Town Hall News

July 28 (Reuters) – Centene on Tuesday raised its annual profit forecast, as the health insurer kept control of its costs. The company’s quarterly results and outlook “represent meaningful milestones on our path to restoring profitability and increasing shareholder value,” said CEO Sarah London. Shares of the company were up about 4% in premarket trading. The company in April said it has better control over its medical costs and said […]

LEGE-CAP FERRET, France (AP) — Firefighters kept a vast wildfire in southwest France from advancing overnight Tuesday, extinguishing flare-ups near Atlantic coast dunes before returning heat and drier air threatened to test their hold on the blaze. The fire remained stabilized at 6 a.m. after a calm night and the burned area was unchanged at 420 square kilometers (162 square miles), the Gironde prefecture said. Several flare-ups were detected overnight […]

Cross-border fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan has killed nearly 500 civilians in Afghanistan and wounded over 1,000 others between October and the end of June, the United Nations said Tuesday. In a report on the human rights situation, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said it had documented 499 civilians killed and 1,216 wounded by the fighting between the neighbors that has defied international peace efforts. In one case, […]

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — The number of survivors of a cargo ship that sank Saturday off a Chinese-occupied shoal in the South China Sea rose to 48 by Tuesday as search and rescue crews hunted for more people who went down with the vessel. A multinational search for 14 people who remain missing was still underway Tuesday afternoon involving Vietnamese, Philippine and Chinese rescuers. Vietnamese authorities announced Monday that three […]

By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Ebrahim Hajjaj CAIRO/GAZA, July 28 (Reuters) – On a road in Gaza City’s Zeitoun district, Palestinian resident Assem Dawla loaded mattresses and bags onto a truck as concrete yellow blocks marking the edge of Israel’s expanding military zone stood amid the rubble nearby. He said it was the seventh or eighth time since the war began that he and his family had been forced to leave […]

July 28 (Reuters) – Nasdaq futures fell on Tuesday, mirroring a cautious mood across global markets toward AI chip stocks on concerns about hefty corporate spending and rising Chinese competition, ahead of earnings from some of the biggest companies on Wall Street. Chip bellwethers such as Nvidia fell 1.1%, Micron slid 4.6% and Applied Materials lost 3.5% in premarket trading, while U.S.-listed shares of Taiwan’s TSMC and Korea’s SK Hynix […]

NAIROBI, July 28 (Reuters) – Uganda’s health authorities declared the country Ebola-free on Tuesday ending the East African nation’s latest outbreak of the viral haemorrhagic disease that infected 20 people and killed two of them since it was declared in mid-May. (Reporting by Vincent Mumo Nzilani, Editing by Louise Heavens) Brought to you by www.srnnews.com

By Abigail Summerville NEW YORK, July 28 (Reuters) – Family-owned food companies are stocking up on U.S. snack companies, which are warming to the idea of private backers – many of them overseas – that can help them weather the storm in the supermarket aisles. Last week, Hanover, Pennsylvania-based potato chip maker Utz agreed to be taken private by Germany’s Intersnack Group along with Utz’s founding families. The nearly $3 […]

By Yves Herman and Janis Laizans BORDEAUX, France, July 28 (Reuters) – France was bracing for its fourth major heatwave of the year on Tuesday, as soaring temperatures and tinder-dry conditions across the southwest piled pressure on crews battling a giant wildfire in the Bordeaux region. Temperatures in Bordeaux are forecast to reach 33 degrees Celsius (91 degrees Fahrenheit) during the day, around 7 degrees above the average high between […]