European stocks were subdued on Monday as the U.S. government shutdown entered its third day and investors awaited cues from two major central bank meetings this week.
The pan-European Stoxx Europe 600 index was marginally lower at 400.90 in late opening deals after rising half a percent on Friday.
The German DAX and France’s CAC 40 index were down about 0.1 percent each while the U.K.’s FTSE 100 was little changed with a positive bias.
Sanofi shares tumbled nearly 3 percent after the French drugmaker agreed to buy hemophilia drugmaker Bioverativ Inc. for $11.6bn.
Swiss banking giant UBS dropped 1.7 percent after it reported a 2.22 billion-franc ($2.3 billion) loss for the fourth quarter as a result of a large writedown related to the new U.S. tax overhaul.
Swiss luxury group Richemont lost over 1 percent after it launched an offer to take full control of Yoox Net-a-Porter. Shares of Italian online luxury retailer Yoox Net-a-Porter soared more than 24 percent.
Gambling firms slumped in London after reports that the government is set to limit gambling terminal stakes to two pounds. William Hill slumped 13 percent while Ladbrokes Coral shares fell over 10 percent.
On the positive side, South African retailer Steinhoff jumped almost 9 percent. The company is launching an accelerated bookbuild to place about 29.5 million shares in PSG Group Limited with qualifying institutional investors.
Germany’s Deutsche Telekom rallied 1.6 percent after saying it is confident of hiking dividends in 2018.
British online supermarket Ocado Group soared 13 percent after announcing a partnership with Sobeys to develop an online grocery business in Canada.
Facebook on Monday said it would open three digital training hubs in Europe to train people in digital skills.
The social media giant said it was committed to training one million people over the next two years as part of its drive to show its contribution to the bloc.
The U.S. company – which has faced regulatory pressure in Europe over issues ranging from privacy to antitrust – said it would open three “community skills hubs” in Spain, Poland and Italy.
It said it would also invest 10 million euros (12.2 million dollars) in France through its artificial intelligence research facility.
“People are worried that the digital revolution is leaving people behind and we want to make sure that we’re investing in digital skills to get people the skills they need to fully participate in the digital economy,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, told Reuters.
“The community hubs will offer training in digital skills, media literacy and online safety to groups with limited access to technology, including old people, the young and refugees,’’ she said.
Facebook said this in view of its commitment to train one million people and business owners by 2020.
“Absolutely, we want to make sure that people see that we are investing locally, we’re investing in technology, we’re investing in humans,” Sandberg said.
Facebook’s move comes as EU states discuss proposals to raise the tax bill of tech multinationals after pressure from large states that accuse firms like Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook of slashing their tax bills by re-routing their EU profits to low-tax countries such as Luxembourg and Ireland.
Smaller EU countries like Luxembourg or Malta argued that a solo EU move on corporate tax reform would damage its economy and favour competitors.
EU states could have lost 5.4 billion euros in tax revenues from Google and Facebook between 2013 and 2015, according to a report by an EU lawmaker last year.
Facebook executives are fanning out across Europe this week to address the social media giant’s slow response to abuses on its platform, seeking to avoid further legislation along the lines of a new hate speech law in Germany it says goes too far.
Through its Community Boost EU programme, Facebook will work with small businesses and start-ups to help them grow and hire.
It said it would conduct in-person training for 100,000 small- and medium-sized businesses by 2020 and online training for 250,000 businesses.
“What we’re finding is when small businesses use technology, when small businesses use Facebook, they hire,” Sandberg said.
The European Union’s executive has stressed the need to boost Europeans’ digital skills to help bring down unemployment and enable Europe to create its own digital giant.
Facebook has opened similar centres in countries such as Nigeria and Brazil among others.
The European Union (EU) has fined Google a record-breaking 2.4 billion-euro ($2.7 billion) in what is just a fraction of the costs from the EU’s demand that the Internet giant stop skewing search results to favour its own shopping site gaining ‘undue’ dominance in so doing.
To some smaller businesses, this might mean ‘torn apart’, but for the search engine giant, the penalty will barely make a dent in its cash hoard of $90 billion in ad revenue.
According to a latest PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Entertainment and Media Global Outlook, two-thirds of all global ad dollars this year will go to Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, that have been tagged the Big Five.
The Big Five are reportedly crushing everyone else in the new media world, and this has raised a lot of concerns.
While European politicians have called on the EU to sanction Google or even break it up for the undue dominance, US critics claim EU regulators are targeting successful American firms.
A ruling by EU antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager, has now put an end to concerns in Europe, and raised eyebrows in the US.
“Vestager gave Google a 90-day ultimatum to find ways to give equal treatment to smaller price-comparison services that compete with the Google Shopping ads that appear when people search for products.
“The EU will also monitor Google for five years and can force the company to pay additional fines of up to 5 percent of its daily revenue if it doesn’t comply,” according to Bloomberg.
Meanwhile the search engine giant is to pay a fine towering $2.7 billion to the European Commission.
Vestager’s decision marks the end of a seven-year probe fuelled by complaints from small shopping websites as well as bigger names, including News Corp., Axel Springer SE and Microsoft Corp.
A lawyer for Norton Rose Fulbright in Brussels, Jay Modrall said Google will have “the sword of Damocles hanging over its head” further stressing that this is because it is no longer the firm’s choice on how it makes changes to allay EU concerns. Instead, according to the legal practitioner, Google is “under a legal requirement to do so and under notice that if its commitments are not sufficient, it’ll be fined even more”.
And according to a binding order from the European Commission, Google must “stop its illegal conduct” and give equal treatment to rival price-comparison services.
France President, Emmanuel Macron swerved to avoid the President of the United States, Donald Trump and embraced German Chancellor, Angela Merkel instead, in what seems to be Snub of the Year, in Brussels.
The newly elected French President tweeted the video of himself walking up the red carpet towards the group of NATO leaders, seemingly headed straight towards the US President. But at the last second President Macron ducks to the right and shares a warm embrace with Angela Merkel, leaving Trump to lower his hands awkwardly back down to his sides.
Macron then proceeds to greet other leaders including Trump, who grabs his French counterpart’s hand with a characteristic fiery action.
The not-so-subtle power play may be read as a show of support for Merkel, after Trump previously refused to shake hands with her when they first met, according to The Telegraph.
The incident also comes after Macron and Trump shared another power handshake on Thursday morning at the pair’s first face-to-face meeting in Brussels.
“Each president gripped the other’s hand with considerable intensity, their knuckles turning white and their jaws clenching and faces tightening,” according to a report by the White House correspondents’ pool.
Philip Rucker of the Washington Post said: “Trump tried twice to release and Macron held on tight… It was quite a handshake, two alphas.”
Trump is known for his habit of pumping people’s hands and then yanking them forcefully towards him in a gesture that psychologists believe is intended to demonstrate dominance. Quite literally, Trump likes to have the upper hand.
Macron, who at 39 is France’s youngest leader, may have been well-prepared for his American counterpart’s strong-arm handshake and simply held on tighter than Trump, 70.
President Donald Trump is never far from controversy; watch him shove fellow NATO leader, Dusko Markovic aside to take front spot in a photo shoot.
International investigators hunted Saturday for those behind an unprecedented cyber-attack that affected systems in dozens of countries, including at banks, hospitals and government agencies, as security experts sought to contain the fallout.
The assault, which began Friday and was being described as the biggest-ever cyber ransom attack, struck state agencies and major companies around the world — from Russian banks and British hospitals to FedEx and European car factories.
“The recent attack is at an unprecedented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits,” said Europol, Europe’s police agency.
Europol said a special task force at its European Cybercrime Centre was “specially designed to assist in such investigations and will play an important role in supporting the investigation”.
The attacks used ransomware that apparently exploited a security flaw in Microsoft operating systems, locking users’ files unless they pay the attackers a designated sum in the virtual currency Bitcoin.
Images appeared on victims’ screens demanding payment of $300 (275 euros) in Bitcoin, saying: “Ooops, your files have been encrypted!”
Payment is demanded within three days or the price is doubled, and if none is received within seven days the files will be deleted, according to the screen message.
But experts and government alike warn against ceding to the hackers’ demands.
“Paying the ransom does not guarantee the encrypted files will be released,” the US Department of Homeland Security’s computer emergency response team said.
Manhunt for hackers behind global WannaCry Ransomware cyberattack underway
“It only guarantees that the malicious actors receive the victim’s money, and in some cases, their banking information.”
Experts and officials offered differing estimates of the scope of the attacks, but all agreed it was huge.
Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the Helsinki-based cyber security company F-Secure, told AFP it was the biggest ransomware outbreak in history, saying that 130,000 systems in more than 100 countries had been affected.
He said Russia and India were hit particularly hard, largely because Microsoft’s Windows XP — one of the operating systems most at risk — was still widely used there.
French police said there were “more than 75,000 victims” around the globe, but cautioned that the number could increase “significantly”.
The virus spread quickly because the culprits used a digital code believed to have been developed by the US National Security Agency — and subsequently leaked as part of a document dump, according to researchers at the Moscow-based computer security firm Kaspersky Lab.
Microsoft said the situation was “painful” and that it was taking “all possible actions to protect our customers”.
It issued guidance for people to protect their systems, while taking the highly unusual step of reissuing security patches first made available in March for Windows XP and other older versions of its operating system.
US software firm Symantec said the majority of organisations affected were in Europe, and the attack was believed to be indiscriminate.
The companies and government agencies targeted were diverse.
In the United States, package delivery group FedEx said it was “implementing remediation steps as quickly as possible,” while French carmaker Renault was forced to stop production at sites in France, Slovenia and Romania.
Russia’s interior ministry said some of its computers had been hit by a “virus attack” and that efforts were underway to destroy it. The country’s banking system was also attacked, although no problems were detected, as was the railway system.
Germany’s rail operator Deutsche Bahn said its station display panels were affected. Universities in Greece and Italy also were hit.
China’s network information safety working group sent a warning to universities about the cyber-attack and the National Internet Emergency Center suggested that users update Windows security patches.
Shanghai’s Fudan University received reports that a large number of school computers were infected with the virus.
Kaspersky said it was “trying to determine whether it is possible to decrypt data locked in the attack — with the aim of developing a decryption tool as soon as possible.”
On Saturday, a cyber security researcher told AFP he had accidentally discovered a “kill switch” that could prevent the spread of the ransomware.
The researcher, tweeting as @MalwareTechBlog, said registering a domain name used by the malware stops it from spreading, though it cannot help computers already affected.
“If you have anything to patch, patch it,” the researcher said in a blog post. “Now I should probably sleep.”
A hacking group called Shadow Brokers released the malware in April claiming to have discovered the flaw from the NSA, Kaspersky said.
“Unlike most other attacks, this malware is spreading primarily by direct infection from machine to machine on local networks, rather than purely by email,” said Lance Cottrell, chief scientist at the US technology group Ntrepid.
G7 finance ministers meeting in Italy vowed to unite against cyber crime, as it represented a growing threat to their economies and should be tackled as a priority. The danger will be discussed at the G7 leaders’ summit next month.
In Britain, the attack disrupted care at National Health Service facilities, forcing ambulances to divert and hospitals to postpone operations.
“There will be lessons to learn from what appears to be the biggest criminal cyber-attack in history,” Interior minister Amber Rudd said.
“But our immediate priority as a government is to disrupt the attack, restore affected services as soon as possible, and establish who was behind it so we can bring them to justice.”
President Muhammadu Buhari has frowned at the high rate of illegal migration of Nigerian youths to European countries through the Mediterranean Sea.
Buhari made this known at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Sahel and West Africa, organised by the Food Crisis Protection Network in Abuja on Monday.
The president, who was represented by Chief Audu Ogbeh, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, called for an immediate stop to the action by Nigerians, saying it was unfair to European countries.
He said that agriculture revitalisation was a solution to the migration issue, while expressing the readiness of his administration to support farmers in order to boost local production in the country.
“We are pained when we see our youths across West and North Eastern Africa in a desperate attempt to cross the desert; get to Libya and cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.
“We consider it as something that must stop as fast as possible because it is unfair to Europe.
“We think that if we reorganise our agriculture better, many of these youths will earn a decent living at home rather than become an embarrassment to their host countries and to us here in Africa.
“We are not unmindful of our youths population here, hence the need to ensure that the agriculture sector is revitalised as soon as possible.
“We have decided that we will no longer rely on rainfall, we will create dams, water reservoirs and insist on harvesting food at least three times in a year,’’ the president assured.
On food crisis in the West African region, he described the threat as real, saying that urgent steps were necessary to address the challenge.
According to him, there are 800 million hectares of agricultural lands across the world yet to be cultivated and Africa owns half of them.
The president, appealed to Sahel and West African agricultural stakeholder to devise ideas that would guarantee better management in cattle breeding through artificial insemination.
Buhari, however, said his administration was aggressively tackling humanitarian crisis of the Internally Displaced Persons by attending to issues of food and nutrition, especially for women and children in the North East.
Mr Marcel De Souza, the President of ECOWAS Commission, said that no fewer than 40 million Nigerians were internally displaced as a result of the insecurity in the North eastern region.
He listed some of the developmental challenges of the Sahel and West African regions to include economic and political governance.
De Souza called on governments of the regions to invest toward addressing unemployment and food crisis, which he described as bane to development.
Mr Kassoum Denon, the Malian Minister of Agriculture, appealed to various countries in the Sahel and West Africa to share ideas and success stories with a view to addressing food crisis in the regions.
The Food Crisis Protection Network is an international network created in 1984 as part of regional system for the prevention of food crisis.
It brings together Sahelian and West African expertise of the humanitarian and development spheres by mobilising available resources for social protection, livelihoods, nutrition, agricultural development, natural resources management to benefit the most vulnerable populations.
It aims to eradicate hunger and malnutrition by 2030 in the regions.
