Bloomberg Bahrain’s GFH Financial Group is in talks to buy a majority stake in Islamic lender Bank Alkhair. GFH has signed a memorandum of understanding for the potential acquisition, which is subject to board and shareholder approval, completion of due diligence, agreement on an acquisition structure and regulatory approvals, according to a statement Monday to the Dubai stock market. ...

  Bloomberg OPEC has done it again. Talk of a potential deal to freeze output helped push oil close to $50 a barrel and prompted money managers to cut bets on falling prices by the most ever. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, went from a bear to a bull market in less than three weeks. OPEC is on course ...

  Major media outlets in France have recently decided not to publish the names and faces of terrorists so as not to glorify them and encourage copycats. On the surface, this might seem like reasonable self-imposed discretion in the interests of national security. But it’s actually self-censorship — and it’s dangerous. It reflects a subtly mistaken conception of why extremists ...

  Imagine what could happen if Donald Trump hadn’t turned the presidential campaign into an argument over who founded IS or whether there should be ideological entrance tests for foreign visitors and immigrants. Then he and Hillary Clinton could have a rational debate over taxes, a serious topic on which they have clear differences. Trump wants to cut taxes massively, ...

  The European Union says it wants clarity on whether U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is serious in her pledge that “Brexit means Brexit.” That clarity would be good for Britain as well as the rest of Europe, and there’s a simple way to get it: Extend the two-year deadline triggered by formal notification of the decision to leave the ...

  Brazil has overcome the Olympics challenge in style, but now comes the bigger challenge: to sustain the benefits ensuing from the Games. Before the mega sporting event started, many were sceptical about the country’s ability to put up a good show. The worst recession facing the nation, shooting inflation, swelling unemployment and the political upheaval caused by impeachment of ...

  The Indian government’s decision to elevate a well-respected deputy governor at the Reserve Bank of India to become the country’s next central banker is, frankly, a bit of a relief. The naming of Urjit Patel comes after months of quite unnecessary drama — first over whether current RBI chief Raghuram Rajan and the government were getting along, then whether ...

  When China’s top securities regulator said recently that it plans to delist Dandong Xintai Electric Co. for falsifying initial public offering documents, it didn’t grab many headlines. But it suggested some far-reaching changes may be afoot. Xintai is the first company to be expelled from Shenzhen’s ChiNext board for such an offense, and one of only a handful that ...

  Although First Ladies have been given important responsibilities in their husbands’ presidencies, none has taken such an active part in policymaking as Hillary Rodham Clinton did. Here are excerpts from interviews my colleagues and I conducted with Clinton administration officials and others who discussed her personality and her role. Did you get the impression that she may have been ...

Bloomberg Don’t look now, but technology companies are exerting more control over the US stock market than any time since the internet bubble. Fueled by three-year rallies in which Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. doubled, Amazon.com Inc. tripled and Facebook Inc. surged fivefold, computer and software stocks have increased to almost 21 percent of the S&P 500 Index’s value, near ...