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  RITIKA SHARMA / Emirates Business Generating a total of $653 million per year, the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) industry in the Emirates is expected to witness an annual growth rate of over 7 percent yearly till 2020. The MICE industry, which is considered the backbone of many economies globally, has emerged as one of the key growth ...

  Bloomberg The IMF weighed in once more with its thoughts on Britain’s referendum, warning the U.K. could slide into a recession if it quits the EU. In a 64-page document, the Washington-based fund said that the size of the hit would depend on a multitude of factors, though its overall assessment is that the U.K. “would likely be worse ...

  Bloomberg Prices fell and volume surged in a week of heightened anxiety for U.S. investors, whose dreams of reaching a record high anytime soon all but faded away. A streak of six weeks without a 1 percent drop was broken as the S&P 500 Index dropped 1.2 percent to 2,071.22, the worst retreat since April. Shares slid on four ...

  Bloomberg After a week in Washington, Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince is heading west to meet with technology executives in Silicon Valley and then to New York to pitch his nation’s new economic plan to Wall Street investors. Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman wants to discuss how Saudi Arabia can benefit from innovations spawned in California and then ...

  Dubai / WAM Microsoft opened a new centre of excellence for the oil & gas industry in Dubai. The Middle East and Africa centre has been launched to assist organisations in the sector to drive digital transformation, cut costs and optimise processes in their organisations. The centre, which is the largest such facility for Microsoft globally, will focus on emerging ...

  Geneva / AFP IS extremists are still committing genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria, United Nations rights investigators said on Thursday. “Genocide has occurred and is ongoing,” Paulo Pinheiro, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) for Syria, said in a statement. “ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to ...

  Sunaina Rana / Emirates Business As digitalisation penetrates into almost every sector around the globe, companies in the MENA region are leaving no stone unturned to grab their space in the online world. Google Analytic estimates that MENA consumers are now relying more on their brands’ digital messages than before, to guide them through a purchase journey. It points ...

  DUBAI / Emirates Business Emirates Green Building Council (EmiratesGBC), an independent forum aimed at conserving the environment by strengthening and promoting green building practices, underlined the measures that can be adopted to improve air quality and the role of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in adversely impacting green building design at its recent Networking Seminar. The discussion on ‘What’s in ...

  Beijing / AFP China’s total borrowings were more than double its gross domestic product (GDP) last year, a government economist said, warning that debt linkages between the state and industry could be “fatal” for the world’s second largest economy. The country’s debt has ballooned as Beijing has made getting credit cheap and easy in an effort to stimulate slowing growth, ...

  ST. PETERSBURG / AP EU Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker warned Russia on Thursday that the 28-nation bloc will only lift its sanctions if the Kremlin fully implements a Ukraine peace deal. “The next step is clear, full implementation of the agreement—no more, no less,” Juncker told Russia’s main economic forum in Saint Petersburg ahead of a meeting with President ...