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A British newspaper editor convicted of killing his wife with a hammer has seen his sentence reduced by Dubai’s Court of Appeal. The court ordered Wednesday that former Gulf News editor Francis Matthew must serve a seven-year sentence for manslaughter…
November 27, 2019Read More
Iraqi officials say three anti-government protesters were killed and 35 wounded by security forces in southern Iraq amid ongoing violence. Security and hospital officials said Wednesday that two of the protesters were killed the previous night. Prote…
November 27, 2019Read More
Iran’s supreme leader on Wednesday claimed without evidence that recent protests across the Islamic Republic over government-set gasoline prices rising were part of a “conspiracy” involving the U.S., as authorities began to acknowledge the scale of the…
November 27, 2019Read More
A new report says South Sudan’s National Security Service has recruited a force of 10,000 fighters in President Salva Kiir’s ethnic stronghold, outside the terms of the country’s peace deal. The report by United Nations experts monitoring sanctions on…
November 27, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — When a topic is both highly controversial and mind-numbingly complex, there’s a rule of politics that says it’s best avoided before an election if at all possible. A botched offering on social care was one of the things that dera…
November 27, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Sign up to our Next Africa newsletter and follow Bloomberg Africa on TwitterJeremy Corbyn spent Tuesday fighting claims that his Labour Party hasn’t dealt properly with anti-Semitism in its ranks. The launch of Labour’s faith and race el…
November 27, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg) — Want the lowdown on what’s moving European markets in your inbox every morning? Sign up here.Good morning. Trade talks inch forward, China is slowing down and the U.K.’s Labour Party continues to contend with anti-Semitism accusations. Here’s what’s moving markets.‘Final Throes’Progress on the first phase of a U.S.-China trade deal has been inching forward via phone calls and meetings, now President Donald Trump says the two are in the “final throes of a very important deal” and that the talks are going “very well.” Time will tell if that’s the case but the extra optimism is certainly buoying the mood so far this week, though the U.S. trade deficit demonstrates pretty clearly the impact tariffs are having. At least ties between China and the U.S. are as strong as ever in the bond market.SlowdownEarly indicators are pointing to a slowdown in the Chinese economy for the seventh consecutive month. Combined with industrial profits from Chinese companies dropping by the most on record in October, that could take some of the sheen off any trade optimism for cyclical stocks and risk assets. The country is also facing more pressure on climate change, with top environmental officials having reiterated its commitments but provided little on questions around the deeper carbon emissions cuts being called for by the United Nations.‘Poison’Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn spent another day attempting to defend his party against accusations of institutional anti-Semitism and continues to face consistent claims that he is not fit for office, with the flames fanned by a television interview on Tuesday evening in which he again failed to convince on the subject. On Wednesday night, a poll will be released that last time managed to predict the surprising loss of the Conservative Party majority, so election watchers will be glued to that. Perhaps no one more so than Tory leader Boris Johnson who knows that should he win, that’s only the start of the battle.Crypto DowntrendBitcoin is on track for its worst month of the year. It’s joining other cryptocurrencies in a persistent downtrend since China took steps to crack down on virtual-currency trading — more than 170 crypto platforms have since shut down. Bitcoin has now fallen for ten consecutive sessions but for those watching the market, this may hold some solace for those eyeing the technical signals of the market and may mean it will find a floor relatively soon. Coming Up…Asian stocks were mixed as traders continue to watch for any new signs on the U.S.-China trade talks, though the optimism has fed into a higher oil price which has held onto the gains made on Tuesday ahead of U.S. crude inventories later in the day. Company news will be topped by British American Tobacco Plc’s trading update, coming as it does amid a rapidly deteriorating view of vaping in the U.S. What We’ve Been ReadingThis is what’s caught our eye over the past 24 hours. Investment management is still a boys’ club. What it’s like to drive 300 miles per hour. Inside London’s latest broker war. Young Russians want to leave the country. $1 billion in jewels. Two thieves. No insurance. Can AI compose good music? Manchester City’s owner is selling a stake to Silver Lake.Like Bloomberg’s Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close.Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. Learn more.To contact the author of this story: Sam Unsted in London at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Celeste Perri at [email protected] more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
November 27, 2019Read More
(Bloomberg Opinion) — Here’s the state of Social Democrats across continental Europe: In two corners, Scandinavia and Iberia, they’re alive and well, having become pragmatic centrists or, as in Denmark, having turned hard right on issues such as migration. Almost everywhere in between — from France to the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Italy — they’re in various states of disarray or dissolution. What happened? And is their decline terminal?That’s what Germany’s SPD, founded 156 years ago as the ancestor of the movement, should be asking itself, as it convenes next week to anoint new leaders and decide whether to quit its coalition with the conservative bloc of Chancellor Angela Merkel. But this more existential question won’t be debated, at least not honestly.To get the big picture, look at the chart below. It shows the percentage of eligible voters in the Federal Republic of Germany who plumped for the SPD in national elections. What you see is a rise in the postwar years, when the SPD formally dropped its Marxist doctrines to appeal to potentially all Germans, not just the blue-collar types. The SPD then peaked in the 1970s under two Social Democratic chancellors, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, who promised to lift more people into prosperity.But in the 1980s and 90s, the ideological left wing of the party fought back. Lifting up was de-emphasized. Leveling down was the new message, as the SPD cast aspersions on “the rich.” Its support dwindled. The lifters briefly prevailed again over the levelers in 1998, putting the third Social Democrat in the chancellery, Gerhard Schroeder. But since then the levelers have dominated rhetorically. According to polls, the next bar in this chart will be the smallest yet.Something similar has taken place around the neighborhood. The equivalent party in France, called PS, had an absolute majority of the National Assembly in 2012, then got overrun by the brand-new centrist movement of President Emmanuel Macron; it’s now irrelevant. Its Italian sister, called PD, is in government again, but as a much diminished junior partner to populists. Emulating Macron, Matteo Renzi, the PD’s former star, will quit and form his own party. One lesson is that Social Democrats, not unlike the Democrats in the U.S., do well whenever they promise opportunity and badly whenever they preach, as Winston Churchill put it, “the gospel of envy.” But envy is all they’ve got these days. Hence calls by Germany’s SPD (and others) to bring back a wealth tax, even though it was suspended in the 1990s because it was a nightmare to assess and brought in little revenue.Another lesson: You can’t just keep looking for new demographic groups that allegedly suffer some urgent “injustice” that must be fixed (by Social Democrats, of course). But that’s what the SPD keeps trying. It has just spent months haggling with its coalition partners to top up the state pensions of low-income retirees who’ve paid into the system for 35 years or more. Why not 34 years? Nobody knows. Not discussed was the unsustainability of the whole pension system, in which ever fewer young people will pay ever more of their income to ever more old people. As usual, the SPD is baffled that it hasn’t risen in the polls.The bigger insight is that the Social Democrats are simply out of ideas and out of date. They sprang from the second industrial revolution, when workers eked out miserable and unsafe existences in factories, smelting ores or bashing metals. Just by fighting for the right to safe workplaces and paid leave, Social Democrats did lift many people up. But today, at the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution, that proletariat is disappearing. Unions are shrinking. Jobs are moving into the service sector and the gig economy. Brains are more important than brawn.The new threat to workers is not from “capitalists” but from artificial intelligence, automation and the Internet of Things. Some very low-wage jobs (such as janitors) are pretty safe. Many high-wage jobs (the creative and brainy ones) will boom. But in between, many professions — especially those based on routines or algorithms, whether in manufacturing or administration — could well disappear. Overall, society will be better off. But for many individuals, the transition will be hell. What about them?Beats the Social Democrats. Rhetorically, they enjoy calling for “fresh” thinking. So what did Kevin Kuehnert, the allegedly up-and-coming 30-year-old leader of the SPD’s youth organization, come up with? He recently had a brainstorm — wait for it — to collectivize BMW. Bold and visionary, in a bygone century.Nobody in politics has yet found convincing and comprehensive answers to the twin challenges or our time: reconciling the economy and ecology on a heating planet, and assuring social cohesion as technology first supplements, then competes with, human intelligence. The answers will eventually touch everything from education to taxation, welfare and consumption. There are people probing deeply and curiously into these fields. Just not among the Social Democrats.To contact the author of this story: Andreas Kluth at [email protected] contact the editor responsible for this story: Timothy Lavin at [email protected] column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Andreas Kluth is a member of Bloomberg’s editorial board. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
November 27, 2019Read More
4 dead, 8 missing in southwest China tunnel collapse Lexington Herald Leader
November 27, 2019Read More
No. 1 Duke was upset by unranked Stephen F. Austin in overtime handing the Blue Devils their first loss of the season.
November 27, 2019Read More
Egypt’s government is using a secretive security agency designed to fight terrorism to detain peaceful protesters, journalists and critics on trumped-up charges without trial, Amnesty International said in a report released Wednesday. The 60-page repo…
November 27, 2019Read More
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