Masonry Layout

  Seoul / AFP Tens of thousands of North Koreans, brandishing red flags and chanting slogans, paraded in Pyongyang to celebrate the start of the Stalinist regime’s latest five-year economic plan, state media reported on Thursday. The “mass mobilization” took place on Wednesday in the sprawling Kim Il Sung square in the North Korean capital. It marked the beginning of a ...

  New Delhi / Tribune News Service Indian companies’ earnings growth is recovering and they are all set to post a double-digit profit growth for the fiscal years to come, after seeing flattish to weak growth for a few years now, according to analysts. To be sure, this growth comes on a low base. Kotak Insititutional Equities, an arm of ...

  Dubai / WAM Emirates NBD announced that it will invest AED 500 million over the next three years towards digital innovation and multichannel transformation of its processes, products and services. The bank also revealed plans to launch the UAE’s first digital bank targeted at millennials. A first-of-its-kind ‘by the customer, for the customer’ initiative using digitisation and social input as ...

  DUBAI / WAM The Ministry of Economy discussed ways to minimise the export of paper, leather and aluminium waste to other countries in order to provide raw materials for the national industry. This came during a meeting chaired by Abdullah Sultan Alfan Alshamsi, Assistant Under-Secretary for Industrial Affairs at the Ministry of Economy. The practice has caused a shortage ...

  DUBAI / EMIRATES BUSINESS The Middle East and North Africa’s leading shopping mall, retail and leisure pioneer, Majid Al Futtaim, on Wednesday unveiled a strategic development plan that will see the company increase its total investment in the UAE by AED 30 billion by 2026, taking its total investment in the country to AED 48 billion. The investments, which ...

  Tokyo / AFP Japan’s prime minister said on Wednesday that he will delay a consumption tax hike that threatened the fragile economy, but analysts said the move highlighted his failure to spark growth. Shinzo Abe announced his decision to members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in televised remarks ahead of a press briefing expected around 6:00 pm ...

  Paris / AFP Transport chaos hit France again on Wednesday, just nine days ahead of Euro 2016, as railway workers went on strike in the latest salvo of a months-long battle between the government and unions. Between a third and half of France’s trains were expected to grind to a halt, as workers from railway operator SNCF launched their ...

Near Fallujah / AFP Iraqi forces struggled on Wednesday to break into Fallujah city centre where hundreds of fighters from the IS group and some 50,000 increasingly desperate civilians were holed up. Fighting also raged hundreds of kilometres further up the Euphrates Valley in Syria, as US-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters opened a new front against the extremists in the ...

  RITIKA SHARMA / Emirates Business As technology continues to change the way in which payments are made across the Middle East, improved application performance and flexibility are expected to play an important role in making the region’s digital economy mature. Experts at the Cards and Payments Middle East, and its co-located exhibitions — Retail Show Middle East 2016 and ...

  ALKESH SHARMA Emirates Business ‘Go Green’ is the new corporate mantra of enterprises worldwide in their eco-friendly pursuit to ensure a sustainable tomorrow. Following this green path, UAE-based Al Ghurair Investment — one of the largest diversified industrial enterprises in the Middle East — has unveiled its environmental and sustainability plan for the next three years. Various entities, active ...