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Singapore Banks can’t be relaxed about rig-building woes

Bloomberg It’s not clear how much of Singapore’s bad loans for 2015, the highest since 2009, are due to low commodity prices, because banks don’t give a detailed industry breakdown of their assets. Given the city’s focus on becoming a global rig-building hub, chances are there’s a link. Another report Monday from Sembcorp Marine, the world’s second-largest maker of offshore ...

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Germany brings its gold hoard home

Frankfurt / DPA Germany is slowly bringing home its gold, lodged outside the country in vaults in New York, Paris and London during the years of the Cold War. Germany’s central bank possesses the second-biggest hoard of gold bars in the world, and conspiracy theories have multiplied over the years, based around the fact that only a tiny number of ...

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Pathogen plagues Italy’s olive trees

Gallipoli / AFP Italian olive grower Federico Manni is at the end of his tether. “You see this one,” he says, waving in the direction of a majestic but diseased olive tree on his property near Gallipoli on the Salento peninsula on Italy’s heel. “It is over one thousand years old. Fires and wars failed to kill it, but that’s ...

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