CANBERRA / AP Australia’s prime minister and opposition leader have agreed to hold the country’s first-ever online election campaign leaders’ debate. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Tuesday that he had reached an agreement with Facebook and News Corp. Australia to stream the debate early next week in a bid to reach more voters. Opposition leader Bill Shorten later agreed ...

  Caracas / AFP Venezuela’s opposition held new protests, seeking to convert widespread anger over food shortages and economic havoc into pressure for a referendum on removing embattled President Nicolas Maduro. Clad in the red, yellow and blue of the Venezuelan flag, hundreds of opposition supporters rallied on a square in eastern Caracas, brandishing messages aimed at the allegedly pro-Maduro ...

  Bloomberg Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri will send a public private partnership bill to Congress in the coming weeks that will increase the country’s financing capacity by as much as $90 billion, according to his top adviser on foreign investment. The bill will allow the government to speed up its investment in infrastructure while providing legal guarantees for private sector ...

  Bloomberg Last week’s tepid jobs report may have dominated financial headlines in the U.S., but the oil market quietly had some better news for the American economy. The U.S. petroleum trade deficit, the gap between the value of imports and exports, shrank to a seasonally adjusted $3.13 billion in April, the Census Bureau said on June 3. That left ...

  Bloomberg YPF SA, Argentina’s state-controlled energy firm, named Total SA managing director Ricardo Darre as chief executive officer to lead the country’s biggest company. Darre, the head of the U.S. exploration and production unit since August 2014 at France’s largest oil company, will start July 1, according to an e-mailed statement from Buenos Aires-based YPF. “With the incorporation of ...

  Bloomberg Brazil’s interim government is seeking a market-driven approach for the electricity industry amid waning power demand, growing debt and consecutive losses at the country’s largest power company. The administration of Acting President Michel Temer will scale back heavy-handed policies in the power industry and reduce dependence on state development bank BNDES for financing, said Paulo Pedrosa, executive secretary ...

  Venezuela / AFP Venezuelans facing severe food shortages might have been expected to welcome heavily subsidized bags of rice, milk and other staples — but the controversy didn’t take long to set in. The bags, distributed to poor families every three weeks, represent President Nicolas Maduro’s latest plan to combat the increasingly desperate economic crisis that has taken hold ...

  Beijing / AP China agreed to try to slash excess output of steel, avoid competitive devaluations of its currency and to wind down unprofitable “zombie enterprises,” US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said on Tuesday as the two countries wrapped up annual high-level meetings in Beijing. The commitment to persist with reforms to make China’s economy more balanced included specific steps ...

  Sydney / AP Australia’s central bank held interest rates steady at the all-time low of 1.75 percent on Tuesday following strong growth figures, while keeping an eye on low inflation. The Reserve Bank of Australia cut the official cash rate from 2.0 percent last month to spur the economy, but gave little indication of further easing in a statement ...

Seoul / AFP South Korea has called for car giant Nissan to face criminal charges for allegedly manipulating emissions data on a popular sports utility vehicle, weeks after Seoul slapped the firm with a fine over the issue. The environment ministry called on state prosecutors to probe Nissan Korea after saying tests had shown an emission defeat system on the ...