The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.

  Bloomberg India’s top iron ore miner is feeling the squeeze despite a global rally in the price of the steel-making material. NMDC Ltd. has cut prices about 6 percent in 2016 even as iron ore climbed 36 percent internationally. Challenges include record domestic supplies, moderating local steel demand and transport costs on India’s clogged railway. “Transport costs are prohibitive,” ...

  Vientiane / AFP President Barack Obama pledged on Tuesday to dramatically increase US efforts to clear millions of bombs secretly dropped on tiny Laos by American planes a generation ago, saying the clean-up was a “moral obligation”. Laos became the world’s most-bombed country per capita from 1964 to 1973 as Washington launched a secret CIA-led war to cut supplies flowing ...

  Seoul / AFP Flooding following heavy rain has killed 60 people and left over 44,000 homeless in North Korea, the United Nations said on Tuesday, after the country reported that a northeastern river suffered its worst-ever flood. Pyongyang said on Friday the Tumen river, which partially marks the border with China and Russia, experienced the biggest flood ever recorded due ...

  Vientiane / AFP Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has vowed to personally tear apart and eat Abu Sayyaf militants, in a bloodthirsty vow of revenge for deadly attacks. “They will pay. When the time comes, I will eat you in front of people,” Duterte told an audience of Filipinos late on Monday night while in Laos for a regional summit. “If ...

  Narathiwat / AFP A four-year-old girl and her father were among three killed on Tuesday when a bomb hidden in a motorcycle’s fuel tank exploded outside a school in Thailand’s insurgency-plagued south. The device went off as pupils and teachers filed into the school in the Tak Bai district of Narathiwat province for the start of the day. Two of ...

  Sittwe / AFP Hundreds of Buddhists jeered former UN chief Kofi Annan as he arrived in Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine state on Tuesday to examine a bitter religious conflict that has displaced tens of thousands of Muslim Rohingya. Annan has been tasked by the de facto leader of Myanmar’s new government, Aung San Suu Kyi, to head a commission charged with ...

  Libreville/ AFP Pressure mounted on Gabon’s President Ali Bongo over his disputed poll victory on Tuesday as his justice minister resigned over the results and former colonial ruler France suggested a recount. With Bongo claiming victory by a wafer-thin margin of some 6,000 votes, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls proposed recounting the ballots. “There needs to be a clear electoral ...

  In the two months since Britain voted to leave the European Union, its government has done little to clarify where this project is going. It would be wrong to expect a detailed plan, because the terms of exit and whatever arrangements follow must be negotiated. But surely a statement setting out priorities and basic principles wasn’t too much to ...

  Financial crises are becoming more frequent as markets and the rules that govern them grow ever more complex. New research suggests that this is no coincidence — and that a simpler system would be a lot more resilient. Forward-thinking officials have long argued that financial regulation needs to be simpler. In his much-quoted speech “The Dog and the Frisbee,” ...

  Quantum mechanics, Carl Sagan once observed, is so strange that “common sense is almost useless in approaching it.” Scientists still don’t understand exactly why matter behaves as it does at the quantum level. Yet they’re getting better at exploiting its peculiar dynamics — in ways that may soon upend the technology business. One of the most interesting applications is ...