Kiev / AFP Ukraine’s central bank keeps trying to shut them down but they keep surviving: ‘zombie banks’ are roiling the impoverished country’s financial system through the help of allegedly crooked courts. The former Soviet republic — labelled the continent’s most corrupt state by the European Court of Auditors on Wednesday — needs financial aid from the International Monetary ...

  ANKARA / Reuters Weakness in the Turkish lira could start to drive up prices and knock the central bank off its targets in the first quarter of next year, but the impact will depend on the pace of economic activity, Governor Murat Cetinkaya said. At a news conference on the central bank’s monetary and exchange rate policy for 2017, ...

  Bloomberg Sony Corp. is stepping up efforts to gain a foothold in mobile gaming. It has announced 11 new mobile titles and unveiled Project Field, a thin, lightweight device the size of a kitchen cutting board that connects to real-world objects so they can be used for controlling games on smartphones and tablets. “We believe this is a brand ...

SAN FRANCISCO / AP Google is crossing a milestone in its quest to reduce pollution caused by its digital services that devour massive amounts of electricity. The internet company believes that beginning next year, it will have amassed enough renewable energy to meet all of its electricity needs throughout the world. That’s significant, given Google’s ravenous appetite for electricity to ...

  Bloomberg Two months after rolling out its digital assistant, Google is opening its doors to outside developers to help the company chase rivals, particularly Amazon.com Inc., in a critical technology race. The Alphabet Inc. unit recently launched a system for developers to build chatbots that work with Google Assistant, its voice-based virtual helper. The tools, called Conversation Actions, will ...

  Mumbai / AFP India’s only surviving opera house has been restored to its colonial-era glory, reopening to the public more than two decades after it closed in disrepair. Once the place to be seen for Mumbai’s great and good it was forced to close in the 1990s after years of financial struggles. But a painstaking seven-year project has transformed ...

  Cairo / AFP In an endless cacophony of car horns, Mostafa Ekram each day confronts the frenzy of Cairo’s traffic jams: pedestrians darting out into the street, swerving tuk-tuks and even donkey carts. At the wheel of his SUV, in the heart of Egypt’s bustling capital, he doesn’t bat an eyelid as he narrowly dodges a black tuk-tuk, a ...

  ABU DHABI / WAM The United Arab Emirates (UAE) strongly condemned Sunday’s terrorist attack, which targeted the Saint Mark’s Coptic Cathedral in the Abbasiya district in the Egyptian capital Cairo. The blast killed scores of innocent people. HH Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, emphasised that the leadership, government and people of ...

  ABU DHABI / WAM Abu Dhabi General Services Company, (Musanada) is currently providing management services to 2,713 facilities and buildings across the emirate of Abu Dhabi, in addition to operating a 24/7 customer service call centre, the company said on Sunday. “Musanada’s facility-management division follows highest international and local standards to ensure provision of best services and operation of ...

  Dubai / Emirates Business Dubai SME, the agency of the Department of Economic Development mandated to develop the Emirate’s small and medium enterprise (SME) sector, and Al Tamimi & Company, the largest law firm in the Middle East which specialises in patents and innovations, have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to support entrepreneurial innovations and patents. The MoU ...