Bloomberg Brenntag AG’s first-quarter profit missed analyst estimates after the world’s largest distributor of chemicals was hit by a currency devaluation in Venezuela and slump in demand for additives used by the oil and gas industry. Earnings were “surprisingly low” due to weakness in the Venezuelan currency, oil and gas and the North American industrial environment. Brenntag stuck to ...

  On April 25 2016, the very day that Australia commemorated its war dead who fell in Europe a century earlier, Australia sent a private note to France, its former ally, that it had won the bidding process to be preferred designer of 12 new submarines. In announcing the decision, the Australian government made some understandable historical allusions to past ...

  Marvin Ott / Mick Zloof SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS The Indonesian military (TNI) and the strategic perspectives of the Indonesian political leadership have been shaped by a tumultuous history of domestic security challenges. Indonesia is a sprawling archipelago of thousands of islands and hundreds of more or less distinct ethnic communities. That geography and ethnography virtually guarantee that national ...