Vienna / DPA Music comes to Alma Deutscher when she dreams. “I sometimes get a melody in the middle of the night. Then I wake up and I sneak out of bed and I write it down in my notebook,” the British girl says. Like many 11-year-olds, Alma also has a vivid imagination when she is awake, but unlike ...

  Puerto Barra / AFP Forced from their ancestral forests by the arrival of big agriculture in eastern Paraguay, the Ache people gave up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that had sustained them for centuries. Now they have taken up farming themselves — and they want their old land back. The Ache’s homeland was remade in the 1970s by the mass arrival ...

  Reuters Banking shares boosted Saudi Arabia’s stock index on Tuesday to its highest level this year, while other Gulf markets moved little in quiet trade with some foreign investors absent for New Year holidays. The Saudi index closed up 1.3 percent at 7,257 points in its highest trading volume for two weeks, rising above technical resistance at this year’s ...

  London / AFP A plunge in the share price of Toshiba over a possible write-down and the bailout of one of Italy’s top banks were the biggest ripples in otherwise placid trading on Tuesday. “Markets are calm, as thin holiday volumes are in play,” said market analyst Ipek Ozkardeskaya at London Capital Group. However a 12 percent meltdown in ...

  Bloomberg After pulling off the biggest oil-market deal in a decade, OPEC faces a new balancing act in 2017: boosting prices without igniting shale. The first shale boom spurred a global supply glut that started prices sliding in mid-2014, and was amplified that November by a pump-at-will OPEC strategy aimed at market dominance. During the ensuing rout, prices in ...

  SINGAPORE / Reuters Egyptian General Petroleum Corp (EGPC) is seeking up to 178,000 tonnes of gasoil for delivery in January, a tender document showed on Tuesday. The state-owned company is seeking two cargoes of 30,000 to 33,000 tonnes each of 0.1 percent sulphur gasoil for delivery into Alexandria or El Dekheila ports over Jan 11 to 13 and Jan ...

  Bloomberg Oil extended the longest winning streak in more than four months before OPEC and other producing nations start reducing output to stabilize the market. Futures advanced 0.5 percent in New York, climbing for a seventh session. Prices are set to recover next year as production cuts help to re-balance an oversupplied market, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih ...

  Bloomberg The purchase of 55,000 tonnes of sugar by Egypt’s state commodity buyer GASC on Monday was a direct, non-tender deal, traders said on Tuesday. GASC, the General Authority for Supply Commodities, said on Monday had bought the white sugar for delivery between Jan. 7 and Jan. 20. Dealers said on Tuesday the purchase was made in Egyptian pounds ...

  Bloomberg Libya’s oil production stood at 622,000 barrels a day (bpd), up slightly from levels recorded before an armed faction agreed to lift a two-year blockade on major western pipelines on Dec. 14, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) said. Before the agreeement, Libya’s output stood at about 600,000 bpd, having doubled since September. The NOC said it could add ...

  Bloomberg Toshiba Corp. can’t get past its accounting problems. The Japanese company, which paid a record fine a year ago for its bookkeeping practices, warned that it may now have to take another charge of several billion dollars related to an acquisition made by US unit Westinghouse Electric. The company’s shares fell 12 percent to 392 yen at the ...