. will take over about 38 billion rupees ($543 million) of loans out of a total of 58 billion rupees that GMR Chhattisgarh Energy Ltd. owes, said ...

Bloomberg Three bankrupt US companies with links to Indian billionaire Nirav Modi were “directly involved” in transactions related to the alleged multibillion-dollar international fraud for which Modi has been charged by Indian authorities, according to an investigation by the court-appointed examiner. The examiner, John J. Carney, found “substantial evidence” that senior officers and directors at Firestar Diamond Inc., A. Jaffe ...

Bloomberg Jewelers in India’s biggest gold-buying state expect sales to drop during the peak festival and wedding season after heavy rains and floods caused more than $3 billion of damage. The usual spend of 200 grams to 1 kilogram of gold per wedding in Kerala may drop 50 percent in the next month, B. Govindan, president of the All Kerala ...

Bloomberg A deadline set by India’s central bank to restructure an estimated $52 billion of stressed loans may push dozens more companies into bankruptcy. The Reserve Bank of India in February introduced new rules and a 180-day timeline for banks to recast loans once payments are missed, scrapping previous methods that could take an indefinite amount of time. Companies that ...

Bloomberg China’s yuan was stable in the onshore market following Friday’s surge, after the central bank signalled that it’s taking action to support the currency through its daily fixing. Starting this month, banks resumed using an adjustment in the daily pricing of the currency against the dollar, known as the counter-cyclical factor, to mitigate the bias towards a weaker yuan, ...