News Archive - 21 August 2015

>WASHINGTON President Barack Obama is gradually building support in the U.S. Congress for an international nuclear deal with Iran, working the phones to counter lobbying against the pact and sending a letter to lawmakers urging them to support it.Obama needs to win the backing of one-third of either...

>SINGAPORE/SYDNEY Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ.AX) will launch the sale process next week for its 39 percent stake in Bank Pan Indonesia Tbk (Panin) (PNBN.JK), worth about $720 million, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. ANZ has hired Goldman Sachs (GS.N) for the sale,...

>SEOUL/HONG KONG Private equity firms have formed three separate teams to bid for Tesco's (TSCO.L) South Korean business valued at about $6 billion, four people with knowledge of the matter said on Friday, in what is tipped as Asia's biggest ever private equity deal.Asia-based Affinity Equity Partners has...

>NEW YORK When Hormel Foods Corp (HRL.N), maker of Spam canned meat, said it was buying Applegate Farms in May, fans of the organic and natural meat company lamented its takeover by Big Food on social media and questioned whether product quality would go down.Even though Applegate executives...

>WASHINGTON Republican Donald Trump is pulling away from the pack in the race for the party's U.S. presidential nomination, widening his lead over his closest rivals in the past week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Friday.Republican voters show no signs they are growing weary of the brash real...

>NEW YORK For months, the U.S. State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids.While the department is now stamping a few dozen...

>SAN FRANCISCO Shares of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd fell 3 percent on Friday and were perilously close to breaking below the price set in the largest IPO in history as fears of a China-led global slowdown rattled investors.A potential move below $68 would make China's largest e-commerce firm the...

>DETROIT/SAN FRANCISCO Consumer electronics company Apple Inc (AAPL.O) has hired a senior engineer from electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA.O), according to a LinkedIn posting, as part of Apple's effort to build a team of experts in automated driving.A LinkedIn profile for Jamie Carlson shows that...

>The tech website said it was given a contact email address for the hackers, who call themselves the Impact Team, by an intermediary. The hackers replied with a message signed with the same signature and fingerprint, known as a PGP key, posted with the Ashley Madison data releases this week,...

>EDGARTOWN, Mass./WASHINGTON The second-in-command of the Islamic State militant group was killed during a U.S. air strike in Iraq on Tuesday, the White House said on Friday, dealing a blow to the group that has sought to form a caliphate across the Muslim world."Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali, also...

>ATHENS Rebels opposed to Greece's international bailout walked out of the leftist Syriza party on Friday, formalising a split after its leader Alexis Tsipras resigned as prime minister and paved the way for early elections.Greece's president gave the conservative opposition a chance to form a new government following Tsipras's...

>SEOUL North Korea put its troops on a war footing on Friday as South Korea rejected an ultimatum to stop propaganda broadcasts or face military action, prompting China to voice concern and urge both sides to step back after an exchange of artillery fire.North Korea's Foreign Ministry said the...

>NEW YORK The steep selloff that pushed down the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index five percent over three days may say more about the outlook for emerging markets than U.S. companies in the fourth quarter, fund managers and analysts say.China's economic slowdown, recessions in Latin American countries...

>LONDON Signs China's economic slowdown is deepening and weak growth in Europe and the U.S. reported on Friday further damaged the outlook for the global economy, sending stocks and commodity prices reeling. China's factory sector shrank at its fastest rate in almost 6-1/2-years in August, a private survey showed,...

>Financial data firm Markit said its preliminary U.S. Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index fell to 52.9 in August, its lowest since October 2013, from a final July reading of 53.8. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the August figure would be 54.0. A reading above 50 indicates...

>Fears of a China-led global economic slowdown drove Wall Street to its steepest one-day drop in nearly four years on Friday and left the Dow industrials more than 10 percent below a May record.Wall Street's selloff this week suggested investors are growing nervous about paying high prices for stocks...