Back in 2006, after Chung Mong-koo, chairman of Hyundai Motor Co. Ltd. and son of its founder, was arrested amid one of South Korea’s recurring corruption scandals, I called a friend in the company’s public relations office. He answered in a breathless panic. Without Chung in the driver’s seat, he assured me, the management of Korea’s largest automaker would ...

  London’s Cheesegrater building is as close as Britain gets to a memorial to Brexit. Construction of the wedge-shaped skyscraper in the heart of the city’s financial district started in 2011 as things were picking up after the financial crisis. Within three weeks of the European Union referendum, the tower was fully let. At the time, its co-owner, British Land ...

  The comeback of the Nokia 3310, the icon of the “dumb phone” industry, is mainly a marketing gimmick by a Finnish startup. But there’s plenty of reasons to embrace it as something more — as an antidote to these digitally toxic times. Unlike the original, which was discontinued more than a decade ago, the rebooted model by HMD offers ...

  Hanoi / DPA Pham Thi Minh Thinh, a 52-year-old Hanoi native, spent her early childhood amidst the backdrop of catastrophic American bombings against her home city. Born in 1965 at the onset of the US-Vietnam War, she clearly remembers hiding in underground shelters as explosions rocked the surface. “It was a very painful time because the bombs nearly killed ...

  KABUL / AP Raheem Rejaey was a drug addict for 17 years. He lived under bridges in Kabul or in the ruins of buildings. His clothes reeked. In his misery, he tried suicide several times, he said, once intentionally overdosing and lying unconscious in a street for two days, undiscovered. So he can feel the pain of other addicts ...

  Bloomberg Europe has wanted to wean itself from Russian natural gas ever since supplies from its eastern neighbor dropped during freezing weather in 2009. Almost a decade later, the region has never been more dependent. Gazprom PJSC, Russia’s state-run export monopoly, shipped a record amount of gas to the European Union last year and accounts for about 34 percent ...

  Bloomberg Canada’s first exports of liquefied natural gas may soon be heading overseas — from a port in Louisiana. A year ago, Cheniere Energy Inc. built an LNG export terminal along Louisiana’s coast and became the only company shipping US shale gas by tanker. Now it’s looking for supplies to send abroad from as far off as the Montney ...

  Bloomberg Sasol Ltd., the world’s biggest producer of liquid fuels from coal, said the first units at its Lake Charles chemical project will start operating in 2018, as the company reported lower first-half profit because of currency losses and a strike. The Lake Charles project is 64 percent complete and still within its $11 billion budget, co-Chief Executive Officer ...

  Bloomberg Shares of US refiners pared gains after President Donald Trump’s administration denied that it was considering a proposal to change biofuel blending rules. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn and the leading US biofuel trade group struck a deal to revamp a law that mandates oil refiners to either blend petroleum-based fuels with ethanol and biodiesel, or buy blending credits ...

  Bloomberg BP Plc said it will need a crude price of about $40 a barrel in 2021 to cover spending and dividends, down from $60 this year, as Chief Executive Officer Bob Dudley seeks to reassure investors on the oil major’s growth outlook and finances. The break-even level will fall as BP keeps capital spending at no more than ...