Town Hall News

LONDON (Reuters) -Barclays has appointed a Morgan Stanley veteran Scott McDavid as its new global head of equities, the British bank said on Tuesday, the latest in a series of high-profile hires to its New-York investment banking operations. The bank also said it had appointed Ronnie Wexler as global head of equities distribution. McDavid will join Barclays in September and report to Adeel Khan, co-head of Global Markets. He worked […]

By Michel Rose and Tassilo Hummel PARIS (Reuters) -French President Emmanuel Macron will meet Sam Altman, the Silicon Valley businessman who rose to fame with ChatGPT, on Tuesday to discuss the place of France and Europe in the global race for artificial intelligence (AI), his office said. Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI who recently told the U.S. congress that things could “go quite wrong” when asked about the potential […]

(Corrects to delete reference to start time of meeting, paragraph 2) By David Morgan and Jarrett Renshaw WASHINGTON (Reuters) -White House and congressional Republican negotiators will meet again on Tuesday to resolve a months-long impasse over raising the government’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, with the nation facing the risk of default in as soon as nine days.     Aides for President Joe Biden and Republican House of Representatives Speaker Kevin […]

DOHA (Reuters) – Boeing Chief Executive Dave Calhoun on Tuesday said that planemakers were unlikely to introduce all-new jet designs before the mid-2030s, citing the pace of emerging propulsion and wing technology. However, Qatar Airways Chief Executive Akbar Al Baker told a conference he would advise planemakers Boeing, Airbus and Embraer to “start looking now” at sustainable new platforms. Both executives were speaking in a panel at the Qatar Economic […]

By Andrew Mills DOHA (Reuters) -Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters on Tuesday said the sale of Credit Suisse to UBS was “surprising” given the “unusual” terms of the deal, which prioritised shareholders over bondholders. “The conclusion was very surprising to me, in terms of the way that the bank was resolved through this very unusual sale to UBS, with associated unusual payments to shareholders versus bondholders,” Winters told an audience […]

By Lucinda Elliott MONTEVIDEO (Reuters) – Uruguayans in the capital Montevideo are praying for rain amid a historic drought that has left the main reservoir for the city with only ten days of water left. Low rainfall and high temperatures across the southern region of South America have triggered a severe drought over the last year, affecting crops in neighboring grains producer Argentina and triggering steep farm losses. In Uruguay, […]

(Fixes typo ‘Russian’ to ‘Russia’ in paragraph 3) AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – The Belarusian government has allegedly taken part in the illegal deportation of children from Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, exiled Belarusian opposition leaders said in a preliminary report. The National Anti-Crisis Management, a group of political opponents to the government of President Alexander Lukashenko, said in the report that 2,150 Ukrainian children, including orphans aged six to 15, were taken […]

By Andrew Osborn (Reuters) – The Russian military said on Tuesday it had routed militants who had attacked a Russian border region with armoured vehicles the previous day, killing more than 70 “Ukrainian nationalists” and pushing the remainder back into Ukraine. In what appeared to be one of the biggest incursions from Ukraine since the war began 15 months ago, two purported anti-Kremlin armed groups employing Russians based abroad said […]

(Corrects headline to reflect ECHR is not an EU court) BUCHAREST (Reuters) -Romania has failed to enforce the rights of same-sex couples by refusing to recognise their relationships, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said on Tuesday in a ruling which will force policymakers to expand protections for the LGBT community. Socially conservative Romania decriminalised homosexuality in 2001, decades later than other parts of the European Union, but still […]