(Bloomberg) -- Oil headed for a second weekly gain as signs an energy demand recovery in the U.S. is gaining traction outweighed a more pessimistic report from the International Energy Agency.Futures in New York edged higher near $42 a barrel Friday and are up around 3% for the week. A slew of encouraging data on U.S. crude stockpiles, gasoline consumption and refinery activity spurred the biggest daily jump in three weeks Wednesday. The optimism was tempered the following day as the IEA cut its global demand estimates for almost every quarter through the end of 2021.The agency’s steepest downgrades were for the second half of this year and it said the outlook for jet fuel consumption had worsened in the last few weeks as the coronavirus spread more widely. On a brighter note, the IEA said that world markets should tighten during the rest of the year as activity recovers and...
Britain will buy potential COVID-19 vaccines from U.S. drugmakers Johnson & Johnson and Novavax Inc, the companies said on Friday, bringing the total number of deals by the UK government to six as the race for shots heats up. Johnson & Johnson said its Janssen Pharmaceutica unit will supply the UK government with its candidate known as Ad26.COV2.S with an initial sale of 30 million doses on a not-for-profit basis for emergency pandemic use. In a separate statement, Novavax said the UK would buy 60 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine candidate, NVX-CoV2373, for a phase 3 clinical trial....
Baidu's second-quarter revenue fell 1% to 26.0 billion yuan ($3.8 billion) from the same period a year earlier but was better than an average analyst estimate of 25.7 billion yuan. Shares in iQIYI, a Netflix-like video-streaming service, plunged as much as 19% while Baidu shares dropped 5.5% in after-hours trade. It said it could not predict the timing, outcome or consequences of the probe and had hired professional advisers to conduct an internal review....
(Bloomberg) -- When Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris to be his running mate, it sparked a frenzy on the other side of the globe to track down her connections to Chennai, the southern Indian city where her mother was born.On Twitter and Facebook, a flurry of users chronicled every minute link including her grandparents’ home in the Besant Nagar neighborhood, from where her mother Shyamala Gopalan set off as a teenager to pursue a doctoral degree at the University of California Berkeley. Undated photos surfaced of Kamala and younger sibling Maya in saris, smilingly posing with their grandparents during a visit. Many saw Harris a step away from the White House, and the de facto Democratic Party front-runner in four or eight years.Writer Cauvery Madhavan captured the hysteria in a tweet: “If you’re wondering what that loud windy up sound is - it’s all of Chennai cranking...
(Bloomberg) -- Baidu Inc.’s quarterly revenue shrank 1% and its projections suggest sales could slide again, as rivals like ByteDance Ltd. continue to chip away at its core advertising business.China’s leading search engine forecast sales of 26.3 billion yuan ($3.8 billion) to 28.7 billion yuan for the September quarter, compared with estimates for 27.62 billion yuan. Its shares slipped as much as 8% in extended trading after Netflix-style subsidiary iQiyi Inc. disclosed it was cooperating with a U.S. regulatory inquiry into allegations by Wolfpack Research that it inflated user numbers. Shares in iQiyi fell as much as 19%.Read more: Baidu-Backed Iqiyi Tumbles After Disclosing SEC Probe of RecordsBaidu is riding a gradual post-Covid 19 recovery in its home market but, at the same time, is trying to ward off increasingly aggressive competition in media and advertising from the likes of Tencent Holdings Ltd. and ByteDance. The company is diversifying ad revenue...
(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. is offering Seattle-based employees a choice of smaller offices outside the city, suggesting the Covid-19 outbreak and a new local employers tax have pushed the e-commerce giant to consider alternatives to its hometown.In a message to employees Thursday, Amazon asked which communities near Seattle -- including Tacoma and Redmond, Washington -- they’d prefer. The title on the message, which was shared on Reddit and later deleted, was “office workplace options.” Amazon declined to comment on the matter.Amazon, which reported a total global workforce of almost 877,000 as of June 30, has been expanding beyond Seattle for years. It is building a second major office center in suburban Virginia near the nation’s capital and has satellite locations in cities including New York, Austin and Los Angeles.The company has threatened to focus employment growth outside Seattle due to a rocky relationship with city officials and new taxes imposed on...
