REAL ESTATE
US home sales decline
Sales of new US homes edged lower last month after a strong rise the prior month, according to US Department of Commerce data released on Tuesday. New sales for single-family homes hit a seasonally-adjusted 464,000 last month, down 2.1 percent from the revised October count of 474,000, the data showed. Last month’s sales rose 16.6 percent compared with a year ago. The median sales price of new houses for last month was US$270,900, while the average price was US$340,300, a record.
SPAIN
King expresses sympathy
King Juan Carlos has used his annual Christmas address to the nation to express sympathy for millions of Spaniards who have lost their jobs amid the nation’s economic crisis and have little relief in sight. The 75-year-old monarch said on Tuesday night that a big effort is needed to jump-start the economy because “we cannot accept as normal the anguish of the millions of Spaniards who do not have work.” The nation has an unemployment rate of 26 percent, and joblessness is more than twice that for Spaniards under age 25.
OIL
BP injury argument rejected
A federal judge has rejected BP’s argument that a multibillion-dollar settlement over the company’s massive 2010 Gulf oil spill should not compensate businesses if they cannot directly trace their losses to the spill. US District Judge Carl Barbier said in a ruling on Tuesday that the settlement was designed to avoid the delays that would result from a “claim-by-claim analysis” of whether each claim can be traced to the spill.
TECHNOLOGY
BlackBerry founder divests
BlackBerry co-founder Michael Lazaridis has trimmed his stake in the troubled smartphone pioneer to just below 5 percent after selling 3.5 million shares. The sales disclosed in a Tuesday regulatory filing came after BlackBerry Ltd announced a third-quarter loss of US$4.4 billion last week. The setback marked the latest sign of the company’s deepening distress as BlackBerry’s products fall further behind the iPhone and devices running on Android software.Lazaridis previously owned a 5.7 percent stake in the Waterloo, Ontario, company that he once ran.
INTERNET
Twitter shares surge
Twitter Inc, the microblogging service that held its initial public offering last month, rose to a record for a third trading day amid optimism that the company has room to expand sales in digital advertising. Twitter jumped 8.4 percent to US$69.96 at the close in New York after rising 7.5 percent on Tuesday. The stock has surged 169 percent since going public at US$26 on Nov. 6, giving Twitter a market value of almost US$40 billion. — larger than Time Warner Cable Inc, media company Viacom Inc and retailer Target Corp.
BRAZIL
Tax to be eliminated
The government is eliminating a four-year-old tax on the issuance of depositary receipts in international markets, Interim Deputy Finance Minister Dyogo Oliveira said on Tuesday.
The 1.5 percent tax on the conversion of local shares into depositary receipts dates from November 2009. It was an attempt to balance out a levy on foreign investments in local stocks that has since been abolished, Oliveira said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group