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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 Puerto Rico’s main water utility may not have enough money to repay certain bonds if it needs to redirect funds to pay contractors, according to a filing on the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s website. The Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority’s board on Feb. 16 approved an alternative plan to divert money to pay contractors if the agency fails ...

SAO PAULA / Bloomberg Brazil’s ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva vowed to battle his opponents in the streets in a defiant speech, hours after being briefly detained as part of a probe into a massive corruption scheme. Wearing a red shirt with his leftist Worker’s Party yellow star on his chest, Lula gave an emotional speech to supporters where ...

Bloomberg Argentina plans to mark its return to global capital markets in mid-April by issuing $11.68 billion of bonds to yield 7.5 to 8 percent, Finance Ministry officials told Congress while presenting a debt bill to clear the way for a settlement with most holdout creditors. After reaching a milestone deal with the largest holdout creditors led by billionaire Paul ...

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, ...

DENVER / Bloomberg Frontier Airlines Inc., a no-frills carrier, hired underwriters for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), people with knowledge of the matter said. Frontier, owned by private equity firm Indigo Partners, is working with Barclays Plc, Deutsche Bank AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co. on the IPO, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions ...

NEW YORK / AP Gap Inc. is reporting a 2 percent drop in a key revenue measure for February, dragged down by weakness at its Banana Republic stores. The results, announced this week, were slightly worse than the 1.4 percent decline that analysts were expecting, according to Thomson Reuters. Gap said that by division its namesake brand saw revenue at stores ...

PARIS / AFP France and Britain have inked a deal to invest more than two billion euros in the development of next generation combat drones, Paris said in a statement. Following a two-year feasibility study begun in 2014, “we hope to proceed to the next phase in 2017 to prepare for the full-fledged development of operational demonstrators of air combat ...

Frankfurt / AFP Sports giant Adidas said that it expects revenues and profits this year to rise by 10-12 percent as the current consumer boom in Germany continues. “Group sales are expected to increase at a rate between 10 and 12 percent on a currency-neutral basis in 2016,” the German sportswear and equipment manufacturer said in a statement. “The positive ...