Bloomberg YouTube plans to introduce a paid music service in March, according to people familiar with the matter, a third attempt by parent company Alphabet Inc. to catch up with rivals Spotify and Apple Inc. The new service could help appease record-industry executives who have pushed for more revenue from YouTube. Warner Music Group, one of the world’s three major ...

Bloomberg China expressed pessimism about bringing the North Korean standoff to a peaceful resolution, even as Kim Jong Un’s regime touted new United Nations support for “regular” talks. Chinese Foreign Minster Wang Yi said on Saturday “the outlook is not optimistic” on the Korean Peninsula and urged all sides to end what he said was a “vicious cycle” of confrontation. ...

BAGHDAD / Reuters An Iraqi military parade celebrating final victory over IS was held in Bag-hdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, an Iraqi military spokesman told Reuters on Sunday. The country’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared final victory over IS after Iraqi forces drove its last remn-ants from the country, three years after the militant group captured about a third of ...

Bloomberg Neither the Palestinian Authority president nor the head of the Coptic Church in Egypt plan to meet with US Vice President Mike Pence when he visits the Middle East later this month, to protest the US declaration that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. The rejections emerged as the Anadolu Agency said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and French ...

Bloomberg Liberia’s Supreme Court told the electoral commission to proceed with organising the final round of presidential elections that was initially scheduled Nov 7 but put on hold to probe allegations of fraud during the first round. The runoff should go ahead, Justice Philip Banks said in the ruling in the capital, Monrovia. The ruling ends weeks of uncertainty over ...

Bloomberg The leader of Mexico’s largest opposition group is stepping down from his post to prepare for a presidential run under a left-right coalition that’s looking to dislodge the ruling party from power. Ricardo Anaya’s resignation as party president, effective this weekend, is the first step to seeking the nomination from his National Action Party (PAN) to run in 2018 ...

A year ago, with the election of a US president who had fulminated against the international trade and financial systems, some analysts worried that the engine of global prosperity might soon be sputtering. But that’s not what happened. The global economy has surged forward this year, significantly outperforming expectations. As the International Monetary Fund wrote in its latest world economic ...

Masayoshi Son to the rescue. It helps to have the SoftBank Group Corp. founder on your side when Chinese regulators are raining on your IPO party. Lufax, the online wealth manager that’s among the world’s biggest start-ups, has hired five banks to work on a Hong Kong initial public offering of as much as $5 billion, according to IFR. SoftBank’s ...

Amid resurgent nationalism and talk of nuclear war, it’s been a rough year for global diplomacy. So a 10-party agreement to protect the waters of the planet’s far north qualifies as a minor miracle. For the next 16 years, commercial fishing will be prohibited in the central Arctic, a Mediterranean-sized patch of icy ocean more than 200 nautical miles from ...

Punters who wanted to bet against Britain in the run-up to the Brexit vote thought they’d found the perfect target in Berkeley Group Holdings Plc, a London-focused homebuilder partly reliant on inflows of foreign capital to purchase it’s very expensive homes. Throw in a government decision to increase property transaction taxes and penalize purchases of buy-to-let homes, and you had ...