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China’s tech giants have upended the country’s payments system and promise to shake up its consumer-banking sector. The rest of the region won’t be so easy. Asia is quickly becoming next battlefront for Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Ant Financial and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat Pay, after both secured licenses to set up online-only banks in Hong Kong this month. Singapore’s ...

Florida this month became the latest state to allow teachers to carry guns at school — even though there is no evidence to suggest this can reduce school violence, and ample reason to fear the unintended consequences. The new law coincides with the release of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most recent report on active shooters — the armed and ...

It’s hazardous to see elections to the European Parliament as a barometer of European Union politics. Turnout was higher than in previous EU elections, but still only about 50%; voters in many countries aren’t sure what the parliament does; national anxieties predominate. In many ways, ballots have just been cast in 28 separate national elections, rather than in a single ...

Last weekend, Russia launched the last of a new crew of atomic icebreakers meant to consolidate the country’s dominance of commercial traffic in the Arctic. As much of the rest of the world recognises climate change as an emergency, Russia is working hard to capitalize on it — and the US appears to be far behind. The icebreaker Ural, launched ...

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s potential plan to raise $20 billion in Hong Kong is huge. That’s not just because $20 billion is a lot of money. After going public in New York, the Chinese e-commerce giant is considering a secondary listing in Hong Kong, Bloomberg News reported– a coup for the city that’s still sore from missing out on the ...

At the time of his first bid to become India’s prime minister five years ago, Narendra Modi was seen by many in Mumbai as a reformer rising to slay crony capitalism, corruption and policy paralysis. It was the bureaucracy in New Delhi that had misgivings about the then chief minister of Gujarat state, known for his highly centralized style of ...

Bloomberg Forget drones. The future of deliveries may be robo-vans. A Chinese startup called Neolix kicked off mass production of its self-driving delivery vehicles — saying it’s the first company globally to do so — and has lined up giants such as JD.Com Inc and Huawei Technologies Co as customers. Neolix expects to deliver a thousand of the vehicles, which ...

Bloomberg Volvo Cars has made a multi-million euro investment in Varjo Technologies Oy, whose headset with screens and cameras can be used to allow engineers to test-drive cars to dodge hazards such as virtual moose. Varjo — founded by Nokia Oyj and Microsoft alumni — has been developing an augmented-reality headset with a significantly higher image resolution than those produced ...

Bloomberg Amazon.com Inc is updating its Alexa voice software to let users delete recordings of their voice using a spoken command, a move that follows criticism of the company’s privacy practices related to its digital assistant. A set of updates offers users who have opted in online the ability to say “Alexa, delete everything I said today,” or, in a ...

Bloomberg Microsoft Corp will begin selling a subscription service for personal computer video games, two years after unveiling a similar offering for the Xbox console. Xbox Game Pass for PC offers access to more than 100 titles on Windows 10 for a monthly fee, rather than requiring individual purchases. They include games from studios including Bethesda, which makes the “Elder ...