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Bloomberg Didi Chuxing is overhauling safety measures across its business after a female customer of its Hitch carpooling service was allegedly murdered by a driver using its app in China. Hitch has been marketed as a social ride-sharing service, allowing drivers and passengers to label or rate each other by appearance. Such features attracted criticism as the platform was rife ...
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May, 2018
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16 May
PayPal joins Indonesian VC firm to develop fintech startups
Bloomberg PayPal Holdings Inc. is teaming up with Indonesian venture-capital firm Alpha JWC Ventures to back emerging financial technologies that can be developed for Southeast Asia. Under the partnership, Jakarta-based Alpha JWC will contribute as much as $5 million in funding for PayPal Incubator, said Alpha JWC Managing Partner Will Ongkowidjaja. After being selected by PayPal and Alpha JWC senior ...
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16 May
Hong Kong’s $3.2bn land sale shows no slowdown in sight
Bloomberg Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd.’s record HK$25.2 billion ($3.2 billion) purchase of a coveted plot near Hong Kong’s former airport signals that the city’s developers are brushing off concern that expected rate increases will damp the red-hot housing market. Sun Hung Kai beat out bidders including units from CK Asset Holdings Ltd. and Henderson Land Development Co., paying almost ...
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16 May
Malaysia’s back-to-the-future economic reform wave
At the beginning of 1997, Malaysia appeared to be one of the world’s great success stories. Economic growth had topped 9 percent in eight of the previous nine years (and was 8.9 percent in the other one). Foreign investment had been pouring in. The world’s tallest building had just topped off in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, and a spectacular new ...
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16 May
India’s latest power debacle is Enron times 20
Enron Corp. is long gone, but the scandal it left behind in India has beguiled the country’s lenders for almost two decades. However, if the bankers who financed the US energy company’s unviable power plant in Maharashtra state aren’t ruing that 2,000-megawatt debacle any more, it’s only because they’re now staring at a mess 20 times bigger. India’s total electricity-generation ...
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16 May
Don’t sweat the iPhone supply chain. It’s just fine
The fortunes of iPhone suppliers are looking strong. First-quarter earnings at Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. show that Apple Inc.’s chief product assembler pumped $2 billion more into its supply chain than a year earlier. Weak iPhone sales can’t be blamed for Hon Hai’s net income slipping 15 percent and missing estimates, because they weren’t weak. Revenue at the Taiwanese ...
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16 May
Record UK profits are nothing to sing about
The sight of J Sainsbury Plc CEO Mike Coupe singing ‘we’re in the money’ neatly sums up the dichotomy between those feeling the pinch from Brexit and those who aren’t. UK corporations have rarely been this flush. They reported record pretax profits in the first quarter, according to the Share Centre, a broker. Average revenue growth for members of the ...
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16 May
California puts solar on the roof and up for grabs
If we could somehow capture all the energy expended on Twitter when California approved new rooftop solar standards, we’d solve our climate problems immediately. The perpetual emotion machine has cranked up in response to the California Energy Commission passing a new building code that will, among other things, require most low-rise residential buildings constructed after 2019 to have built-in solar-power ...
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16 May
German postman delivers $3 trillion debt reminder
Perhaps Germany’s reputation for penny-pinching is undeserved after all. Net debt at Deutsche Post AG, the mail and logistics operator, swelled by a whopping 10 billion euros ($12 billion) in the first three months of 2018. The bulk of that change of it relates to new accounting rules, rather than new borrowing. But that’s what makes it interesting (bear with ...
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16 May
Critics of economics are actually dwelling in the past
In last July, writer and researcher John Rapley penned an article in the British newspaper the Guardian entitled “How Economics Became a Religion.†This followed on the heels of shorter but equally acerbic critiques by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian and Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph, earlier that year. In 2015, the Guardian published an article by Joris Luyendijk called ...
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