Global business
After increasing its bid to $104 billion and enhancing the cash portion of its offer, Anheuser-Busch InBev at last persuaded SABMiller to agree to a merger. The deal, the third-largest corporate acquisition to date, will create a company that produces a third of the world's beer, bringing familiar brews such as Budweiser, Stella Artois, Grolsch and Peroni together under the same roof. To satisfy competition regulators, SAB is expected to sell its 58 percent stake in its American business. Molson Coors, which owns the remaining 42 percent, is the most likely buyer.
Treasury Wine Estates, based in Australia and one of the world's biggest wine producers, bought the American and British wine operations of Diageo, the world's biggest drinks company.
Benefiting from the decline in oil prices, Delta Air Lines reported a quarterly profit of $1.3 billion, up from $357 million in the same three months last year, as its fuel expenses dropped 38 percent.
China's exports fell 3.7 percent in September, in dollar terms, compared with the same month last year and imports were down by 21 percent, raising more concerns about the country's slowing economy. However, China's imports of some commodities, such as copper, have increased by volume on some measures, adding to the uncertainty about how fast the economy is actually growing.
Britain dipped back into deflation in September, as consumer prices fell year-on-year by an annualized 0.1 percent. Core inflation, which excludes energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, rose by 1 percent. The unemployment rate fell to 5.4 percent, the lowest since 2008.
Wal-Mart's share price plunged after it forecast a sharp fall in profit next year. The retailer's wage bill is rising after its decision to pay workers a higher hourly rate. It is also spending more on e-commerce, as a greater amount of sales come from online, and investing in smaller neighborhood stores, which have lower profit margins than the big supercenters.
Valeant, a drug company that found itself in the news recently after Democrats in Congress launched an investigation into big price increases on certain pills, said it had been asked by federal prosecutors to submit documents on a range of pricing issues.
Just a few days after being appointed chief executive at Twitter, Jack Dorsey presented several measures to bring back users who no longer tap into their Twitter feeds. He also announced Twitter's first big job cuts. Around 8 percent of its staff, or 336 employees, are to go, mostly in its product and engineering teams.
In the biggest deal to date in the tech industry, Dell, a computer maker, agreed to buy EMC, a data storage company, for $67 billion. The acquisition shows how Dell, which went private two years ago, is transforming itself into a corporate IT provider in response to the rise of cloud computing.
The mushrooming of cloud computing was underlined by Intel's latest quarterly results. It reported a fall in sales from the chips it makes for PCs, but strong growth in the revenue it gets from chips for data centers (though it cut its forecast of future growth in that business because of uncertainties about the world economy).
Gartner, a market-research firm, said that shipments of PCs fell by 8 percent in the third quarter compared with the same period last year. The computer industry had hoped that the release of Windows 10 would provide a boost, but Gartner found that this had a "minimal impact" in the quarter.
Axel Springer took the most aggressive action yet by any publisher against software that blocks ads on media websites by forbidding people who install ad blockers from reading the online version of Bild, Germany's bestselling daily. Instead, it wants readers to pay a monthly fee of $3.40 for a version of the newspaper with fewer ads. Around 200 million people use ad blockers, costing publishers $22 billion in advertising revenue, according to a study by Adobe and PageFair.
Political economy
Alexander Lukashenko won a fifth consecutive term as president of Belarus. Opposition parties and candidates are essentially nonexistent. But the E.U. suspended its sanctions against Belarus, noting the vote had taken place without violence. Western politicians view Belarus as a potential strategic asset in their standoff with Russia.
The governor of Japan's Okinawa prefecture, Takeshi Onaga, revoked a permit allowing a U.S. military base to move to a new site. The central government says it plans to proceed with the project, which is widely opposed by Okinawans.
