Bloomberg Urban rooftops are buzzing across France, but the fad for beekeeping from Montpellier to Lille to Paris — including atop AFP’s headquarters — will do little do reverse declining bee populations, experts say. The northern city of Lille was a pioneer in efforts to defend the bee by providing pesticide-free environments, and it was among the first to ...

  DPA Friederike Kolb is 100 years old and never thought she’s be able to dance again. “When I was a young girl I used to love dancing and I still really love it,” she says. Every Wednesday morning social worker Gerburg Cartus gives quite a special dance lesson at the Frankenhoehe senior citizens home in Mainz, western Germany. The ...

  Bloomberg Australia rejected bids for electricity network Ausgrid from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing and State Grid Corp. of China, amid growing opposition to selling infrastructure assets to overseas investors. Treasurer Scott Morrison said it would be contrary to national security to allow the offers to proceed in their current form and said the bidders, which he didn’t name, ...

  Bloomberg Egypt reached an initial agreement with the International Monetary Fund over a $12 billion package designed to restore the confidence of foreign investors and ease a crippling dollar shortage hampering economic growth. The three-year agreement aims to “improve the functioning of the foreign exchange markets, bring down the budget deficit and government debt, and to raise growth and ...

  Bloomberg The top two US solar manufacturers are shifting away from the biggest domestic market because utilities aren’t signing as many deals to buy electricity from their giant power plants. SunPower Corp. the No. 2 US panelmaker, said it’s turning its attention to rooftop power, while First Solar Inc., the biggest producer, now expects more of its growth to ...

  Bloomberg China’s infrastructure investors have had a tough two weeks, with plugs being pulled on at least $15 billion of potential deals in nuclear power and electricity distribution. Britain and Australia refused to sign off on investments where state-owned Chinese companies were ready to provide much-needed funding. In both cases, the long-term utility programs were halted in the later ...

Bloomberg For Indonesians seeking to bring back billions of dollars stashed overseas, the government just opened up more avenues to park their funds under a tax amnesty plan. Individuals who sign up to the amnesty will be allowed to invest in assets such as gold, property and infrastructure projects, according to the Finance Ministry. Participants can also move funds between ...

  Bloomberg Palm oil imports by India probably fell for a third month in July as some buyers switched to soybean oil. Imports dropped 20 percent to 585,000 metric tons in July from a year earlier, according to the median of five estimates in a Bloomberg survey of processors, brokers and analysts. Total vegetable oil purchases rose 11 percent to ...

  Bloomberg India’s coal ministry, at the urging of state miner Coal India Ltd., is asking the government to levy an environmental tax on a competing fuel in effort to maintain coal’s cost-competitiveness, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Petcoke, an oil-refining by product and a coal substitute, is more polluting than coal and should be subject to ...

  Bloomberg An apartment-construction boom in Brooklyn is putting a cap on rents in the New York borough as a surge of new units erodes landlords’ pricing power. The median monthly rent declined last month for the first time this year, dropping 0.8 percent from last July to $2,826, according to a report Thursday by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and ...