Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition March 6, 2023

● War in Ukraine ▶ Ukraine signaled it may be forced to evacuate Bakhmut. Russia’s prolonged siege of the city, which has seen incredibly high casualty rates, has puzzled military observers. ▶ Moscow blamed Kyiv for drone attacks in some Russian Black Sea regions but said they were repelled with limited damage. Ukraine hasn’t claimed responsibility for the incursions. ▶ Lithuania’s state-owned energy company, Ignitis, is appealing to its rivals to follow its lead and donate about 10% of last year’s profits to help rebuild Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. ● Globally, there have been 676 million cases of Covid-19 and almost 6.9m deaths. The US Department of Energy and the FBI said the pandemic likely resulted from a lab accident in China. Many scientists say there is no evidence for that. China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman…

After years of chaos at the US’s southern border, the government says illegal crossings have fallen more than 40% in recent months. These figures suggest that the migration policies President Joe Biden’s administration has introduced are starting to deliver results. It’s regrettable that politicians in both parties are trying to undermine this progress before it’s barely begun. Since late last year, the administration has employed a carrot-and-stick strategy to contain the surge of people attempting to enter the country. It started a program for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, allowing as many as 30,000 a month to apply for temporary visas before reaching the border. Under the program, known as humanitarian parole, applicants who have a sponsor, pass background checks and meet other requirements can work in the US…

▶ Australia’s central bank sets interest rates on March 7; the Bank of Japan, on March 9. Forecasters say the BOJ is likely to continue to defy global trends and keep its key rate at -0.1%. ▶ The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports February unemployment data on March 10. With the job market still tight, analysts don’t expect much of a change from January’s very low 3.4%. ▶ China posts February inflation data on March 9. Economists believe prices, which began to climb after its Covid-19 restrictions ended, will keep ticking up from January’s 2.1%. ▶ Trip.com and Grindr report quarterly earnings on March 6; Dick’s Sporting Goods and Manchester United, on March 7; Embraer and Campbell Soup, on March 8. ▶ Round-robin play for 20 national teams in the World Baseball Classic…

The data alarmed employers and economists as the shock waves of the pandemic hit the US. Women were leaving their jobs in droves. By the end of 2020, their share of the labor force had fallen to its lowest level since 1987. Two years later, the female participation rate is steadily returning to prepandemic levels. Problem solved? Not exactly. Another one is festering below the surface: Many seniorlevel women, exhausted and torn between their career ambitions and personal lives, are now bowing out. Some are switching to less demanding positions or changing industries, while others are giving up lucrative paychecks and simply walking away, raising troubling issues for the decades-long national effort to diversify the top ranks of corporations. Several recent studies have documented the same disturbing trend—which government data aren’t…

Tom Quinn thought he had a deal. The chief executive officer of Neon, the distributor behind such films as Parasite and I, Tonya, last year agreed to sell the company for more than $100 million to Steven Rales, the billionaire industrialist and backer of director Wes Anderson. But Rales got spooked by the shaky economy and pulled out at the last minute, according to a person familiar with the matter. A slowdown in spending by streaming services, higher interest rates and a tough regulatory climate have cratered the once-hot market for independent film and TV studios. Although deals could still come together, at least a half-dozen other companies have explored—and thus far failed to close—sales, including J.J. Abrams’s Bad Robot, British visual effects maker Cinesite and kids’ media company PocketWatch Inc.,…

As western Europe and the US imposed sanctions last year in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, civil aviation looked like a promising place to inflict maximum pain. Russian airlines, after all, fly jets mostly from Airbus SE and Boeing Co., which are barred from doing business in Russia. And more than two-fifths of those aircraft were owned by foreign leasing companies that immediately demanded their property back. But one year into the war, Russian carriers are still operating 467 Airbus and Boeing jets, versus 544 a year ago, according to researcher Cirium. Although Russia’s airlines have eliminated flights to the US, western Europe and allied countries, they’ve ramped up service to Thailand, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, alongside former Soviet republics such as Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. They fly…