Australia refugee camp ‘amounts to torture’: Amnesty

  Sydney / AFP Australia’s detention of asylum-seekers on a remote Pacific island “amounts to torture” under international law, Amnesty International said on Monday in a report that alleged widespread abuse and an “epidemic of self-harm”. Canberra sends asylum-seekers who try to reach the island continent by boat to the Pacific islands of Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus, where ...

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Unrest cripples school system in Myanmar’s Rakhine

  Maungdaw / AFP Buddhist teachers have been airlifted and trucked out of northwestern Myanmar to escape a new surge of violence in the ethnically divided region, another blow to persecuted Muslim Rohingyas already marginalised by a lack of opportunity. Residents have fled their homes in the area near the Bangladesh border on military helicopters and other army vehicles over the ...

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S Korea flags long wait for Sewol ferry salvage

  Seoul / AFP South Korea says efforts to lift the Sewol ferry that sank more than two years ago may drag on into next year, with salvage operations hampered by poor visibility and the sheer scale of the undertaking. The 6,825-tonne vessel was carrying 476 people when it capsized and sank off the southwestern island of Jindo in April ...

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Stocks drop as markets eye central banks

  London / AFP Stock markets swung mostly lower on Monday, with attention fixed on central bank policy before an ECB meeting this week and speculation on the outlook for US borrowing costs. Asian markets diverged following healthy gains for world equities at the end of last week, as investors bet that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates before ...

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Saudis in a fix over size and pricing in debut bond sale

  Dubai / Reuters Potential investors in the Saudi Arabian government’s first international bond issue are preoccupied by a key question: how will the Saudis resolve their dilemma between size and pricing? Any issuer must choose between raising as much money as it can and selling debt as cheaply as possible. But as Saudi Arabia holds investor roadshows in the ...

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Iran output boost plan may hit OPEC deal

  Bloomberg Iran, OPEC’s third-biggest member, plans to boost its oil output to 4 million barrels a day this year, potentially complicating the producer group’s plan to cut supply in an effort to prop up prices. Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said he hopes the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will agree next month at a meeting in Vienna to ...

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Iran aims for oil, gas fields tender in Nov

  Reuters Iran will launch next month its first new style tender to develop oil and gas fields since the lifting of international sanctions, a leading oil official said on Monday, after months of internal discussions over the terms, intended to be more alluring to foreign companies. OPEC’s third largest oil producer hopes to revive its energy sector following the ...

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Oil speculators most bullish since 2014

  Bloomberg Oil investors must be getting dizzy. In the two months since OPEC began talking about capping production, speculators’ sentiment has swung wildly, with government and exchange data showing the four biggest weekly position changes ever for the two global benchmark crudes. The latest shift is to optimism, with money managers the most bullish on West Texas Intermediate oil ...

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Oil trades near $50 amid gains in OPEC supply

Bloomberg Oil traded near $50 a barrel in New York as U.S. producers increased drilling and OPEC nations added supply, threatening to compound a global surplus. Futures were little changed after slipping 0.2 percent Friday. Output from OPEC member Libya expanded to 560,000 barrels a day, according to National Oil Corp., up from 540,000 last week, while Iran repeated plans ...

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Kuwait’s KNPC aims to finalise over $5bn loan

  Reuters Kuwait National Petroleum Co (KNPC) expects to finalise a loan of well over $5 billion to finance its Clean Fuels project by the end of the first quarter of next year, sources involved in the project said. The state-owned refiner had originally said it planned to complete the fundraising, one of the world’s largest-ever loans backed by export ...

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