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Dubai / WAM His Highness Sheikh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Chief of the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince’s Court, on Monday inaugurated the Microcredit Summit, which is being held under the patronage of HH Sheikh Hazza bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Chairman of Abu Dhabi Executive Council. Organised jointly by Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development, the Arab Gulf Programme for ...

DUBAI / WAM His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai, has received Houlin Zhao, Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) based in Geneva. During the meeting, which was held in the presence of HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, and ...

Beijing / AFP Thousands of miners in China’s coal-rich northeast have gone on strike over months of unpaid wages, amid fears of mass layoffs as the government seeks to restructure lumbering state-owned industries. Social unrest is anathema to China’s Communist leaders, making the threat of worker discontent a disincentive to the hard choices analysts see as necessary to reform the ...

Luke Hunt / The Diplomat It’s hardly a secret that much of Southeast Asia is in drought, that Laos has bitterly upset its neighbours with its overly-ambitious dam construction plans, or that the once Western-backed Mekong River Commission (MRC) has been reduced to a shell of its former self. It’s a difficult situation, pushed along by a robust social debate ...

Bloomberg Back in 2010, when U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was kicking off his fiscal squeeze, he rarely tired of saying how his “credible’’ plans gave the Bank of England flexibility on policy. Six years later and the story hasn’t changed much. Cornered by his own pledge to post surpluses from 2020, Osborne must keep tightening the purse ...

Brussels / AFP The EU said on Monday it was looking for support from the European Investment Bank at crisis talks in Brussels aimed at helping dairy and other farmers hit hard by plunging prices. Around 100 farmers protested as agriculture ministers gathered just six months after Brussels announced a €500-million emergency package to tackle a crisis partly blamed on ...

Bloomberg Even in the mighty U.S. Treasury market, bond traders are taking their cues from central bankers in Europe and Japan. With Mario Draghi and Haruhiko Kuroda pressing ahead with their grand monetary experiments, negative yields in Germany and Japan are exerting greater and greater influence over U.S. Treasuries. Overnight trading of Treasury futures has exploded, reaching levels not seen ...

Ankara / AFP Turkish warplanes pounded Kurdish rebel bases in northern Iraq on Monday, the day after a suicide car bomb tore through downtown Ankara killing at least 36 people, the third attack on the capital in five months. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the latest carnage, which reduced cars and buses to charred hulks on a ...

Bloomberg “Republicans in Ohio and Florida head to the polls this week to help decide who will become their party’s nominee, and whether the GOP will endure in any recognizable form in the months and years that follow. To hear those who have devoted their lives to building the party tell it, if front-runner Donald Trump prevails on Tuesday in ...

Bloomberg More than one million people marched through cities across Brazil to protest political corruption, a weak economy, and to call for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, in a showing that could accelerate efforts to remove her from office. The protest in Sao Paulo was the largest ever recorded by polling firm Datafolha, surpassing even the 1984 rallies to ...