Bloomberg Brazil’s real strengthened, defying a slump in emerging-market currencies, as reports that President Dilma Rousseff could be directly implicated in a widening corruption scandal fueled speculation she’ll be ousted. Investors who think that a new government would be better positioned to lift the country out of its economic morass sent the real up 0.4 percent to 3.7722 per dollar ...

Bloomberg Chile’s inflation rate fell for the first time in three months in February after the economy expanded at the slowest pace in almost six years. Consumer prices rose 4.7 percent from the year earlier, the National Institute of Statistics said on Tuesday in a report on its website, compared with 4.8 percent the month before. The median estimate of ...

Bloomberg Finance ministers from Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Peru met investors in New York in an attempt to reassure the markets of the stability of their economies after a slump in commodity prices and economic malaise in Brazil. The four countries, which formed the Pacific Alliance in 2011 to integrate their economies, explained to investors how they’ve have been responding ...

Bloomberg Not many people in Brazil look back on the crisis-plagued years from the late 1980s to the early 1990s as a golden era. But the people of Franca do. The country’s capital for men’s footwear is among large sections of Brazil that watched their manufacturing sectors atrophy in the emerging-market frenzy and commodities boom of the 2000s. Now the ...

brussels / ap European Union leaders hoped early Tuesday they reached the outlines for a possible deal with Ankara to return thousands of migrants to Turkey and said they were confident a full agreement could be reached at a summit next week. After months of disagreements and increasing bickering among the 28 EU nations, French President Francois Hollande said that ...

United Nations / AP Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is planning to hold a donor’s conference before June to help tens of thousands of Sahraoui refugees from the 40-year-old dispute over the Western Sahara who are facing one of the world’s forgotten humanitarian crises. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that Ban understood the anger of the refugees living in “some of the ...

Jerusalem / AFP Israel is razing Palestinian homes and other buildings constructed with international aid at an “alarming” rate, the UN says, with more demolitions so far this year than in all of 2015. In total 121 structures funded partly or fully by international donors were demolished in the occupied West Bank between January 1 and March 2, overtaking the ...

Seoul / AFP South Korea on Tuesday accused North Korea of hacking the smartphones of government officials, and unveiled new sanctions on Pyongyang over its recent nuclear test and long-range rocket launch. The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said the North had stolen phone numbers and texts from the phones of dozens of key officials between late February and early March. ...

Kabul / AP Six months after fleeing a Taliban assault on her city, the owner of an Afghan radio station devoted to women’s rights is back home and returning to the airwaves. Zarghona Hassan is a lifelong activist and the founder of a radio station in Kunduz that until last year reached hundreds of thousands of listeners across northern Afghanistan, ...

Beijing / Bloomberg China’s exports saw their heaviest fall in nearly seven years in February, diving more than a quarter as feeble global trade offset the weaker yuan and raised pressure on Beijing to ramp up domestic demand. The below-forecast reading is the latest data to raise fears of a “hard landing” in China and comes days after Beijing cut ...