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  Emirates Business Musafir.com, the UAE’s first premium-experience travel website, announced a partnership with Visa across the UAE, Qatar and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and launch of dedicated websites for Qatar and KSA. The move is a breakthrough in Musafir.com’s regional expansion and to the continuous increase in online travel bookings in the region. “At Musafir.com we like to ...

  Islamabad / AFP Pakistan’s embattled national carrier has been widely mocked for sacrificing a goat next to a plane to ward off bad luck, weeks after one of the country’s worst air disasters. A Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) turboprop plane built by European manufacturer ATR plummeted into a mountain in a northern region on December 7, bursting into flames ...

  Bloomberg British Airways Plc (BA) and cabin crew representatives are set to hold talks aimed at stopping strikes that would hit thousands of passengers flying in and out of the UK over Christmas, as Prime Minister Theresa May’s government clashes with unions over a wave of industrial action. The Unite trade union and BA agreed to meet in London ...

  Kiev / AFP Ukraine nationalised the country’s biggest bank in a bid to avert a financial meltdown in the war-scarred former Soviet state. The government moved to take over PrivatBank after months of rumours that the lender was heavily burdened by bad debts. PrivatBank controls one-third of the east European country’s deposits and even has branches in the Baltic ...

  Bloomberg Indonesia’s central bank is reviving a plan to redenominate the currency of Southeast Asia’s biggest economy despite the threat of market turmoil as the US steps up the pace of interest-rate increases. “Re-denomination must be done while the economy is stable,” Bank Indonesia Senior Deputy Governor Mirza Adityaswara told reporters in Jakarta on Monday. “Now, at this moment, ...

  Bloomberg Barclays Plc is preparing to tell 7,000 clients to do more trading with the firm or find another bank, the latest move in an industrywide trend of winnowing down customer lists to the ones that produce significant profits. The British bank launched a new computer system, called Flight Deck, this month that ranks every customer of its trading ...

  Bloomberg China’s capital outflows are accelerating and the central bank is selling larger amounts of foreign exchange, Goldman Sachs Group Inc warned as the yuan headed for its biggest annual decline in more than 20 years. A net $69.2 billion exited the nation in November, compared with a monthly pace of around $50 billion since June, Goldman economists led ...

  Bloomberg Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA is attempting to sell shares on the market while the government prepares a plan to inject as much as 15 billion euros ($15.7 billion) into Italian banks should the fundraising fail, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Italy’s Treasury plans to participate in the share sale, which may ...

  Berlin / AFP Better known for its electronic music and street art, Berlin is now also home to a budding graphic novel scene in a country that has treated illustrated stories as children’s literature. Hardly seen in bookstores just a few years ago, German-produced graphic novels now have their dedicated shelves, as not only homegrown artists but also foreign ...

  Ouinhi / AFP Daniel Aboko proudly shows off the 11 hectares (27 acres) of paddy fields he shares with other farmers — a small spread that produces a bounty of food thanks to smart irrigation and a hardy strain of rice. In just four years, small farmers in Ouinhi, southeastern Benin, have seen their rice harvest double from three ...