DUBAI // A man who raped a 32-year-old British teacher in her flat in the early hours of New Year’s Day will spend the next 10 years in jail. The woman was returning home at 3am when she met the Nigerian salesman, 30, near the lift of the building. “At first I thought he was a tenant,” said the woman, who added that he asked which floor […]
BAGHDAD — If there were one safe place in Iraq, it should be a hospital nursery, locked down for the night with dozens of babies nestled inside. But here, not even that is a given. When a fire started late Tuesday night in the maternity wing of one of Baghdad’s main hospitals, it quickly engulfed the babies’ room. And then, in another Iraqi tragedy in a horrifying […]
|By Arabian Post Staff|Saudi Arabia’s banks are seen more likely now than ever before to tap the international bond markets. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, Saudi banks have less foreign currency debt outstanding compared to any other GCC country. Of the 57 securities outstanding from issuers in the kingdom, only one is a dollar bond from a bank, compared with more than 400 foreign-currency notes from […]
UAE. [ME NewsWire] –The latest Global Economic Conditions Survey (GECS) from ACCA and IMA, suggested positive signs for businesses in the GCC but a stark forewarning of how the shock of Brexit will hit a fragile recovery in global business confidence. Responding to the findings, Lindsay Degouve de Nuncques, head of ACCA Middle East said: “It is encouraging to see that our members’ business confidence has improved […]
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan suggested that oil prices have probably bottomed out at about $40 per barrel after tumbling more than 20 percent in the past two months into a bear market. “It’s hard for me to imagine it going very much lower, but it could,” he said Wednesday, according to the transcript of a conference call organized by Rock Creek Group, an investment advisory […]
BREMEN, Germany — Believing he was answering a holy call, Harry Sarfo left his home in the working-class city of Bremen last year and drove for four straight days to reach the territory controlled by the Islamic State in Syria. He barely had time to settle in before members of the Islamic State’s secret service, wearing masks over their faces, came to inform him and his German […]
UAE. Project activity in the UAE is forecast to recover in 2017 after a difficult 2016 on the back of a strong recovery in economic growth, according to a new report from Middle East business intelligence service MEED. MEED’s annual UAE Outlook Report for 2016 says that a recovery in oil prices combined with growing public and private sector activity boosted by Dubai’s preparations for the Expo […]
LIBYA. A multi-million redevelopment of Tripoli International Airport is getting ready for take-off following the Libyan Local Investment & Development Fund’s (LLIDF) appointment of PwC as its strategic advisor. The LLIDF is supporting the redevelopment of Libya through its new Investment Programme which includes the redevelopment of Tripoli International Airport into a world-class international airport. Based within a secure hub on the former airport site, the ambition […]
SAUDI ARABIA. JLL, the world’s leading real estate investment and advisory firm, today has released its Q2 2016 Riyadh and Jeddah Real Estate Overview reports assessing the latest trends in the office, residential, retail and hotel sectors. With Saudi Vision 2030 pivotal to the diversification and restructuring of the economy in lieu of decreasing oil prices, this report highlights that both Riyadh and Jeddah continue to maintain […]
A potential lifesaver lies unrecognized in the human body: Scientists at the University of Tübingen and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have discovered that Staphylococcus lugdunensis which colonizes in the human nose produces a previously unknown antibiotic. As tests on mice have shown, the substance which has been named Lugdunin is able to combat multiresistant pathogens, where many classic antibiotics have become ineffective. The research […]
DUBAI // Around 130 residents of Sulafa Tower took shelter at a nearby hotel after their apartments were damaged or destroyed in Wednesday’s fire. A blaze broke out in the 75-storey tower in Dubai Marina on Wednesday afternoon, spreading quickly around the residential building and damaging apartments on at least eight floors. Management at the nearby Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina tweeted an offer […]
DHAKA/NEW YORK Jupiter. That single word, by a stroke of luck, helped stop the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from paying nearly $1 billion (£757 million) to the cyber-criminals behind a notorious bank heist earlier this year, according to sources familiar with the incident. When hackers broke into the computers of Bangladesh’s central bank in February and sent fake payment orders, the Fed was tricked into […]
|By Arabian Post Staff|Saudi Arabia will build a maritime complex on its east coast, with shipbuilding capability, to provide sufficient capacity for exporting oil, Bloomberg reported quoting Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih. The country, the world’s largest oil-producing nation, eventually will have a shipping fleet that will match its oil capabilities, Al-Falih said in Riyadh. Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Aramco, will need more tankers to meet global […]
UAE. JLL, the world’s leading real estate investment and advisory firm, today has released its Q2 2016 Dubai Real Estate Q2 Overview report that evaluates the impact of Britain’s exit from the European Union on the Dubai Real Estate Market across office, residential, retail and hotel sectors. Dubai caters to the most open real estate market within the region and as a result is more susceptible to […]
DUBAI // Nutritionists have poured cold water on the Kinder chocolate scare that erupted after a watchdog said an ingredient was carcinogenic. Parents who were worried that mineral oil aromatic hydrocarbons were being passed on to children through the chocolate are being reassured after the alarm was raised by German watchdog Foodwatch. While advising against overindulging in chocolate, health experts say the risk from hydrocarbons is low […]
|By Matein Khalid|Brexit will have a profound impact on international banking. It was no coincidence that the shares of UK, German, Swiss, Italian, Spanish and other banks fell 20-25% in a single trading session on news of Brexit. Even American money center banks and investment banks with a large footprint in the City of London fell 8 – 10% on Friday, June 24, 2016. As Deutsche Bank […]
INTERNATIONAL. The Bloomberg Commodity Index, which tracks the performance of 20 major commodities split evenly between energy, metals and agriculture, continues to show a gain of more than 10% in the year to date. Some softness, however, has crept in during the past few weeks with some sectors, most notably energy, pausing after rallies in oil and natural gas ran out of steam. Industrial metals found support […]
A new hypothesis on the extinction of dinosaurs and ammonites at the end of the Cretaceous Period has been proposed by a research team from Tohoku University and the Japan Meteorological Agency’s Meteorological Research Institute. The researchers believe that massive amounts of stratospheric soot ejected from rocks following the famous Chicxulub asteroid impact, caused global cooling, drought and limited cessation of photosynthesis in oceans. This, they say, […]
Food chemists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have found that garlic aroma is evident in the breast milk of women who have consumed garlic. This is caused by allyl methyl sulfide (AMS) — a metabolite which is first formed in a strong concentration during breastfeeding. Whether the aroma has an impact on which food preferences children develop and whether they like garlic in later life needs to be […]
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — For most of his adult life, Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi worked among the bearded enforcers of Saudi Arabia. He was a dedicated employee of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice — known abroad as the religious police — serving with the front-line troops protecting the Islamic kingdom from Westernization, secularism and anything but the most conservative Islamic practices. […]
It is said that good things come to those who wait. If so, then the European Union’s (EU) new Global Strategy on Foreign and Security Policy, more than a decade overdue, must be a very good thing. Actually, it is exactly what Europe needs. But the timing of its release — in the immediate aftermath of the United Kingdom’s (UK) vote to leave the EU — could […]
When Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota Motor Corporation, said he wanted the Lexus brand to be more sporty, this is what he had in mind. The Lexus GS models are rear-wheel-drive sports sedans. The entry GS 200t is a new model for 2016 that comes with a turbocharged four-cylinder engine. Our tester had the F Sport performance package that should ramp up the fun-to-drive meter even more. […]
|By Matein Khalid| The merger of Abu Dhabi banks First Gulf Bank and NBAD creates the largest bank in the Middle East, a regional colossus with $170 billion in assets, competitive funding cost in the global interbank/capital markets and a market value greater than Credit Suisse, Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) and Deutsche Bank. This is the biggest game changer event in UAE banking and finance since the […]
|By Arabian Post Staff|The coordinated militant attack on the eve of Eid is the biggest challenge yet to Saudi Arabia’s internal security since it crushed an al-Qaeda insurgency a decade ago, according to Bloomberg. With no claims of responsibility, suspicion has fallen on Islamic State, which has vowed to overthrow Gulf rulers they see as betraying Islam. One of the bombings on Monday, near the Prophet’s Mosque […]
