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Bloomberg Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is getting its digital assistant into Mercedes-Benzes, Audis and Volvos in China, enlisting a clutch of global automakers in an effort to popularise the year-old technology for everything from shopping to home security. Daimler AG, Volkswagen AG and Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co.’s Volvo join some 100 brands Alibaba says it’s partnered with. The Chinese ...

Bloomberg International Business Machines Corp., a group of four gold and diamond industry companies and an independent laboratory are developing a blockchain network for tracing the provenance of finished pieces of jewelry from mine to store. The TrustChain Initiative, which will run on IBM’s technology, includes precious-metals refiner Asahi Refining, US jewellery retailer Helzberg Diamonds, precious-metals supplier LeachGarner, jewellery-maker the ...

Bloomberg The leaders of Asia’s two most-populous countries agreed to strengthen communication between their two militaries to avoid disputes along their contested Himalayan border, after last year’s months-long standoff over territory in Bhutan. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met for an “informal summit” in China’s central city of Wuhan on April 27 and on Saturday. ...

Bloomberg Earlier this week Brazil’s President Michel Temer called the ten Senate leaders of his ruling coalition to discuss the year’s legislative agenda. Only four showed up. Later that same day, the plenary of the lower house, which was due to vote on key bills to help the country recover from the worst recession on record, was conspicuously empty. Instead, ...

Bloomberg North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in agreed on April 27 to finally end a seven-decade war this year, and pursue the “complete denucleariaation” of the Korean Peninsula. US President Donald Trump hailed the move, declaring “KOREAN WAR TO END!” on Twitter. He’s agreed to meet with Kim at a time and place yet to ...

Bloomberg Europe’s preeminent leaders gave it their best shot this week. All signs are it didn’t work. France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel made their separate ways to Washington with a joint mission: to persuade President Donald Trump to stay in the Iran nuclear accord and grant the European Union a reprieve from US tariffs on steel and aluminum. ...

Bloomberg House Republicans chided both the Trump and Clinton campaigns for poor judgment over their contacts with Russia, even as they dismissed the notion of collusion with Moscow in concluding an investigation riven by bitter partisanship. While President Donald Trump’s campaign didn’t work directly with Moscow, some of his senior advisers erred by meeting in 2016 with a Russian lawyer ...

No doubt about it: Health care is a vexing political problem. There’s a contradiction at the core of our thinking. We want the best care when we or loved ones get sick. It’s a moral issue. There should be no limits on treatment. But the resulting uncontrolled health spending harms the country. It undermines other priorities — higher wages (more ...

Whisper it in the cafes of Silicon Valley, mutter it in the teashops of Shenzhen, yell it from the Austrian mountain top, where only the goats will hear you. The supercycle is dead. I’m calling it. Before Apple Inc. unveiled the iPhone X in September, some investors expected the company’s new flagship product to drive a multi-year growth cycle, much ...

Internet users throughout the European Union – and, in some cases, in the rest of the world as well – are starting to get gently pushed towards accepting various companies’ new service and privacy terms that comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is going into effect on May 25. Trying to deal with it has convinced ...