• Russia denies its atomic plants are responsible for radiation leak

    [ad_1] Russia has denied that its nuclear power stations in the north-west of the country were responsible for a mild leak of radiation detected in Scandinavia last week. Rosenergoatom, the power-plant subsidiary of state-owned nuclear group Rosatom, said its installations near St Petersburg and Murmansk were operating normally. “Aggregated emissions of all specified isotopes in the above-mentioned period did not exceed the reference numbers. No incidents related to release of radionuclide outside containment structures have been reported,” Rosenergoatom said, according to Tass news agency. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, said late on Saturday it had contacted member states seeking more information “and if any event may…

  • Coronavirus latest: Macy’s to cut 3,900 jobs in restructuring

    [ad_1] UK retailers expect falling sales in July Valentina Romei in London UK retailers doubt that reopening non-essential shops will be sufficient to revive demand and prevent sale volumes from falling in July. More than two in three retailers expect sales to be lower than the same month in 2019, the CBI monthly retail sector survey showed on Thursday. The share is largely unchanged since last month and is up from one in four retailers in March. The labour market and businesses’ turnover remained depressed, separate figures from the Office for National Statistics showed, while online job adverts in catering and hospitality rose from 20 per cent from its 2019…

  • Coronavirus latest: Covid-19 spread accelerates as situation deteriorates in Latin America

    [ad_1] Mexico’s death toll on Sunday exceeds 1,000 Jude Webber in Mexico City Mexico reported 1,044 more deaths from coronavirus on Sunday, as fears grow about the severity of the crisis affecting the country. Sunday’s data brought Mexico’s total to 21,825 deaths and 180,545 confirmed cases, but because Mexico has one of the world’s lowest levels of testing, the true figures are widely assumed to be far higher. The low testing rate might have contributed to another alarming statistic, highlighted by Harvard epidemiologist and health economist Eric Feigl-Ding, who tweeted: “Holy moly- I’m crying for MEXICO. The over 50% is the POSITIVITY percentage!!!” https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1274816278197342209 José Luis Alomía, director general of…

  • Coronavirus latest: UK scientific task force recommends downgrading threat level

    [ad_1] Australia is suffering state-sponsored cyber attack, says prime minister Jamie Smyth in Sydney A sophisticated, state-sponsored cyber attack is actively targeting Australian government, business, education and political organisations, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, said on Friday. He did not reveal the identity of the state actor that is responsible for the attacks, which he said had been happening for many months. But the scale and sophisticated nature of the malicious activity has led Australia’s security services to determine that a state actor is responsible, he said. “Based on advice provided to me by our cyber experts, Australian organisations are currently being targeted by a sophisticated state-based cyber actor,” Mr…

  • Coronavirus latest: McDonald’s sales improve as diners flock to drive-thrus

    [ad_1] News you might have missed Wall Street kicked off the new week with gains, as the Federal Reserve’s plans to begin buying corporate debt buoyed market sentiment. The S&P 500 closed 0.8 per cent higher on Monday, led higher by shares across the financial sector. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fared best among the three main indices, rising 1.4 per cent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.6 per cent. The US drug regulator has revoked its emergency approval for hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial that has been touted by the president, Donald Trump, and used to treat Covid-19 patients. The Food and Drug Administration said new data from trials showed the…

  • Ikea in talks with governments over returning furlough money

    [ad_1] Ikea is in talks over returning money to all nine countries that gave the world’s largest furniture retailer government support through furlough schemes as it has suffered less than expected from the Covid-19 crisis. Tolga Oncu, retail operations manager at Ingka Group, the main Ikea retailer, said the company had decided to start a dialogue with Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain and the US. Mr Oncu added that Ikea had thought business could fall by 70-80 per cent at the start of the crisis. But, now all but 23 of its stores had reopened, it was experiencing a large amount of “pent-up demand” for…

  • Deutsche Bank warns bad loan provisions set to reach 11-year high

    [ad_1] Deutsche Bank has warned its provisions for bad loans will surge to the highest level in more than a decade this quarter as the coronavirus crisis leaves the global economy mired in recession. Germany’s biggest lender had earmarked a provision of just €506m for bad loans in the first three months of the year, but cautioned on Wednesday that the figure would increase this quarter. “Our expectation would be that credit loss provisions will be in a range around €800m for this quarter,” James von Moltke, chief financial officer, told analysts on Wednesday at Goldman Sachs’ European Financials Conference. Analysts were expecting just €630m in provisions for the second…

  • Doubts remain over true scale of US jobless crisis

    [ad_1] The US government agency responsible for publishing labour market statistics is struggling to pin down the actual unemployment rate in the world’s largest economy. The problem is due to “misclassification” of workers in a key survey, struggles with data collection during the pandemic, and massive flows in and out of jobs. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a unit of the US labour department, released its latest report on the American jobs market, showing unemployment dropping from 14.7 per cent in April to 13.3 per cent in May, an unexpected improvement. But the data came with a caveat: the agency acknowledged that some furloughed employees had been labelled…

  • Coronavirus latest: Opec and Russia in talks about extending oil production cuts

    [ad_1] Australian house prices fall, but transaction activity rebounds Jamie Smyth in Sydney Australian house prices fell for the first time in a year in May as the coronavirus crisis dented the economy and pushed an estimated 3m people onto government wage-support schemes. Property values across state and territory capitals fell by 0.5 per cent in May, the first monthly decline since June 2019, according to CoreLogic, a research company. House prices in the two biggest cities, Melbourne and Sydney, recorded falls of 0.9 and 0.4 per cent respectively, while the national index fell by 0.4 per cent. However, the price declines were lower than some analysts had anticipated and…