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Bloomberg Indonesia’s resort island of Bali is set to impose a $10 levy on foreign tourists to preserve its environment and culture, The Jakarta Post reported, citing Governor Wayan Koster. The provincial government is deliberating whether the tax, which won’t be imposed on Indonesian citizens, will be collected as part of the airline ticket or at counters at the airport, ...

Bloomberg The European Union unveiled a blueprint for a free-trade deal with the US that would cut tariffs on a wide range of industrial goods including cars in a bid to heal commercial ties. European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom asked EU governments in Brussels for the go-ahead to start negotiations on lowering trans-Atlantic commercial barriers, prodding US President Donald Trump ...

Bloomberg The European Commission is expected to block a plan by Siemens AG and Alstom SA to merge their rail units over concerns that the deal betw-een two rivals would stifle competition in the region’s train-equipment market, according to people familiar with the matter. Proposed concessions aimed at allaying EU objections — plus a last-minute lobbying campaign from politicians warning ...

Bloomberg A US privacy investigation of Facebook Inc, begun after a major data breach was exposed in March, is likely to result in a record fine against the company, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Federal Trade Commission, the nation’s chief privacy watchdog, is weighing a penalty against the social-media giant for violating a 2011 settlement with ...

Bloomberg Microsoft Corp said it will spend $500 million to develop affordable housing and help alleviate homelessness in the Seattle area, responding to a growing regional housing crisis that has strained the finances of many lower- and middle-income residents. Half the money will be spent to support low-income housing across King County with a further $225 million invested at lower ...

Bloomberg Elon Musk is cutting Tesla Inc.’s workforce by 7 percent — or more than 3,000 jobs — warning that the “road ahead is very difficult” in making electric cars more affordable for the mass market. Tesla shares fell as much as 7.7 percent shortly after the start of regular trading. Musk wrote in a blog post that the Palo ...

The poet Rupert Brooke voiced the exhilaration of those Britons who welcomed the war in 1914 as a chance to escape monotonous normality, “as swimmers into cleanness leaping.” They got four years mired in Flanders’ mud. In a 2016 referendum, Britons voted, 52 percent to 48 percent, for the exhilaration of emancipation from the European Union’s gray bureaucratic conformities. They ...

An investigation by federal authorities into the possible theft of trade secrets by Huawei Technologies Co. could give even more weight to a US campaign against the Chinese company. Civil suits against Huawei, including a case where it was found liable by a jury in 2017 for the theft of T-Mobile US Inc. robotics technology, appear to be the springboard ...

That pain the global tech industry felt at the end of 2018 isn’t about to abate. The outlook from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. last week in Taipei paints a dire picture that will persist at least through the middle of this year. Those dark clouds I warned about in August haven’t gotten any lighter. At the time, I noted that ...

Fearing that low unemployment would spur serious inflation, the Federal Reserve has raised its benchmark interest rate nine times since December 2015 and has started to shrink the size of its balance sheet assets in an effort to tighten credit. So imagine the surprise when the minutes of the Fed’s December monetary policy meeting stated that “many participants expressed the ...