UK   –  Andy Street’s mayoral victory in Britain’s second largest metropolitan area may give the best indication yet of just how far Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives are poaching traditional Labour supporters ahead of the June 8 national vote.

Street quit his $1-million-a-year job as managing director of department store chain John Lewis to stand for the top political job in the West Midlands region of central England, which has a population of about 3 million. His victory this month was a surprise because the seven cities and boroughs, including Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, that make up the West Midlands Combined Authority are a traditional stronghold of the opposition Labour Party.(Reuters)[+]

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)[+]

GERMANY – Germany could move troops now based in Turkey to another country if Ankara persists in denying German lawmakers permission to visit them, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday, highlighting renewed strains between the NATO allies.

Some 250 German troops are stationed at Incirlik air force base, contributing to NATO’s mission targeting Islamist State militants in neighboring Syria. Turkish foreign ministry sources told Reuters a visit by German parliamentarians would not be appropriate at this time, without elaborating. Turkey similarly refused access to German parliamentarians late last year, though that visit eventually went ahead.

“We will continue to talk with Turkey, but in parallel we will have to explore other ways of fulfilling our mandate,” Merkel told reporters on Monday. “That means looking at alternatives to Incirlik, and one alternative among others is Jordan,” she said.(Reuters)[+]

US   –   Many companies outside the United States may not have cover for a recent computer-system attack, leaving them potentially with millions of dollars of losses because there has been relatively little take-up of cyber insurance, insurers say.

A massive ransomware worm caused damage across the globe over the weekend, stopping car factories, hospitals, shops and schools, amid fears it could wreck fresh havoc on Monday when employees return to work. Cybersecurity experts said the spread of the virus dubbed WannaCry – “ransomware” which locked up more than 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries – had slowed, but the respite might only be brief. The overall cost of getting businesses going again could run into the billions of dollars, with companies in Europe, including Russia, and Asia particularly vulnerable.

Nearly nine out 10 cyber insurance policies in the world are in the United States, according to Kevin Kalinich, global head of Aon Plc’s cyber risk practice. The annual premium market stands at $2.5-$3 billion. The biggest reason for the larger penetration in the United States, says Bob Parisi, U.S. cyber product leader for insurance broker Marsh, “is that the U.S. has been living with state breach notification laws for the past 10 years.”(Reuters.)[+]

NORTH KOREA – North Korea’s parliament sent a rare letter of protest to the U.S. House of Representatives over its new package of tougher sanctions, state media reported yesterday. The sanctions were condemned as a “heinous act against humanity” by the foreign affairs committee of the North’s Supreme People’s Assembly, the report said. It’s not unusual for Pyongyang to condemn moves to censure it by Washington, but a direct protest to Congress would be rare. It was not immediately clear how the protest was conveyed since North Korea and the United States have no diplomatic relations and virtually no official channels of communication. The report, carried by the North’s Korean Central News Agency, said the letter of protest was sent yesterday. The House passed the sanctions package bill on May 4. (Fox news)[+]

LONDON –  Hospitals in the UK were crippled by a “large-scale” cyber attack yesterday that forced operations to be canceled and ambulances to be diverted. Health workers reported being locked out of their systems and seeing messages demanding ransom payments to regain access. NHS England described the incident as a “ransomware” attack. At least 16 organizations connected to the National Health Service (NHS) in England reported being affected. “The investigation is at an early stage but we believe the malware variant is Wanna Decryptor”, NHS Digital said in a statement. “At this stage we do not have any evidence that patient data has been accessed. We will continue to work with affected organisations to confirm this.”(CNN)[+]

CONGO –  An outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo that began April 22 has resulted in at least one death and possibly two others, according to the World Health Organization. The Congo Ministry of Health notified the WHO of nine suspected cases of Ebola in the Aketi territory, in the northeastern province of Bas-Uele, WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said. Three people with the hemorrhagic fever have died, but only one death has been confirmed as resulting from the Zaire strain of Ebola. Officials suspect that the two other deaths were also caused by the highly infectious virus, which spreads through contact with bodily fluids. (CNN)[+]