Bloomberg Rising property values enabled lenders in the U.K. to reduce defaulted commercial-property loans on their books by almost half to about 12.1 billion pounds ($17.5 billion) last year, a survey showed. The amount remaining in default fell from 23.2 billion pounds at the end of 2014, according to a survey of lenders by Leicester, England’s De Montfort University …

  BLOOMBERG In this age of tiny houses and the less-is-more aesthetic of millennials, can a house be too large for its market—even when that market sports a median home price around the $5 million mark? That has to be a question that occurs when viewing this massive 30,000-square-foot home listed for $48,880,000 in tony Alpine, NJ. New Jersey’s most …

  Abu Dhabi / AFP The Middle East’s poetry equivalent of “Pop Idol” is helping to keep alive an age-old tradition using bedouin dialect, which is barely understood outside the Arabian Gulf. Apart from the glory, a Kuwaiti student took home five million dirhams ($1.36 million), the top prize in a television show followed by millions of poetry lovers across …