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Beirut / AP A shaky cease-fire in Syria brokered by Moscow and Washington has survived its first week, outlasting skeptics’ expectations and providing some hope that a diplomatic solution to the five-year-old war might be possible. With daily incidents of artillery shelling, airstrikes and clashes, it would be easy to dismiss the “cessation of hostilities” as a charade. But the ...

Bloomberg Fortress Investment Group LLC is betting that one of the real estate industry’s greatest contrarian wagers has more room to run. The manager of $70.5 billion, which piled into Japanese property after a tsunami and nuclear meltdown battered valuations in 2011, has seen its investments surge after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s stimulus revitalized the industry. Invincible Investment Corp., a ...

SAN FRANCISCO / AP Amazon.com is introducing two devices designed to amplify the role its voice-controlled assistant Alexa plays in people’s homes and lives. The products are echoes of Amazon’s Echo, a cylinder-shaped speaker with Internet-connected microphones that became Alexa’s first major showcase when it debuted in late 2014. Set these gadgets up and they’ll listen for your voice and ...

ALKESH SHARMA / Emirates Business Building upon its dependable repute of acting as a fertile ground for facilitating industrial deals and MoU pacts, ISNR 2016’s Business Connect team is all set to arrange more than 3,000 meetings between government, private sector buyers, and exhibiting companies in the forthcoming edition. This is a nearly 60 percent growth over its 2014 edition, ...

Bloomberg What is the oil rally running on? “Gasoline!” cry bulls. “Fumes!” cry bears (and the odd headline writer). To find out who is right, it is worth comparing this rally with the one that happened almost exactly a year earlier. The similarity doesn’t end there. This chart shows what happened with oil prices at the start of this year ...

Washington / AFP US employers defied a global slowdown and pumped up hiring in February, fending off worries about financial market turmoil and the oil industry crash. The Labour Department reported that companies and government authorities added a much better-than-expected 242,000 jobs last month, and the figures for the previous two months were revised higher. Steady growth in consumer spending ...

BLOOMBERG Amazon.com Inc. is dialing back on the security built into its tablets. Bad timing. The Web retailer decided late last year to remove the ability to encrypt data stored on its Fire tablets, a few months before a battle erupted between Apple Inc. and the FBI over the decryption of information locked in a terrorist’s iPhone. As a result, ...

Bloomberg Slovaks are voting in a general election that looks set to hand a third term to Prime Minister Robert Fico, who’s pledging to raise living standards in the eastern euro-area member and protect its citizens from the European Union’s migrant crisis. Having presided over booming growth, Fico’s Smer party holds a strong lead in opinion polls. His support has ...

Abu Dhabi / WAM The role of cross-border partnerships in the global aviation, aerospace, defence and space sectors will come under the spotlight in Abu Dhabi this month when international leaders from all four industries meet at the Global Aerospace Summit to explore and identify future development strategies. Hosted by Mubadala Development Company, the 2016 Summit, the third in the ...

Athens / AFP EU President Donald Tusk on Thursday issued a stark warning to economic migrants not to come to Europe, as he castigated countries for taking unilateral action to tackle the crisis. On a visit to Greece — on the frontline of Europe’s worst migration crisis since World War II — Tusk told economic migrants it was pointless to ...