International News

  Washington / AFP Extreme poverty has been falling steadily around the world, but eliminating it by 2030 could be stymied by unequal distribution of the gains of economic growth, the World Bank said on Sunday. Unless the gains of growth are steered better to those at the bottom of a country’s economy, they could be left behind, warned the ...

  Bloomberg Italy’s bond-yield spread to Spanish securities climbed to the highest level in almost two years after the latest poll showed that the constitutional referendum, on which Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s political fate hangs, is too close to call. Italian 10-year government bonds declined, erasing last week’s gain, after a survey conducted by Ipsos PA for the newspaper Corriere ...

  Washington / AFP The World Bank is indirectly financing a boom in some of Asia’s dirtiest coal-fired power generation despite commitments to end most funding for the sector, a development advocacy group charged on Monday. The power plants, which contribute to climate change and deforestation as well as premature deaths due to illness, are cropping up from Bangladesh to ...

  New Delhi / AFP India’s Reliance Group and France’s Dassault have signed a lucrative defence partnership as part of a fighter jet deal agreed between the two nations last month, the companies said on Monday. India signed a contract to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets for 7.9 billion euros ($8.8 billion), France’s biggest ever such sale, as the nation ...

  BLOOMBERG Coal India Ltd.’s output fell year-on-year for a second consecutive month in September, signaling demand from power plants, its biggest consumers, remains weak. Production at the world’s biggest miner of the fuel declined 5.2 percent from a year earlier to 35.24 million metric tons in September, while shipments fell 6.6 percent to 37.74 million tons, according to data ...

  HANOI / AP Vietnamese authorities say they’ve seized 309 kilograms (682 pounds) of elephant tusks illegally imported from Nigeria. A customs official says the tusks were seized at Hanoi’s airport on Saturday. She said on Monday that the cargo had been declared as glass. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the ...

  MANILA / AP The Philippine economy may grow faster than expected if public infrastructure spending is increased as planned, the World Bank (WB) said on Monday. If that happened, the country’s economic growth may exceed the earlier forecasts of 6.4 percent this year and 6.2 percent in the next two years, the bank said. It also noted some businesses ...

  HONG KONG / AP The Chinese units of a former meat supplier for McDonald’s and KFC China have been fined more than $3.6 million for selling expired meat in a fast food safety scandal that erupted two years ago. It’s the latest fallout for OSI Group after a Shanghai TV station reported in 2014 that the company repackaged old ...

  Birmingham / AFP Prime Minister Theresa May said Britain would start the formal process for leaving the EU before April as her governing Conservative Party opened its annual conference on Sunday. Though many Conservatives headed to the congress in Birmingham, central England still jubilant about Britain’s June referendum vote to leave the European Union, the centre-right government has come ...

  Bloomberg After failing with an initial public offering of its infrastructure unit, Telefonica SA is likely to test investors’ appetite again with the sale of its U.K. mobile-phone business, only this time with a possible twist. The Spanish phone carrier is considering whether to set aside part of an initial public offering of U.K. mobile operator O2 for individual ...