Town Hall News

LONDON (Reuters) – The cost of insuring against a U.S. default rose to its highest since early 2009 on Thursday, in the latest sign of investor nerves over the debt ceiling standoff. U.S. 5-year sovereign credit default swaps rose to 74 basis points, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, up from 73 basis points at the previous close and the highest since March 2009. U.S. President Joe Biden […]

By Xie Yu HONG KONG (Reuters) – China’s securities watchdog on Thursday said that it was willing to work with its counterparts in the United States to promote audit regulatory cooperation and safeguard the rights and interests of global investors. The comment from the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) came a day after a U.S. accounting watchdog said that it found unacceptable deficiencies in audits of U.S.-listed Chinese companies. The […]

MOSCOW (Reuters) – A Russian court fined Alphabet’s Google 3 million roubles ($38,600) on Thursday for failing to delete YouTube videos it said promoted “LGBT propaganda” and “false information” about Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, Russian news agencies reported. Over the last year Moscow has levied dozens of fines against Western tech companies as part of a drive to ramp up control over what Russian internet users see online. As […]

UPINGTON, South Africa (Reuters) – When she was a girl in South Africa’s Northern Cape, Katrina Esau stopped speaking her mother tongue, N|uu, after being mocked by other people and told it was an “ugly language”. Now at age 90, she is the last known speaker of N|uu, one of a group of indigenous languages in South Africa that have been all but stamped out by the impacts of colonialism […]

(Reuters) -Ukraine is holding fire until more Western armoured vehicles arrive before it starts its long-awaited counteroffensive to recapture Russian-occupied territory, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an interview released on Thursday. “We still need a bit more time,” Zelenskiy said in the interview with European broadcasters, according to Britain’s BBC. Ukrainian forces had already received enough equipment from Western allies for a campaign, but some of the promised armoured vehicles […]

TBILISI (Reuters) -Armenia and Azerbaijan blamed each other for an exchange of fire in a border area on Thursday in which Azerbaijan said one of its soldiers was killed. The clashes come amid an intensification of diplomatic talks between the two South Caucasus rivals aimed at bringing them back from the brink of another all-out conflict over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. The enclave is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan, […]

By Sam Nussey and Kiyoshi Takenaka TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp on Friday posted a sharply narrower annual loss after a capital raise using its stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd helped cushion investment loss at its Vision Fund investing arm. SoftBank reported a net loss of 970 billion yen ($7.18 billion) for the year ended March 31, compared with a 1.7 trillion yen loss in the same period […]

By Melanie Burton MELBOURNE (Reuters) -Shares in Australian-listed lithium miners jumped on Thursday after a $10.6 billion merger in the sector raised expectations for more consolidation among producers of the key metal in electric vehicle batteries. The tie up between Allkem Ltd and Livent announced on Wednesday will create the world’s third-biggest producer of lithium for which demand is expected to soar more than five-fold by 2030 amid the energy […]

(Reuters) -Ukraine is holding fire until more Western armoured vehicles arrive before it starts its long-awaited counteroffensive to recapture Russian-occupied territory, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an interview released on Thursday. “We still need a bit more time,” Zelenskiy said in the interview with European broadcasters, according to Britain’s BBC. Ukrainian forces had already received enough equipment from Western allies for a campaign, but some of the promised armoured vehicles […]