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Kuala Lumpur / DPA Malaysian online shoppers are turning to local sites as the weaker ringgit has made shopping on foreign sites much more expensive. Local online retailer Lazada Malaysia said the drop in the ringgit’s value has not really affected sales on its site. In fact, Lazada Group as a whole recorded US$40 million in overall sales during its ...

Bloomberg As the dot-com bubble burst, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the last firewall between the U.S. economy and a recession is consumer confidence. Given the market’s plunge this year, will it hold now? So far, so good. The risk facing the U.S. is that falling stock prices cause people to start worrying about their finances, and they spend ...

Bloomberg Donald Trump’s dominating victory in the Nevada caucuses pushes him further out ahead of his nearest competitors for the Republican presidential nomination, giving his unorthodox candidacy a major boost heading into Super Tuesday contests next week. The real estate mogul and political newcomer now has won in the Northeast, the South and the West by riding a wave of ...

Vienna / AFP Austria warned on Wednesday that the EU’s future was at stake as it pressed Balkan states, in the absence of an effective common response by the bloc, to reduce the influx of migrants despite fears of a humanitarian crisis. Further undermining the European Union’s hopes to get a grip on the situation, Hungary meanwhile announced a referendum ...

Bloomberg Russian and Syrian warplanes pounded IS positions near Aleppo on Wednesday, a group monitoring the conflict said, trying to regain access to a strategic road whose fall to the militant group set back the allies’ advances before a scheduled truce. IS has tightened its grip on the Syrian military’s only access route to Aleppo, the country’s largest city, according ...

BLoomberg The pound sank below $1.39 for the first time since March 2009, while a gauge of anxiety in currency markets showed traders are preparing for even more extreme moves. Options traders are paying the most to protect against price swings in six months’ time compared with historical volatility since Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed during the 2008 credit crisis. ...

DUBAI / WAM Under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, and in the presence of H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of Dubai Executive Council, the Global Women’s Forum Dubai, 2016, opened on Tuesday at the Madinat ...

DUBAI / WAM H.H. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, on Tuesday delivered a keynote during the official opening of the Global Women’s Forum in Dubai, in which he stressed that the UAE, as part of its developmental journey, has regarded women as partners in the service of the homeland and nation-building, stressing ...

Beijing / AFP Beijing is installing radar facilities on its artificial islands in the disputed South China Sea, an American think tank has said, in a move analysts warned would “exponentially improve” the country’s monitoring capacities. Satellite imagery of Cuarteron reef in the Spratlys released by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) showed what appeared to be ...

Kiev / AFP Germany and France on Tuesday urged Kiev to root out corruption and quickly adopt a law on elections in the pro-Russian east that may help resolve Ukraine’s separatist war. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived in Kiev amid political chaos that has seen ministers in the pro-EU government trade accusations of ...