Havana / AFP Cuba’s communist party gathers on Saturday for a rare party congress less than a month after US President Barack Obama’s historic visit, but Cubans eager for change are likely to be disappointed. Held every five years, party congresses normally are the main political event in a one-party system like Cuba’s that brooks no dissent. The last one in …

  Brussels / AFP Brussels airport will fully re-open in June, its chief executive said, after suffering extensive damage when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in the departures hall last month killing 16. “We will be 100 percent operational again in June,” Brussels airport chief executive Arnaud Feist told Belgian newspaper Le Soir published Saturday. “But it will be a …

Almost everyone agrees that America’s income tax is too complex. Considering this, you might expect that simplifying the income tax would be a slam dunk. Sure enough, the various presidential candidates have proposed sweeping overhauls. But any agreement is mostly rhetorical. The odds that the next president — whoever it be — will engineer genuine tax simplification are negligible. On …

  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is at loggerheads with European creditors regarding plans over ability of Greece to repay debts. While European Union (EU) insists it has already charted out plan for debt relief, the IMF says these plans are not strong enough, and will not bail out Athens from its current economic difficulties. Under the EU programme, Greece …

  Catherine Putz SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Al-Qaeda is ostensibly the reason the United States got involved militarily in Afghanistan more than a decade ago. But as the war in Afghanistan progressed, al-Qaeda receded as a target and seemingly as an active player. When Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 in neighboring Pakistan, the group seemed to be at …

  Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was in China Thursday and Friday for a fly-by visit that lasted just over 36 hours. Nonetheless, it was an important trip – as Turnbull’s first visit to China since assuming office last fall, it was important to set the tone for the Australia-China relationship under his administration. And that tone was relentlessly upbeat, …

Matthew Sedacca SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Lowering his voice nervously, Yang Kechao confessed that over half of his workers at Huaxinyuan Steel Company are on vacation. The employees did not leave the factory owner with stations half-filled to go bask in the warm weather of Hejin, Shanxi, a North China province where the plant is based. Nor did they head …

  Laos is a country that is usually described in accordance with one of two narratives. The first portrays a Buddhist Shangri-La — the ‘real,’ ‘hidden,’ and ‘untouched’ Indochina dreamed of in Western backpacker fantasies — while the second depicts a highly impoverished country in desperate need of foreign aid and technical assistance. Both depictions have some merit. Laos is …

  Relaxnews After spending time with the recently released consumer editions of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive virtual re.ality systems, here are the 10 best VR titles out now: Adr1ft If the film “Gravity” was a video game, it would be “Adr1ft.” The weightless saga for Oculus casts players as an astronaut struggling to survive while exploring a shattered …

  AFP GoPro has announced it is teaming up with outside developers to make it easy to use the company’s mini cameras with apps or synch them with other devices. The effort to make GoPro products more versatile and, ideally, more tempting to buyers was revealed a day after the California-based company announced that it hired away an Apple veteran …