Beijing / Bloomberg China’s home sales continued to grow in April, signaling that tightening measures designed to stem a home-price surge in some large cities have yet to slow the market’s upward momentum. New-home sales gained 63.5 percent to 793.7 billion yuan ($122 billion) last month from a year earlier, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data the National ...

  Singapore / AFP Singapore Telecom (Singtel) reported a full-year net profit rise, driven by increased mobile data usage as more customers browse the Internet on handheld devices. Investments in high-speed Internet networks and services are paying off as the easy mobile connections allow people to consume more data while on the go, said Singtel, Southeast Asia’s biggest telecom firm ...

  Kolkata / Bloomberg The monsoon in India, which accounts for more than 70 percent of the annual rainfall, will arrive a week later this year, prolonging a drinking water shortage and delaying planting of crops from rice to cotton and sugar cane. Southern Kerala state will start receiving the seasonal rains from June 7, the India Meteorological Department said ...