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Bloomberg Venezuela’s main opposition parties say they will shun this year’s presidential elections, claiming the vote has been rigged to guarantee a victory for President Nicolas Maduro. Justice First, the country’s largest opposition party, announced that it would not be participating in April 22 elections. “We won’t help out a dictatorship that only cares about maintaining power on the backs ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump ordered a ban on gun accessories known as “bump stocks” that allow semiautomatic rifles to be fired more rapidly, taking the administration’s first concrete measures in response to a Florida school shooting last week. Trump said that he had signed a memorandum directing the Justice Department to come up with rules prohibiting “all devices that turn ...

Perhaps the most baffling aspect of the European Commission’s ruling against Google last year, which included a 2.42 billion euro ($3 billion) fine, is that the remedial action Google was allowed to take didn’t make the market in question, shopping searches, any fairer or any more accessible to smaller players than it was before the ruling. Now there’s a reason ...

Look at two important numbers in Walmart Inc.’s earnings report on Tuesday, and you could draw different conclusions about the retailer’s momentum. Its closely watched US comparable sales rose 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier — strong growth after a third quarter that saw the best growth on this measure in eight years. That data point ...

Private-equity firms have many ways of making money, but PAG Holdings Ltd. may have found a unique model in its loan to HNA Group Co. The cash-strapped Chinese conglomerate has pledged most of its stake in a Hong Kong-listed unit in exchange for funds. The size of the advance wasn’t disclosed, but the 1.39 billion shares in Hong Kong International ...

President Donald Trump’s latest proposal to eviscerate the State Department’s budget may already be dead on arrival in Congress. It’s nonetheless a reminder of how the administration’s failure to take diplomacy seriously is undermining its own strategic goals. Barely two months after warning in its new National Security Strategy of ‘growing political, economic and military competitions,’ the White House delivered ...

For years, economists and policymakers have hailed the propensity of Chinese to save. Among other things, they’ve pointed to low household debt as reason not to fear a financial crash in the world’s second-biggest economy. Now, though, one of China’s greatest economic strengths is becoming a crucial weakness. Over the past two weeks, as they’ve held their annual work meetings, ...

Apple proclaims each new iPhone model is the best one it has ever made. The company says every software update is better than the last. In general, Apple believes everything it does is awesome. There’s a consequence to declaring victory no matter what: it becomes impossible to define success. One example is the Apple Watch. In April 2016, one year ...

People concerned about robots taking away jobs might want to consider where it’s already happened. Machines with varying levels of intelligence have quietly taken over the most glamorous, coveted and admirable job in the world — space exploration. It’s not that people can’t still be astronauts — it’s just there aren’t nearly enough jobs for all the people with the ...

Bloomberg The banking crisis engulfing the tiny nation of Latvia has turned into a potential diplomatic incident, as Riga points the finger at Moscow. “There is a high probability that an externally organised widespread information operation is being carried out that, by its structure and execution, is identical to those observed in pre-election periods in the US, France and Germany,” ...