Helen Clark SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS I’m late to the story here, but Singapore and Australia signed a large defense deal in May and expanded their free trade agreement, the SAFTA, first signed in 2003, the first for Australia since a 1983 deal with New Zealand. Australia and Singapore have had a generally strong friendship, and one better than ...

  Geneva / AFP   The UN’s human rights chief voiced alarm on Monday at the increasing detention of migrants in Europe, including unaccompanied children, amid widespread anti-migrant rhetoric across the continent. As Europe faces its biggest migration crisis since the aftermath of World War II, UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said he had sent staff members to assess ...

  Nairobi / AFP Eritrea on Monday accused arch-rival Ethiopia of attacking its heavily militarised border, but officials in Addis Ababa said they had no knowledge of the reported fighting. Ethiopia on Sunday “unleashed an attack against Eritrea on the Tsorona Central Front,” Eritrea’s ministry of information said in a statement. Ethiopian government spokesman Getachew Redda said there were “no ...

  Tehran / AFP Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have killed five Kurdish rebels near the country’s northwestern border with Iraq, an official statement said on Monday. “A team of five from the PJAK terrorist splinter group… has been identified and destroyed in the Sardasht region” on the Iraqi border, a Guards statement said on its official website. It said the ...

  Pretoria / AFP Oscar Pistorius is suffering from depression, a South African court heard on Monday, as the Paralympic athlete faced a return to jail for murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp three years ago. The double-amputee killed Steenkamp, a model and law graduate, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day in 2013, saying he mistook her for an intruder ...

  Jerusalem / AFP Israel has reopened Palestinian crossing points from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip following a three-day closure put in place after last week’s deadly Tel Aviv shooting, the army said on Monday. Crossings were reopened overnight as planned, an army spokeswoman said, though “security checks are ongoing” in Yatta, the West Bank village where the ...

  Manila / AFP Filipino protesters said on Monday that Chinese coastguard ships blocked and sprayed them with water as they sailed to a disputed South China Sea shoal to plant a Philippine flag for independence day. China claims most of the strategic and resources-rich sea and has controlled Scarborough Shoal, just 230 kilometres (145 miles) off the main Philippine ...

  BLOOMBERG Growing anxiety over the prospect of the U.K. exiting the European Union dominated financial markets, sending global stocks down for a third day and the British pound to an eight-week low while boosting demand for havens such as the yen and gold. In Europe, equities headed for the lowest close since February and the pound weakened against most ...

  Bloomberg The oil market just hit a yellow light. Crude’s advance of more than 90 percent from a 12-year low earlier this year has U.S. shale producers starting to return to their drilling rigs, threatening to slow further gains. “The $50-to-$60 a barrel area is the sweet spot,” said Mark Watkins, the Park City, Utah-based regional investment manager for ...

  Bloomberg Five years ago, when Eric Ries was working on the book that would become his best-selling entrepreneurship manifesto “The Lean Startup,” he floated a provocative idea in the epilogue: Someone should build a new, “long-term” stock exchange. Its reforms, he wrote, would amend the frantic quarterly cycle to encourage investors and companies to make better decisions for the ...