By Adam Hamilton: Gold has slid during this past week on mounting fears of interest-rate hikes. Between the latest FOMC meeting’s minutes and the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, American futures speculators’ rising-rate phobias have been whipped into a fever pitch. They worry gold will be crushed when the Fed eventually starts normalizing rates. But history shatters this fallacy that rising rates are gold’s nemesis. […]
KOLKATA/BANGALORE: The Reserve Bank of India moved to close a loophole on Friday, saying that the rules need to be followed with respect to e-commerce credit card transactions “essentially taking place between two residents in India”. This means that companies such as Uber will need to follow the two-step authentication process that it was able to circumvent by virtue of having an overseas payment gateway. Its rivals […]
Most of the rest of the world is horrified that so much British ice cream is made up of vegetable fat and air Photo: REX FEATURES The Ice Cream War was one of Scotland’s most notorious criminal cases. It involved two rival Glasgow families using ice cream vans to sell drugs and stolen goods in the Eighties. The vicious turf war culminated in arson and murder. Now, a […]
MUMBAI: The Reserve Bank of India proposes to cut banks’ group exposure limit by as much as 15 percentage points to reduce the systemic risk posed by lending too much to any single business house. This means that credit to any particular group will have to be restricted to 25% of a bank’s capital, down from 40% now. It’s not clear whether such a move will have […]
Mumbai: The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas is plannig at replacing the controversial production sharing contracts (PSCs) with a revenue-sharing regime or production-linked contracts. In a bid to attract more private and foreign players into the country’s exploration business, the ministry on Thursday floated a model revenue sharing contract (MRSC) on its website seeking comments from the industry on the same till September 10. The […]
Letter From Europe Britons, including Anglican clergy members worried about the plight of beleaguered Iraqi Christians, accuse Prime Minister David Cameron of incoherence. By ALAN COWELL August 21, 2014 LONDON — For a century and more, Iraq has been the graveyard of Western dreams, often literally, from the defeat of British colonial forces in the First Battle of Kut in 1916 to the bloodshed that flowed from the American-led […]
Here’s one of the usual everyday life frustrations if you live in Saudi Arabia: You want to eat cereal. You open the fridge and realize you’re out of milk. You get dressed, get in your car and drive to the supermarket. Then the moment your reach the supermarket, they close for prayer. The kingdom is the only Muslim country in the world where all businesses must be […]
By P. Sreekumaran THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Was the gas leak at the public sector unit, Kerala Minerals and Metals Ltd(KMML), sometime back, in which 130 school children had to be hospitalized, an accident or was it a well-planned effort to ensure the permanent closure of yet another PSU unit in the State? This is the question uppermost in the minds of not only the KMML workers but […]
DUBAI // A woman who threatened to blow up the Public Prosecution building with a bomb belt will hear if the appeal against her sentence is successful next month. In March, Zulfiya Hamraeva, 33, from Uzbekistan, was sentenced to seven years in jail by Dubai Criminal Court. The Court of Appeal will deliver its final verdict on this sentence on September 3. The woman’s accomplice, Emirati M […]
Op-Ed Contributor By MICHAEL SINGH August 19, 2014 WASHINGTON — President Obama surprised many recently when he diagnosed the crisis gripping Iraq as partly an economic one, noting that Iraqi Sunnis were “detached from the global economy” and thus frustrated in achieving their aspirations. While Iraq’s chaos has many sources, the president is nevertheless on to something; and it’s not just Iraqi Sunnis, but the entire Middle East that […]
August 19, 2014 Open Source By ROBERT MACKEY After St. Louis county police officers in full battle gear trained sniper rifles on peaceful protesters in the suburb of Ferguson last week, and then proceeded to douse the streets in tear gas and round up journalists, a Russia analyst named Mark Adomanis observed that images of a crackdown on dissent in the United States would make life easier […]
A year after a $920 million payment default at a spot commodities bourse cut trading from gold to soybeans futures, jolting India’s biggest brokerages, investors are returning as newer regulations buoy confidence. The volume of commodities traded on the Multi Commodity Exchange Ltd. (MCX), India’s biggest commodity bourse, has rebounded from a five-year low after the regulator tightened warehousing and shareholding norms in response to the payment […]
LONDON, August 15 (Fitch) Fitch Ratings has affirmed Abu Dhabi’s Long-term foreign and local currency Issuer Default Ratings (IDR) at ‘AA’. The Outlooks are Stable. The issue ratings on Abu Dhabi’s senior unsecured foreign and local currency bonds have also been affirmed at ‘AA’. The Short-term foreign currency IDR has been affirmed at ‘F1+’. The UAE Country Ceiling has been affirmed at ‘AA+’; this Ceiling also applies […]
Suffering in silence: Robin Williams with wife Susan Schneider Photo: Getty Images I have learnt over the past few years that Parkinson’s disease knows no boundaries. It is a condition that can affect anybody, at any time. But even still, I was as shocked as everybody else to hear that Robin Williams was suffering from its early onset before he took his own life. It was the […]
A computer generated image shows the stadium to be built in Al-Khor for Qatar’s 2022 World Cup. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images It hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for Qatar since it started preparations to host the World Cup football in 2022. Ever since the wealthy Gulf state won the rights to host the tournament in 2010, it has been the subject of bribery allegations while at the same […]
Sanctions on Russia over the crisis with Ukraine are leading banks to call for the development of Islamic finance as they seek alternatives to European and U.S. pools of funding. The expansion of the Shariah-compliant industry would let the country attract fresh capital from the Middle East and Asia, the Association of Russian Banks said this week in response to an inquiry from the state bank. The […]
Dubai’s two biggest builders are turning to bank borrowing to help fund projects as a rise in late payments from their customers takes the shine off a booming construction market. Arabtec Holding PJSC, the contractor that helped push Dubai stocks into a bear market in June, said money owed by clients rose to 8.8 billion dirhams ($2.4 billion) through the second quarter from 7.2 billion dirhams at […]
|By Rashidul Bari| Palestine and Israel, once known as cradle of civilization, have become the hub of cemeteries in modern times. Their conflict has shed untold blood and produced graves as far as the eye can see. The countless tombstones are silent, but the sound of their outcry has carried from Middle-East to here at New York University’s Bobst Library—where I’m writing this article—and from which I’m […]
The chemical triclosan has been linked to cancer-cell growth and disrupted development in animals. Regulators are reviewing whether it’s safe to put in soap, cutting boards and toys. Consumer companies are phasing it out. Minnesota voted in May to ban it in many products. At the same time, millions of Americans are putting it in their mouths every day, by way of a top-selling toothpaste that uses […]
AL AIN // Thirteen companies have been referred to prosecutors in Al Ain for allegedly breaking labour and residency rules. During two, three-day, inspection campaigns with Al Ain police, the Ministry of Labour arrested 24 people who were found, in most cases, to be working with an expired visa. Thirteen women from eight firms and 11 male workers from five companies were arrested over the Eid break. […]
Secretary of State John Kerry in Sydney, Australia, on Monday. By MICHAEL R. GORDON August 11, 2014 SYDNEY, Australia — Secretary of State John Kerry warned Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq on Monday not to interfere with the process of picking a new Iraqi leader, cautioning pointedly that a power grab would lead to a cutoff of international support. “There should be no use of force,” Mr. Kerry […]
By Kyler Hasson: CSX Corporation (NYSE:CSX) has been a strong performer since late 2012, with shares going from about $19 to $29, while earnings have remained about flat. Even with these relatively poor business results and the large run-up in the share price, I believe that shares offer substantial value around $29 and should more than double by the end of 2018. While most investors value railroads […]
By Steve Guenette: On August 6 Bloomberg reported that the Chinese government has excluded certain Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) products from being bought with public money because of security concerns, this according to government officials who asked to not be identified because the information is not supposed to be public. This move by the Chinese government should come as no surprise, as Apple is just one in a […]
By Seeking Profits: Shares of Linn Energy (NASDAQ:LINE) rallied over 2.3% on Thursday after investors digested the company’s second results. Linn has been a controversial company as analysts like Hedgeye’s Kevin Kaiser have suggested the distribution is too high and that a cut is inevitable. Overall, this quarter was a decent one, and Linn is in no danger of a distribution cut in the immediate future. Still, […]
