Bloomberg Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has designated every Friday in the months of April and May as a non-working holiday, in a bid to save electricity as a prolonged drought pushes water levels to a critical threshold at hydro-generation plants. The country will unveil details of a 60-day plan to conserve energy, Maduro said, adding that measures would include asking ...

Bloomberg Crystallex International Corp. said it was awarded $1.4 billion from a World Bank arbitration court over Venezuela’s nationalization of an untapped deposit that the Canadian miner has said holds millions of ounces of gold. The award, issued by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, upheld Crystallex’s claims that Venezuela breached an investment treaty “by failing to accord ...

Bloomberg Mexico may raise as much as $4 billion for clean energy projects this summer as the government seeks to continue a tender process that produced its first results last week. The next auction due in August will be 50 percent bigger than the one that just concluded with expectations for $2.6 billion of investment in the renewables, said Cesar ...

Bloomberg President Mauricio Macri of Argentina has become a market favourite by undoing many of the heavy-handed policies of his predecessor. But now some bond analysts say that he’s taking a page out of her playbook. Last week, the government said it will change the way it measures the economy, sparking concern that holders of warrants tied to Argentina’s growth ...

Bloomberg Victor Dodig’s overhaul of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is paying off. Total returns and profitability at the former underdog of Canadian banking are top among its peers and its dividend yield is the fattest of the nation’s five largest lenders. With the bank’s domestic operations sharpened, the chief executive officer is on the hunt for a US acquisition ...

Bethpage / AFP Donald Trump attacked his insurgent Republican rival Ted Cruz and ignored his crushing defeat in Wisconsin, electrifying thousands of passionate supporters at a home state rally in New York. “It’s great to be home,” the 67-year-old Manhattan tycoon told a fist-pumping, cheering crowd at Grumman Studios in the Long Island town of Bethpage, where Apollo Lunar Module ...

Washington / AFP NATO’s secretary general, responding to Donald Trump’s criticism of the alliance, recalled how it stood behind America after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. The first and only time NATO invoked “collective defense goals” was after the suicide plane bombings against New York and Washington, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said in a speech in Washington. “Europeans stepped ...

Brussels / AFP Extraditing Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam from Belgium to France is likely to take several weeks, as investigators question him about a shootout with police in Brussels last month, his lawyer said on Thursday. “He will be handed over to France in several weeks. He must first be heard in another case,” lawyer Sven Mary told reporters, ...

Copenhagen / AFP Copenhagen police said on Thursday they had detained four people on suspicion of joining the IS group in Syria and seized weapons and ammunition in a search linked to the arrests. All four were suspected of breaking Denmark’s terrorism law while in Syria, and were arrested in the Copenhagen area, police said in a statement without giving ...

Dublin / AFP Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny held talks on Thursday with opposition leader Micheal Martin to end the impasse over a new government following inconclusive elections in February. After an initial meeting on Wednesday, Kenny’s Fine Gael party said in a statement it had offered a “full and equal partnership” in a future administration to Martin’s Fianna Fail—its ...