Beijing / Bloomberg German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang sought to limit conflict over trade during talks overshadowed by angst in Germany about a Chinese company’s 4.6 billion-euro ($5.2 billion) bid for robot maker Kuka AG. “We don’t want a trade war,” Li told reporters in Beijing on Monday after the two leaders presided over …

  Seoul / AFP South Korean President Park Geun-Hye on Monday urged “bone-crushing” efforts to overhaul the nation’s ailing shipbuilders faced with mounting losses caused by slowing global demand and increased competition. The South’s mighty shipbuilders including Hyundai Heavy Industries and Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering have dominated the global market for past decades. But a slump in oil prices …

  Singapore / AFP Singapore on Monday crushed and burnt almost eight tonnes of ivory confiscated over two years to try to deter smugglers as activists called for tighter enforcement. Over 2,700 elephant tusks weighing 7.9 tonnes were fed into an industrial rock crusher before incineration. It was the fist time seized ivory had been destroyed in Singapore, the Agri-Food …

  Islamabad / Bloomberg Pakistan is two months away from finally completing an International Monetary Fund program its government signed up to after more than 10 previous failures. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif won the $6.6 billion loan to avert a balance-of-payments crisis soon after taking power in 2013, and has since seen the pace of economic growth increase while deficits …

  Sydney / Bloomberg Australia’s government plans a A$1 billion ($736 million) fund to protect the Great Barrier Reef from the effects of climate change and declining water quality. Warming waters are bleaching the reef’s coral, while run-off from the land such as farm fertilizer is harming water quality, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said at a news conference in Queensland …

  Bloomberg The way we get electricity is about to change dramatically, as the era of ever-expanding demand for fossil fuels comes to an end—in less than a decade. That’s according to a new forecast by Bloomberg New Energy Finance that plots out global power markets for the next 25 years. Call it peak fossil fuels, a turnabout that’s happening …

  Bloomberg As the U.K. agonizes over its relationship with Europe, the Bank of England is readying for turmoil. With just 10 days before a referendum that could see Britain withdraw from the European Union, central bankers are putting the defenses in place to shore up market confidence and the financial system if that happens. Tuesday will see the first …

  Bloomberg Cheaper oil prices since 2014 have probably been of little net benefit to the global economy and may even have been a drag on growth, according to the European Central Bank. “While most of the oil-price decline in 2014 could be explained by the significant increase in the supply of oil, more recently the lower price has reflected …

  Bloomberg Germany’s 10-year bond yields are set to climb from the all-time low reached last week, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Benchmark yields fell to a record 0.009 percent on Friday. While economists have reduced their year-end yield estimates since January, they don’t foresee that level as sustainable. The median forecast of 19 economists in a Bloomberg survey …

  Bloomberg Jean-Claude Juncker and Vladimir Putin may offer clues about the way forward for a controversial project to expand Russia’s gas interconnections with Europe this week. The European Commission president meets the Russian leader at a conference in St. Petersburg and may discuss ways a Gazprom PJSC-led consortium could be allowed to double the capacity of the Nord Stream …