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Caracas / AFP Venezuela announced it is shifting its time zone forward 30 minutes to save power and alleviate a severe electricity crisis the government blames on the El Nino weather phenomenon. The move, effective May 1, will scrap a half-hour subtraction to the clocks Venezuela’s late former president Hugo Chavez introduced in 2007 that gave his country a slight offset ...

BRASILIA / AP Separated by only a boulevard, two rival camps of demonstrators in Brazil’s capital underscore the sharp ideological divide that is playing out in Congress as lawmakers debate whether to oust the president. On one side of Brasilia’s showcase Eixo Monumental, which cuts through the center of city and dead ends at Congress, several thousand supporters of embattled ...

Lesbos / AFP Pope Francis received an emotional welcome on Saturday on the Greek island of Lesbos during a visit aimed at showing solidarity with migrants fleeing war and poverty, a small group of whom he hopes to bring back to the Vatican. The pontiff’s landmark visit comes amid controvery over a deal last month to end Europe’s refugee crisis ...

Binghamton / AFP What do a New York lawyer, a business owner who calls himself a left-leaning Republican and a construction worker who elected Barack Obama have in common? They’re voting for Donald Trump. None of them live on the breadline. They share surprisingly varied opinions. Yet they are profoundly frustrated—with the economy, with career politicians and with perceptions of ...

  Kumamoto / AFP Scores of people were feared buried alive on Saturday after two powerful quakes hit southern Japan a day apart, killing at least 32 people, and as a forecast storm threatened more devastating landslides. Homes, roads and railway lines were swept away when huge hillsides collapsed, as thousands of tonnes of mud was dislodged by the thunderous ...

Havana / AFP Cuba’s communist party gathers on Saturday for a rare party congress less than a month after US President Barack Obama’s historic visit, but Cubans eager for change are likely to be disappointed. Held every five years, party congresses normally are the main political event in a one-party system like Cuba’s that brooks no dissent. The last one in ...

  Brussels / AFP Brussels airport will fully re-open in June, its chief executive said, after suffering extensive damage when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in the departures hall last month killing 16. “We will be 100 percent operational again in June,” Brussels airport chief executive Arnaud Feist told Belgian newspaper Le Soir published Saturday. “But it will be a ...

Almost everyone agrees that America’s income tax is too complex. Considering this, you might expect that simplifying the income tax would be a slam dunk. Sure enough, the various presidential candidates have proposed sweeping overhauls. But any agreement is mostly rhetorical. The odds that the next president — whoever it be — will engineer genuine tax simplification are negligible. On ...

  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is at loggerheads with European creditors regarding plans over ability of Greece to repay debts. While European Union (EU) insists it has already charted out plan for debt relief, the IMF says these plans are not strong enough, and will not bail out Athens from its current economic difficulties. Under the EU programme, Greece ...

  Catherine Putz SPECIAL TO EMIRATES BUSINESS Al-Qaeda is ostensibly the reason the United States got involved militarily in Afghanistan more than a decade ago. But as the war in Afghanistan progressed, al-Qaeda receded as a target and seemingly as an active player. When Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 in neighboring Pakistan, the group seemed to be at ...