November, 2019

• 5 November

  Time running out for new US-Russia N-deal

  

  Bloomberg The Kremlin warned that time is fast running out to negotiate a fresh strategic nuclear weapons deal with the US before the current New START treaty expires. “There is no progress, there are no signals from the Americans about their readiness to start discussions” on replacing or extending the treaty, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters ...

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• 5 November

  Bulgarian ‘agent’ free on bail gets award from Putin

  Bloomberg A Bulgarian accused of spying for Russia who was freed on bail was allowed by a court to visit Moscow, where he received an award from President Vladimir Putin. Despite being barred from foreign travel as part of a $28,000 bail agreement two months ago, Nikolay Malinov was able to go to Russia on November 1, according to prosecutors. ...

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• 5 November

  Johnson, Corbyn trade Brexit barbs as UK election heats up

  

  Bloomberg Prime minister Boris Johnson and his main rival, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, traded blows over Brexit as the UK prepares to vote next month on which of the two men should lead it out of the European Union. Johnson wrote an open letter to Corbyn asking him to clarify his strategy for the divorce while the Labour leader accused ...

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• 5 November

  Trump campaign woos African-American voters

  

  Bloomberg President Donald Trump’s campaign said it’s creating a new coalition to try to bolster his support among the African-Americans. The group is named “Black Voices for Trump” and aims to recruit and engage African-American voters. Vice President Mike Pence will address the group at an event on Friday in Atlanta, according to a senior campaign official. The official said ...

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• 5 November

  Kazakhstan seeking to ban sales of land along borders

  

  Bloomberg The Kazakh government is seeking to ban sales of land along the country’s borders, returning to an issue that triggered mass protests three years ago. The proposed legislation would bar both foreigners and locals from buying any land in all districts bordering China and in a 25 kilometre-wide strip adjacent to Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, according to Gulzhakhan ...

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• 5 November

  Nix on Donald Trump’s proposed next tax cut

  

  The White House is considering another round of tax cuts, according to a story by The Washington Post’s Erica Werner, Josh Dawsey and Jeff Stein. This is a monstrously bad idea, but it’s hardly a surprise. It displays President Trump’s cavalier attitude towards budget deficits, as earlier reflected in his 2017 tax cut of $1.5 trillion over roughly a decade. ...

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• 5 November

  We can’t live without internet

  

  The internet came to life 50 years ago this week, with a simple message sent from the University of California, Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute. The system crashed only two characters into the transmission of the word “login”: SRI received only “lo” — “as in ‘lo and behold!’” in the words of UCLA’s Leonard Kleinrock. The UCLA terminal ...

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• 5 November

  Google throws Fitbit into its stew of uncertainty

  I hope Alphabet Inc. has a plan. The Google parent company announced that it would spend $2.1 billion to buy Fitbit Inc., a pioneer in the fitness-tracking gadgets that haven’t proved to be a lasting category of consumer electronics. Google has now spent billions of dollars developing homegrown hardware such as its Pixel smartphones and buying all or parts of ...

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• 5 November

  A mega-merger can’t hide $12bn of debt

  China has a standard road map for fixing state-owned giants that have gone off the rails: Create an even more inflated behemoth through a mega-merger, in the hope that the stronger business will be able to prop up the weaker one until the storm blows over. It’s a playbook that’s been followed in steel, shipping, energy and rolling stock — ...

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• 5 November

  Australia is closing an iconic tourist site. Why?

  

  In the hours before climbers were permanently barred from Uluru, the world-famous red sandstone monolith that rises from the heart of Australia, the line to ascend it snaked for hundreds of feet — past a sign posted by its aboriginal owners noting that the site is sacred, and requesting that visitors refrain from climbing it. The last-minute trekkers weren’t alone ...

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