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Bloomberg Czech President Milos Zeman is heading into a runoff against a pro-European challenger in a ballot that’s become a public reckoning of a veteran politician who’s thrown his support behind Russian lea-der Vladimir Putin and mobilised voters with anti-migrant rhetoric. Zeman, 73, had 39 percent with nearly all districts counted after the first round of voting. The former prime ...

Bloomberg An alert mistakenly warning Hawaiians of an imminent ballistic missile attack — at a time the state’s residents are already anxious about nuclear tensions between the US and North Korea — resulted from human error, Hawaii’s governor said. The emergency notice was triggered after an “employee pushed the wrong button” during a shift change at the Hawaii Emergency Management ...

For more than 100 years, the Middle East has been defined by oil exploration, production and its boundaries. Now the region is getting repurposed by its aspiration to grow beyond fossil fuel. The shake-up in Saudi Arabia is also much about becoming a 21st-century economy. None of the region’s petrostates has moved further from its oilfield roots than Dubai, which ...

Was there ever really an Asian contender apart from Hong Kong to host Saudi Arabian Oil Co.’s IPO? Unlikely. The challenge for the world’s largest oil company, if it lists in the territory, will be keeping investors interested once trading starts. Saudi Arabia has shortlisted the city, along with London and New York, for the international portion of a potential ...

Wal-Mart has just announced higher wages and one-time bonuses for most of its workers — linking the news to the corporate tax cuts signed last month by President Donald Trump. It joins a growing list of companies saying “Thank you” to the president by raising their employees’ pay. The White House is crowing (its celebration only slightly dimmed by Wal-Mart’s ...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week released its list of climate events that have had the greatest economic impact on the US from 1980 to 2017. At $306 billion, last year’s sustained costs due to weather disasters was 43 percent higher than in 2005, which had hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Hurricane Harvey alone caused $125 billion in ...

Behavioural economics has always met with a bit more resistance than it deserved. This is true even though a number of behavioural researchers have won the Nobel—Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller and Richard Thaler just last year. Despite this and other forms of official recognition at the highest levels, there continue to be some economists who have an almost instinctive aversion ...

Don’t be too derisive of Eastman Kodak Co.’s yearning to reclaim its lost glory by jumping on the crypto bandwagon. If the dotcom bubble holds any lessons, the blockchain gravy train might have plenty to go around yet. Investors aren’t waiting to see if the proposed KodakCoin is just a fad, or the real new, new thing for a company ...

For much of the past few months, Mark Zuckerberg has been thinking aloud about Facebook Inc.’s mission. He kept saying he wanted Facebook to become a place for meaningful social interaction. His resolution for 2018 was to ‘fix’ Facebook. It was a call to arms, but for what? It wasn’t clear how his musings might translate into substantive changes to ...

Bloomberg Wells Fargo & Co. isn’t giving up its mortgage-lending crown without a fight. The bank wants to hold on to its top spot as the whale of the $1.7 billion industry in the US, even as it predicts profit margins on making home loans will shrink this year and it faces pressure from rival Quicken Loans Inc. “We want ...