NEW YORK   –   Yahoo Inc said yesterday it would buy back $3 billion of its common shares to provide liquidity to stockholders looking to sell shares ahead of the company’s pending deal with Verizon Communications Inc.

Shares in Yahoo, which has a 15 percent stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, were up 2 percent at $50.81. Yahoo said it would pay between $50.79 and $44.74 per share based on its calculations, Alibaba’s share price and timing of the buyback. The Dutch auction tender offer will expire on June 13, the company said. Yahoo said its directors and executive officers will not tender any shares in the buyback offer.

Verizon agreed to buy Yahoo’s core internet properties last year for $4.83 billion in cash. It lowered the original offer by $350 million in February following two massive cyber attacks at the internet company.(Reuters)[+]

AUSTRALIA  –   Chanel has been denounced on social media for appropriating Indigenous Australian culture by producing a $2,000 boomerang derided as the ultimate in useless status symbols.

The wood and resin item is priced at A$1,930 in the luxury haute couture brand’s latest spring-summer 2017 pre-collection, under “other accessories”. Jeffree Star, a US makeup artist with a sizeable following on social media, brought it to wider attention when he displayed his own on Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram on Monday. “Having so much fun with my new @Chanel boomerang,” he tweeted with the emoji for the OK symbol. The absence of hashtags to denote sponsored content, as demanded by the Federal Trade Commission in the US, indicates he paid for the boomerang himself.(Theguardian)[+]

AUSTRIA   –   Austria will hold a snap parliamentary election on October 15, political party leaders said yesterday, with the far-right Freedom Party polling strongly in opinion polls. Austria’s political parties had to agree on a date after the junior coalition party, the center-right People’s Party, called for a snap poll. The date of the poll was agreed on by all parties at a meeting yesterday, led by Chancellor Christian Kern, leader of the Social Democrats.(Reuters)[+]

YEMEN – Cholera has killed at least 115 people in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, the local Saba news agency said, after authorities last weekend declared a state of emergency over the outbreak and called for international help to avert disaster.

Sana’a is controlled by the armed Houthi movement, which is aligned with Iran and fighting a western-backed, Saudi-led coalition. More than 10,000 people have been killed and millions displaced in more than two years of war, which has also destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure. Only a few medical facilities are still functioning and two-thirds of the population are without access to safe drinking water, the United Nations has said.(Theguardian)[+]