Brazil, India need own Operation Warp Speed

Covid-19 is crushing developing countries such as India, Brazil and South Africa, and it won’t help to simply tinker with the patents on life-saving vaccines made by a handful of pharmaceutical companies. It’s more crucial that the pharmaceutical industry’s manufacturing and distribution expertise be brought to bear on this epic challenge, as Bloomberg Opinion’s editorial board has noted. Access to ...

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UK election results spark Scottish debate, hurt Johnson’s opposition

Bloomberg The battle for the future of Scotland has begun after a dramatic set of British election results left the UK starkly divided. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative party cemented its grip on Labour’s former heartlands in northern England, while in Scotland parties pushing to split away from the UK won a historic majority. That threw Johnson and Scottish National ...

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Gunmen kill 12 police officers in Nigeria’s oil-producing hub

Bloomberg Gunmen killed 12 police officers in weekend attacks targeting security agents in two of Nigeria’s oil-producing states in the Niger River Delta in an escalating conflict fuelled by secessionist tensions. Seven of the officers were killed in Rivers State in the southern part of the country, the police confirmed in an emailed statement. Authorities have blamed previous incidents on ...

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Johnson vows to save crisis-hit UK health service after Covid

Bloomberg The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is facing a fresh crisis when the pandemic recedes, with 4.7 million people stuck waiting for care, and will require significant spending and reform to survive, the government will say this week. Prime Minister Boris Johnson will vow to tackle the unprecedented backlog — which officials say is likely to get worse as ...

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France threatens UK on financial services in fisheries dispute

Bloomberg France’s junior minister for European affairs threatened the UK on financial services if Britain failed to grant licenses to French fishermen. Clement Beane said France would retaliate in sectors like banking in the European Union to which the UK wants access, according to an interview published on Sunday in the Journal du Dimanche. French fishermen are still owed 40 ...

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World’s powerful economies bet vaccine passports can save tourism

Bloomberg The world’s most powerful economies agreed to back plans for so-called vaccine passports in a bid to pull the travel and tourism industry out of a pandemic-fuelled slump. Tourism ministers from the Group of 20 threw their weight behind the new certificates, stressing that a resumption of normal activity for the sector is crucial to global economic recovery, according ...

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Toronto home prices see sharpest drop

Bloomberg Toronto’s housing market last month posted the sharpest drop since the early weeks of the Covid-19 crisis, as buyers and sellers took a breather from a frenetic pace amid surging infections and renewed lockdown measures. The number of properties changing hands in Canada’s largest city declined 20% in April on an annualized basis from the month before, while the ...

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Jobs report latest sign of growing pains for US economy

Bloomberg The US job market is suffering from growing pains as the economy rapidly reopens. While economists are optimistic about future growth, employers are facing hiring challenges as well as supply chain disruptions and higher costs. The jobs report from the Labour Department showed the US added 266,000 jobs in April, far short of the 1 million gain economists had ...

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Singapore’s stellar stock run stalls as global virus cases rise

Bloomberg A rally in one of Asia’s best-performing stock markets is stalling amid rising virus cases at home and a rethink of the global reflation trade. Second only to Taiwan among Asia’s major benchmarks this year, Singapore’s Straits Times Index has slipped about 1% so far in May, paring 2021’s gains to around 13%. The reintroduction of social distancing rules ...

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Betting on high-yield stocks is emerging as winning strategy in Asia

Bloomberg Asia’s high-dividend-yield stocks have emerged as winners among regional equities this year as expectations grew for the economy to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. While stocks that pay relatively large dividends are rising globally, for the most part the gains are happening in-line with the wider market. Not so in Asia though, where MSCI Inc.’s key gauge for this ...

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