News Archive - 12 August 2015

>Sprint's shares were up 8.2 percent at $4.20 in extended trading on Wednesday.SoftBank, which owns about 80 percent of Sprint, said the share purchases totaling about $87 million were made through subsidiary Galaxy Investment Holdings Inc. The company said it does not expect that its ownership in...

>Rad returns after being replaced in March by former eBay Inc executive Chris Payne CEO. "We mutually determined that this wasn't going to be optimal and thought that a quick transition served everybody best," the company statement quoted Payne as saying. In another announcement, the company said Greg Blatt will...

>YANGON Myanmar's powerful ruling party chief Shwe Mann has been ousted from his post, party members said on Thursday, apparently after losing a power struggle with President Thein Sein three months before a general election.Security forces surrounded the headquarters of the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in...

>BAGHDAD At least 60 people were killed and 200 wounded in a blast on Thursday at a market in Baghdad's Sadr City district, police and medical sources said, one of the largest attacks on the capital since Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi took office a year ago.There was no immediate...

>SEOUL South Korea's central bank kept interest rates steady on Thursday, maintaining its view that the struggling economy is on track for recovery, but analysts said growing uncertainties in China could prompt it to cut rates later in the year.The Bank of Korea's monetary policy committee unanimously left the...

>TOKYO Japan's core machinery orders tumbled the most in over a year, adding to fears of an economic contraction in the second quarter as exports slumped and consumer spending slackened.The 7.9 percent fall in the key gauge of capital spending followed a recent run of soft indicators -...

>NEW YORK, August 13 For Julian Robertson, the 83-year-old billionaire former hedge fund manager, history is repeating itself.     In 2000, Robertson returned outside investors' money to focus on his own fortune. In 2010, he started taking money from outside investors again, but five years later, two of the three vehicles...

>BEIJING China's Lenovo Group Ltd (0992.HK) will lay off 10 percent of white-collar staff after sales of Motorola handsets fell by a third, raising doubts over the personal computer giant's bet that a money-losing brand it bought for nearly $3 billion will help it become a global smartphone leader.

>TOKYO Asian shares gained on Thursday, taking heart from a late recovery on Wall Street and from reassurances from China's central bank that there was no basis for further yuan depreciation after it devalued the currency earlier this week.Financial spreadbetters expected the brighter mood to extend to European bourses.

>Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said on Wednesday that recent liver surgery revealed he had cancer that had spread to other parts of his body."I will be rearranging my schedule as necessary so I can undergo treatment by physicians at Emory Healthcare," Carter, 90, said in a statement.

>WASHINGTON The future of free-wheeling automated yard work took a step closer to American consumers on Wednesday after U.S. regulators gave robot maker iRobot Corp Inc technical clearance to make and sell a robotic lawn mower.The Bedford, Massachusetts-based company, known for its robot vacuum cleaner Roomba, has designed...

>AT&T Inc said on Wednesday it expects revenue, earnings and free cash flow to grow through 2018 following its DirecTV purchase and investments in Mexico, though it also sees higher capital expenditure.As the U.S. wireless market reaches saturation, AT&T hopes to tap into DirecTV's video assets and has...

>WASHINGTON The fight against Islamic State rebels is at a stalemate and if the U.S. military does not see progress in the coming months it should consider putting support troops on the ground with Iraqi forces, Army General Ray Odierno said on Wednesday.Odierno, the outgoing Army chief of...

>The U.S.-led coalition had launched flying, unmanned missions against the militants earlier this month, the Combined Joint Task Force said in a statement.Turkish fighter jets were not involved in the manned U.S. air strikes on Wednesday, Turkish security sources said. Turkey agreed last month to open...

>Analysts polled by Reuters had expected a $132 billion deficit for July. The government had a deficit of $94.6 billion in July of 2014, according to Treasury's monthly budget statement.A Treasury official said the July deficit was larger because of $42 billion in payments that were shifted into...

>TIANJIN, China Two huge explosions tore through an industrial area where toxic chemicals and gas were stored in the northeast Chinese port city of Tianjin, killing at least 44 people, including at least a dozen fire fighters, officials and state media said on Thursday.At least 520 people were injured,...

>Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) reported higher-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit as strong demand for its products in the United States more than offset weakness elsewhere.Shares of Cisco, considered a bellwether for the performance of the broader network gear industry, rose nearly 4 percent in extended...

>Buyout firm TPG Capital LP is in advanced talks to acquire Ellucian Company LP, in a deal that could value the U.S. provider of software to universities and colleges at $3.5 billion, including debt, people familiar with the matter said.Ellucian's owners, private equity firms Hellman & Friedman...

>BEIJING American business groups are lobbying U.S. President Barack Obama to press Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on technology protectionism concerns during Xi's upcoming U.S. visit, according to a letter addressed to Obama seen by Reuters.In the letter dated Aug. 11, 19 U.S. business lobbies including the...

>The violence came ahead of an expected visit by Iran's foreign minister to Damascus to discuss a new plan to resolve the more than four-year-long civil war.Warplanes targeted several areas in the insurgent-held district of Eastern Ghouta on the capital's outskirts, the Britain-based Observatory said, killing at least 31...

>CHICAGO A retailer-backed rival to Apple Inc's Apple Pay mobile wallet will be tested with customers in a handful of stores in the next few weeks, ratcheting up competition in an increasingly cluttered market.CurrentC was developed by a consortium of retailers under the Merchant Customer Exchange, which includes Wal-Mart...

>BEIRUT Syria's warring parties declared a 48-hour ceasefire in two frontline areas on Wednesday after unprecedented mediation from Turkey and Iran, signaling a new approach by some of the main regional backers of the opposing sides.The ceasefire halted fighting between insurgents on the one hand, and the army and...

>Dudley, in prepared remarks, stressed the need for companies to invest in workforce development to better prepare employees for new technologies on factory floors and other workplaces. He did not comment on the timing of interest rate hikes nor update his economic forecasts.The Fed has kept interest rates near...

>In a report on the North Korea monitoring website, 38 North, Jeffrey Lewis said recent satellite imagery showed that in the past year North Korea had begun to refurbish a major uranium mill in Pyongsan, a county in the southern part of the country."The renovation suggests that North Korea...

>The Labor Department's monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, released on Wednesday, showed the number of unemployed job seekers per open job fell to 1.58, the lowest since August 2007. The ratio was at 1.62 in May."We view this metric as an indicator of labor market...

>U.S. stocks were off session lows in afternoon trading on Wednesday, but stayed sharply lower, as the continued decline in the yuan exacerbated fears about a global economic slowdown.Apple (AAPL.O), for whom China is key growth market, fell 3.4 percent earlier in the session, before reversing...

>BEIJING Alibaba's shares skidded to a record low in New York on Wednesday after China's biggest e-commerce company posted its slowest revenue growth in over three years.The shares fell as much as 7.9 percent in the opening minutes of trading and the number of shares exchanged was already...

>Fresh from the sale of the Financial Times newspaper to Japan's Nikkei, Pearson said it had agreed the sale of the Economist to Exor (EXOR.MI), a holding vehicle for the Agnelli family, and to other existing shareholders which include the Cadbury, Layton, Rothschild and Schroder families."We are convinced...

>LEHIGH COUNTY, Penn./NEW YORK It's easy to find female fans of Donald Trump in this cluster of former factory towns in the hills west of New York City even after his comments about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly that have been widely interpreted as referring to her menstrual cycle.

>Revenue for the quarter ending June rose to 23.43 billion yuan ($3.67 billion), Tencent said in it earnings statement on Wednesday, compared to the 24.12 billion yuan forecast made in a Thomson Reuters Smartestimate poll of 11 analysts.Revenue at the gaming unit grew 17 percent year-on-year...

>SAN FRANCISCO/MUMBAI, August 12 Facebook is trying to lure skeptical advertisers in India with features such as free email support for questions about advertising and advice on increasing sales in a bid to boost revenue from its second biggest market.Facebook has 132 million users in India, trailing only the...

>BEIJING "Tragedy" – that was Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (BABA.N) founder Jack Ma's prediction for the fate of rival JD.com Inc (JD.O) in comments published earlier this year.On Monday, Alibaba signaled it is no longer writing off its smaller competitor, making a $4.6 billion investment...

>ANKARA Sidelined on his island prison, the one man who might have helped quell a surge in violence in Turkey's Kurdish southeast appears increasingly powerless as a three-year-old peace process teeters on the brink of collapse.Abdullah Ocalan, whose Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) first took up arms against the Turkish...

>TOKYO Seventy years after Japan's defeat in World War Two, the conflict's legacy haunts East Asia and reconciliation remains elusive.Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may hope to lay the ghosts to rest with a statement on Friday marking the 70th anniversary of the war's end, but risks inflaming tension instead.

>Without citing its sources, the paper reported on Wednesday that the idea meant that "if Greece ran out of money, the Europeans would jump in and the IMF would suffer no losses. In return, the Fund would no longer demand extensive debt relief." The plan would thus fulfil two...

>BRUSSELS Industrial output in the 19 countries sharing the euro fell by more than expected in June, as activity in the currency bloc's main economies of Germany, France and Italy fell markedly.The European Union's statistics office Eurostat said industrial production in euro zone fell by 0.4 percent month-on-month...

>BEIJING/SHANGHAI China's central bank said on Thursday that there was no basis for further depreciation in the yuan given strong economic fundamentals, in a bid to reassure jittery global markets after it devalued the currency earlier in the week.As the yuan fell for the third straight day, the People's...

>According to the 29-page MOU, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, Greek privatization proceeds, excluding bank shares, are expected to total 6.4 billion euros between 2015 and 2017.The MOU lists a range of measures that the Greek government must implement in order to obtain a new...