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Reuters Berlin — Volkswagen’s original brand is “no longer competitive,” the company’s brand chief warned Monday, owing to high costs and low productivity. “With many of our pre-existing structures, processes and high costs, we are no longer competitive as the Volkswagen brand,” Thomas Schaefer told staff during a meeting at the German carmaker’s headquarters in

By Michelle Toh and Eric Cheung, CNN Hong Kong/Taipei (CNN) — Alibaba founder Jack Ma has a new title: owner of “Ma’s Kitchen.” China’s most famous tech billionaire has thrown his weight behind a newly formed startup, whose name in English translates to “Hangzhou Ma’s Kitchen Food.” According to Chinese public records, the company was

By Michelle Toh, Lauren Izso and Alex Stambaugh, CNN Hong Kong/Jerusalem (CNN) — Elon Musk visited Israel Monday, meeting the country’s leaders and walking through a kibbutz destroyed by Hamas last month as he tried to calm outrage caused by his endorsement of an antisemitic post on his social media platform, X. Musk was taken

By Laura He, CNN Hong Kong (CNN) — The troubles besetting one of China’s biggest privately-owned financial conglomerates have deepened with Zhongzhi now at the centre of a criminal investigation. Beijing police have begun a probe into the wealth management unit of Zhongzhi Enterprise Group, the authorities said over the weekend. The announcement comes just

By Eva Rothenberg, CNN (CNN) — Since at least 2019, Meta has knowingly refused to shut down the majority of accounts belonging to children under the age of 13 while collecting their personal information without their parents’ consent, a newly unsealed court document from an ongoing federal lawsuit against the social media giant alleges. Attorneys

By Christopher Hickey, CNN Not even two years of soaring prices and mounting interest rates have stopped Americans from opening their wallets and tapping their credit cards. The consumer’s willingness to keep paying high prices has kept the US economy relatively strong, but that attitude could soon be shifting. Some experts think the combination of

By Clare Duffy and Rachel Ramirez, CNN New York (CNN) — Tomato growers in central India have been increasingly worried about the volatility that extreme weather events have brought to the region. For much of the area, the last decade has been punctuated by severe droughts that led to significant crop loss, impacting the livelihoods

By Eva Rothenberg, CNN (CNN) — Honda is recalling more than 300,000 vehicles over faulty seat belts. In a notice filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Tuesday, the automaker said some front seat belts in 2023-2024 Accords and HR-Vs have missing pretensioner rivets. A pretensioner is the seat belt component that

By Eva Rothenberg, CNN (CNN) — Whether they jostled through brick-and-mortar stores or toggled between tabs and virtual carts, holiday shoppers were eager to participate in Black Friday this year. Both in-store and online retail sales increased year-over-year unadjusted for inflation, according to Mastercard’s SpendingPulse insights, which noted that apparel, jewelry and restaurant categories saw considerable

By Samantha Delouya, CNN Los Angeles (CNN) — If your idea of train travel – fast, easy, ubiquitous, even glamorous – is from movies like “Before Sunrise” or “Bullet Train” set in Europe or Asia, you’ll be surprised to learn that the US was once the world’s superpower in passenger trains. With a busy transcontinental

By Nathaniel Meyersohn, CNN New York (CNN) — When Sears, Toys “R” Us and Circuit City filed for bankruptcy in recent years, it was an opportunity for other retailers to move into their old storefronts. Now, retailers are pouncing on empty Bed Bath & Beyond stores. “Some of our best stores were created from carved-up

By Parija Kavilanz, CNN New York (CNN) — Let the shopping games begin. Deal-hunters headed to their favorite stores in person and online on the day after Thanksgiving to bag what they hope are some of the best early bargains of the year-end holiday period. So are the start-of-the-season deals enticing enough for shoppers or

By Jordan Valinsky, CNN New York (CNN) — Chances are, you or someone you know is getting ready to shop on Black Friday. The informal kickoff to the Christmas shopping season has morphed into a spectacle that helps retailers lure shoppers to their stores, sometimes as early as dawn, to get deals. About 131 million

By Nathaniel Meyersohn, CNN New York (CNN) — Many retailers and industry lobbying groups say shoplifting is at crisis-level proportions and that it’s even forcing some stores to close. But Best Buy says it has shoplifting under control. The electronics retailer with nearly 1,000 stores says it is preventing shoplifting through higher staffing levels in

By Olesya Dmitracova, CNN London (CNN) — It has taken nearly a month, but workers striking against Tesla in Sweden have finally drawn a response from the company’s famously anti-union boss. “This is insane,” CEO Elon Musk said Thursday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he owns. Musk was responding to news

By Wayne Chang and Michelle Toh, CNN Taipei/Hong Kong (CNN) — Terry Gou, the billionaire founder of major Apple supplier Foxconn, withdrew from the race to become Taiwan’s next president on Friday, just hours before the deadline to formally register as a candidate. “I have never yielded in the battlefield of international business,” Gou said in

By Olesya Dmitracova, CNN London (CNN) — Oil and gas producers must confront a “pivotal” choice: continue to accelerate the climate crisis or become part of the solution, the International Energy Agency said in a report Thursday. The industry currently accounts for only 1% of global investment in clean energy, and continues to pump out