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Bloomberg England’s luxury stores will have more than Christmas sales to worry about when they reopen next week. Many fear a planned tax change related to Brexit could hurt business even more than Covid-19 lockdowns. Retailers are calling on UK Finance Minister Rishi Sunak to reverse a decision to abolish a perk for shoppers from China, the Middle East, the ...

ABU DHABI / WAM Abdulhamid M Saeed Alahmadi, Governor of the Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE), on Wednesday inaugurated the Government FinTech Forum which took place as part of the FinTech Abu Dhabi Festival 2020, held under the patronage of HH Sheikh Hazza bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Chairman of Abu Dhabi Executive Council, and co-hosted by CBUAE and ...

ABU DHABI / WAM The Ministry of Finance (MoF) recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Secretariat General of the GCC, to establish joint programmes and initiatives in the financial and economic sectors, and to implement them as part of the GCC pavilion during Dubai Expo 2020. The singing took place alongside a meeting with Younis Haji Al Khoori, ...

ABU DHABI / WAM The Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA) has launched the “Agricultural Registry” project to build an accurate and comprehensive database for the agricultural sector in the Abu Dhabi Emirate. It will help estimate local production, update farm and farm owners’ data, and link such data directly to the databases of Abu Dhabi Digital Authority ...

Bloomberg Japan and China are racing to build a new type of ultra-fast, levitating train, seeking to demonstrate their mastery over a technology with big export potential. Magnetic levitation, or maglev, trains use powerful magnets to glide along charged tracks at super-fast speeds made possible by the lack of friction. A handful of short distance and experimental maglev trains are ...

DUBAI / WAM India’s farm sector growth will likely be the highest in three years as better-than-normal rain helped farmers to boost output of crops, including rice, sugar cane and soybeans. Agriculture growth in the year that began in April will surpass the 4% level achieved in 2019-20, said Atul Chaturvedi, president of the Solvent Extractors’ Association of India. That ...

Bloomberg Fears that a civil war raging in neighbouring Ethiopia’s northern Tigray Region will reverberate across eastern Africa are playing out in Sudan, which is contending with a massive influx of refugees who’ve fled the fighting. More than 40,000 people have streamed across the border from Tigray into eastern Sudan since November 7, the United Nations said. Sudan itself is ...

Bloomberg Amazon.com Inc is doling out hiring bonuses as high as $3,000 to make sure it has enough people to squeak through the busy holiday shopping season. That’s stoking resentment among existing workers who recently got coupons for Thanksgiving turkeys as a thank you for their hard work. Social-media chatrooms where Amazon workers congregate have lit up. One worker shared ...

Bloomberg The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) affirmed its decision to designate ZTE Corp as a national security threat over concerns telecommunications gear made by the Chinese company could be used for spying. The action shows that the FCC remains determined to drive ZTE and fellow Shenzhen-based manufacturer Huawei Technologies Co from the US market, where small rural carriers rely ...

Bloomberg The UK lost a “crucial month” in its fight against coronavirus because it was too slow to respond to a shortage of ventilators, while the delay in sourcing protective equipment came at a cost of 10 billion pounds ($13.3 billion) to the taxpayer, according to two spending reports. Ministers only started efforts to buy more ventilators on March 3, ...