Bitcoin stumbles in 2018
Compiled from news services
Bitcoin is already having a bad year.
For the first time since 2015, the cryptocurrency began a new year by tumbling, extending its slide from a record $19,511 reached on Dec. 18.
The virtual coin traded at $13,150 as of 12:58 p.m. in New York, down 8.1 percent from Friday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s also a fall from the $14,156 it hit Sunday, according to coinmarketcap.com, which tracks daily prices.
Pence not visiting Israel
JERUSALEM — Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Monday said an expected visit by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence appears to have been postponed again.
Spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said the visit, which had been expected to take place the week of Jan. 14, is not on the ministry’s schedule for January.
He gave no reason for the apparent delay and said it was still possible that Mr. Pence could decide to come.
Catering giant CEO killed
The chief executive of the world’s biggest catering company, which is also one of Britain’s biggest businesses, died Sunday in a plane crash near Sydney, the Australian police said.
Richard Cousins, the chief executive of Compass Group, was among the six people killed when a seaplane went down off Jerusalem Bay, just north of Sydney, according to the New South Wales police. Police representatives confirmed that those who died were Mr. Cousins, his two sons, his fiancée and her daughter, and the pilot of the plane. The cause of the crash was being investigated.
Mr. Cousins, 58, led Compass Group — which employs more than 550,000 people worldwide, providing food for organizations ranging from Costco and Qualcomm to the University of Houston and the stadium that houses the Utah Jazz basketball team — for more than 11 years.
Mr. Cousins had been due to leave Compass at the end of March. His planned successor as chief executive, Dominic Blakemore, the company’s chief operating officer for Europe, will take over immediately, Compass said.
China eyes Kazakhstan
KHORGOS, Kazakhstan — China’s largest shipping company has poured billions of dollars into buying seaports in Greece and other maritime nations around the world. But the location of its latest big foreign investment has given a curious twist to the expanding ambitions of the China Ocean Shipping Company: The nearest ocean is more than 1,600 miles away.
The state-owned Chinese shipping giant, known as COSCO, became the 49 percent owner this past summer of a patch of frost-covered asphalt bisected by railway tracks and lined with warehouses in landlocked Kazakhstan. The barren wilderness close to the border with China is nowhere on the landmass of Europe and Asia is more distant from the sea.
But it is here, where huge, Chinese-made cranes load containers onto trains instead of ships, that China and Kazakhstan are embracing what they see as the new frontier of global commerce.