Dubai / Emirates Business In keeping with the ‘Year of Giving’ initiative, launched by His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Emirates NBD, a leading banking group in the region, announced that it aligned its 2017 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) objectives with the three main themes of the UAE President’s initiative – ‘Strengthening social responsibility in the private ...

  Bloomberg The Dutch election was upended by a diplomatic standoff with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a spiral of increasingly hostile rhetoric threatened to overshadow the final stretch of campaigning and influence voting. With less than 48 hours to polling day in the first of Europe’s big elections this year, political analysts said the international incident centered on ...

  BEIRUT / AP Syrian opposition fighters will be allowed to leave the last rebel-held neighborhood in the city of Homs under a Russia-backed deal signed on Monday, a Syrian official and an activist said. According to Talal Barrazi, the governor of Homs province where the city of Homs is the capital, the deal is to be carried out within ...

  JERUSALEM / AP Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs said on Monday it denied a prominent British boycott activist’s entry into the country. Revital Yakin-Karkovsky, a senior ministry official, said Hugh Lanning of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was prohibited on Sunday from entering Israel because his organization had close ties to the Hamas militant group and was one of the ...

  MOGADISHU / AP A suicide car bomber detonated near a hotel in Somalia’s capital Monday morning, killing at least six people and injuring four others, police said. The bomber detonated near the Weheliye hotel on the busy Maka Almukarramah road, Capt. Mohamed Hussein said. Ambulances rushed to the scene. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. ...

  WASHINGTON / AP Top Senate Democrats are warning Republicans controlling Congress against adding billions of dollars for President Donald Trump’s US-Mexico border wall to an upcoming $1 trillion-plus catchall spending package. The warning from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others came in a Monday letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The letter also warns against adding ...

  WASHINGTON / AP Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway says she doesn’t have any evidence to support President Donald Trump’s claim that Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phone lines during the election. Instead, Conway is pointing to recent revelations about other government surveillance to suggest it was possible Obama used a different technique. Her response was unlikely to tamp ...

  LONDON / AP Scotland’s leader will seek authority to hold a new independence referendum in the next two years because Britain is dragging Scotland out of the European Union against its will, she said on Monday. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said that she would move quickly to give voters a new chance to leave the United Kingdom because Scotland ...

  Rex Tillerson is off to an agonizingly slow start as secretary of state. That matters, because if Tillerson doesn’t develop a stronger voice, control of foreign policy is likely to move increasingly toward Stephen Bannon, the insurgent populist who is chief White House strategist. Tillerson’s State Department has been in idle gear these past two months. He doesn’t have ...

  The odd thing about India’s stock market rally is just how little faith investors have in it. The Nifty 50 Index is barely 2% away from its all-time intraday high, but unlike the S&P 500 Index, which has closed at records 13 times this year, the Indian benchmark is struggling to break free of scepticism. Given the froth in ...