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It’s easy to get caught up in oil’s recovery. After an exceptionally fraught year, hopes are high that putting 2020 soundly behind us can only mean better days. But there’s still a long way to go to get back to anything like normal. That hard reality didn’t stop crude prices from rising by $14 a barrel, or 37%, since the ...

Bloomberg British Airways and Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd aren’t offering refunds to passengers who cancel year-end trips because of new UK coronavirus rules, even as regulators investigate airlines’ earlier refusal to hand cash back to customers caught in lockdown. IAG SA-owned BA will grant ticket holders a voucher or let them switch to a later date, it said in an ...

Bloomberg Celebrating the holidays might be pretty ho-hum, but one area that’s booming is toys. After a terrible year of remote school, cancelled birthday parties and little vacationing, parents and grandparents ridden with so-called “Covid guilt” are spending a lot more on puzzles, crafts and games. And this is setting up the US industry for its best Christmas in years—and ...

Bloomberg The rollout of vaccines against Covid-19 has intensified debate about whether they should be made mandatory, with the head of a major tourism lobby saying that doing so would cause irreparable harm to the struggling sector. “I don’t think governments will require vaccination next year” for travel, Gloria Guevara, head of the World Travel and Tourism Council, said at ...

Bloomberg Canadian transportation authorities validated changes to Boeing Co’s 737 Max ordered by US regulators, putting the jetliner a step closer to flying again in the northern nation. In a statement, Transport Canada said it has completed its review of design fixes mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration in November — calling it “an important first step” towards re-certification. The ...

Bloomberg Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd carried just 37,815 passengers in November, down 98.6% from a year earlier, and warned that its second-half losses will be significantly worse than the HK$9.9 billion ($1.3 billion) hemorrhage in the first six months. Average passenger capacity in the second half is only likely to be 8.4% of pre-pandemic levels, compared with 34.3% in the ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump downplayed the severity of a massive cyber-attack on the US government and suggested China may have been responsible — even as other US officials are convinced Russia was the perpetrator. In doing so on Twitter, the president contradicted assessments from senior officials within his own administration who’ve blamed Moscow for the intrusion of at least half ...

Bloomberg President-elect Joe Biden introduced key members of the team he is assembling to fulfill his pledge to combat climate change, calling them brilliant and qualified. Climate change is “the existential threat of our time,” Biden said, and the people he was nominating to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the White House Council on Environmental Quality and departments of Energy, ...

Bloomberg A container ship owned by AP Moller-Maersk was attacked off the coast of West Africa, prompting the company to warn of a rising risk from piracy in the area. The Maersk Cadiz was boarded by “criminals” on Saturday at about 2:30 pm Nigeria time while traveling from Tema in Ghana to Kribi in Cameroon, Maersk said. Nigerian naval ships ...

Bloomberg Somalia’s government accused Kenya of arming local militia to attack its forces on the border, just days after severing diplomatic ties with its East African neighbour. The alleged steps can “undermine general security of the Horn of Africa region,” Somalia’s Ministry of Information said in a statement posted to its Twitter account. Calls and text messages to the spokeswoman ...