ABU DHABI / WAM Khalifa University of Science and Technology has on Thursday announced promising results and findings on its research to develop ‘artificial soil’ with the necessary ingredients and properties required for the growth of plant and vegetation, thus paving the way for the agriculture sector to grow further in the UAE. A provisional patent application has been filed ...

Bloomberg India is seeking to lure US businesses, including medical devices giant Abbott Laboratories, to relocate from China as President Donald Trump’s administration steps up efforts to blame Beijing for its role in the coronavirus pandemic. The government in April reached out to more than 1,000 companies in the US and through overseas missions to offer incentives for manufacturers seeking ...

Bloomberg Viva Republica Ltd, operator of South Korea’s largest fintech startup Toss, is planning to raise about $200 million from investors to bankroll its expansion in online banking and security trading services. The company just embarked on its funding round and hopes to complete it in coming months, founder Lee Seung-gun said in an interview, declining to disclose the expected ...

Bloomberg The Philippine economy contracted in the first three months of 2020 as restrictions to stem the coronavirus outbreak shut most businesses and sapped consumption, a trend seen worsening in the current quarter. Gross domestic product fell 0.2% in the first quarter compared to a year ago, using 2018 as the new base year, the Philippine Statistics Authority said. That ...

Bloomberg China’s exports unexpectedly rose in April aided by stronger shipments to South East Asia, though with the coronavirus pandemic damaging global demand that increase is likely to be temporary. Imports fell. Exports rose 3.5% in dollar terms in April from a year earlier, while imports dropped 14.2%, the customs administration said on Thursday. Economists had forecast that exports would ...

A peculiar fact about the coronavirus catastrophe so far is that the world’s poorest have largely been spared the worst. Of the 10 countries with the most deaths to date, nearly all are among the wealthiest. But if the virus has overwhelmed places with modern hospitals and world-class medical infrastructure — as anyone who’s been in New York or Milan ...

If working from home during the pandemic has shown anything, it’s that apartments and houses are our castles, like it or not. Hong Kong is emerging from a semi-lockdown (restaurants open, schools shut, workers everywhere on the home-office spectrum) and it’s clear that investors see refuge in housing, too. The world’s least-affordable residential prices look likely to keep floating in ...

It’s not all sunshine and roses being Europe’s benchmark borrower. Germany has a unique problem in that its AAA-rated debt is so revered as collateral that it’s very expensive to actually buy. The country’s debt agency has sharply increased its second-quarter borrowing program to 130 billion euros ($140 billion) to help pay for the Covid-19 crisis. Given that investors already ...

In the midst of the constant up-and-down of coronavirus news, both from science and the markets, it’s easy to lose sight of the scariest scenario of them all: the one where there’s no magic bullet. In this entirely plausible situation, there would be no effective Covid-19 vaccine or transformative therapy; the combination of testing and contact tracing wouldn’t successfully suppress ...

The instruction given by Boris Johnson to the British people on March 23 was dead simple: “You must stay at home.” The pithiness and urgency of that message, the alarming rise in deaths, and the UK prime minister’s subsequent hospitalisation with Covid-19 all reinforced the instruction. People got it. Some say it was too successful. Many Britons don’t seem to ...