Manafort: Can’t prepare for trial because of jail

Bloomberg Paul Manafort said he can’t be ready for a July 25 trial in Alexandria, Virginia, on bank fraud and tax charges because the judge in his separate money-laundering case in Washington put him in a jail two hours away from his lawyers’ offices. Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, asked the judge in Virginia to delay the trial ...

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Mind China’s strong home front in car wars

Donald Trump is trying to take on the single most globalised industry — and China. But the world’s largest car market won’t budge. Beijing reduced duties on autos on July 1, just before the imposition of US tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese goods. China’s carmakers, like its consumers, are the least vulnerable to exte- rnal forces compared with counterparts ...

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Even Sony Pictures has its price

A big Asian player has been left out of a flurry of media and entertainment mergers. Japan’s Sony Pictures, a key unit of the revitalised Sony Corp, is unlikely to be sold under Kenichiro Yoshida. But the new CEO will owe shareholders an explanation if dealmaking heats up. As Comcast Corp looks to beat Walt Disney Co’s $71.3 billion offer ...

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Glencore is in the hole, but it keeps on digging

Glencore Plc’s announcement of a $1 billion stock buyback was short on both wit and colour. So allow me to hazard a rough translation: “Don’t worry, we’re rich and our share price should be much higher.” Faced with the unwelcome attention of the US Department of Justice, most companies would be inclined to batten down the hatches. But, just a ...

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Praxair’s $6bn gas assets hand Japan a solid win

Japanese acquirers aren’t known for underpaying. So the country’s top industrial-gas producer looks to have lucked out in buying the European cast-offs of the $45 billion merger between Germany’s Linde AG and Praxair Inc of the US. Praxair agreed to sell assets valued at about 5 billion euros ($5.9 billion) to Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corp as part of efforts to ...

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Tests are not the only stress on Wall Street

Wall Street is booming. Mergers and acquisitions are happening at a record pace this year. Initial public offerings are making a comeback. Volatility — the lifeblood of any good trader — is creeping back into markets. New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said in March that Wall Street’s average bonus jumped 17 percent in 2017 to $184,220, the highest since ...

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Is KKR building what phone giants couldn’t?

As our appetite for data booms, private equity firms are betting on the cell towers and cable infrastructure to support it. The prize looks to be in creating the pan-European giant that has so far eluded the region’s telecoms industry. For years, Europe’s carriers have struggled to consolidate across the continent in the same way as their US counterparts. But ...

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Robots will make life grim for the working class

Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and one of the pioneers of the world wide web, once declared: The spread of computers and the internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do. Andreessen has since repudiated this declaration, and taken a more optimistic stance. But economists, ...

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Drone deliveries become reality in China

Bloomberg The day after Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com Inc.’s mid-year sale, a company drone took off from a playground in the city of Xi’an to deliver one of the orders in a football-sized box to a village in the mountains to the south. The six-rotor craft is one of about 40 JD.com designed to cut delivery times for items such ...

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Japan Display bets big on dashboard flash for drivers

Bloomberg Fully digital screens are replacing speedometres and dials in vehicles, making industry leader Japan Display Inc. optimistic about boosting sales to global carmakers. While most new models usually have a centre information panel for maps, entertainment and other functions, manufacturers are also increasingly replacing the dashboard facing the driver with a flat screen. Look inside the latest BMW or ...

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