News Archive - 28 December 2015

>TOKYO The Canadian dollar struggled near an 11-year low against the greenback on Tuesday as crude oil prices resumed their slide, weighing on commodity currencies.Prices of both Brent and U.S. crude remained under pressure early on Tuesday after dropping more than 3 percent LCOc1 CLc1 overnight, reversing a...

>Wall Street began the last trading week of the year in the red, dragged down by energy stocks, as oil prices resumed a slide brought on by global oversupply.The 1.97 percent fall in the energy sector was the worst performance on the S&P 500. Exxon's shares were down...

>SINGAPORE Crude oil futures came under renewed pressure early on Tuesday as fears of slowing demand added to near-record global production levels, which have already slashed prices by two-thirds since the middle of last year.Front-month U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures CLc1 were trading at $36.75 per...

>"Saudi Arabia has this year increased production by 1.5 million barrels per day, thus effectively destabilizing the situation on the market," Novak was quoted as saying. (Reporting by Polina Devitt; editing by Maria Kiselyova)...

>Evergrande will buy a 60 percent stake in a commercial and residential development in Sichuan province and a project comprising hotel, residential and office buildings in Guizhou province from New World China Land Ltd (0917.HK), which is controlled by Cheng, for 7.3 billion yuan. In a separate statement,...

>WASHINGTON Islamic State theologians have issued an extremely detailed ruling on when "owners" of women enslaved by the extremist group can have sex with them, in an apparent bid to curb what they called violations in the treatment of captured females.The ruling or fatwa has the force of law...

>NASHUA, N.H. Republican U.S. presidential frontrunner Donald Trump urged supporters on Monday to carry their enthusiasm into voting booths, citing recent news reports questioning whether he can turn his polling strength into victories in key primary states.New Hampshire residents will be the first Americans to cast votes...

>Icahn's latest bid of $18.50 per share on Monday values Pep Boys at about $1 billion, while Bridgestone's previous offer of $17 per share valued the company at about $947 million. Pep Boys said that its board has delivered a notice to Bridgestone to terminate their previous agreement.Icahn...

>Toshiba is likely to approach its lenders for the new commitment line, a company spokesman said on Tuesday. The Nikkei financial daily earlier said it would likely seek help from banks including Mizuho Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. The move comes after Toshiba in September secured a 400 billion...

>The State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) published the statement after Shanghai's dollar-denominated B shares tumbled nearly 8 percent on Monday in their worst day in four months.Some traders attributed the slump to SAFE's individual foreign exchange supervision system, to be launched on Jan. 1, 2016.SAFE said on...

>The new chip is the first that can take multiple measurements - including body fat, skin temperature and heart rate - as well as process the information collected by itself, Samsung said in a statement.To help clients accelerate product development using the chip, the firm said it has developed...

>TOKYO Asian stocks were subdued on Tuesday, with Japanese and South Korean equities slipping, after crude oil prices resumed their slide and cooled investor sentiment.MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan were effectively unchanged, and looked set for a loss of around 12 percent for the year.Japan's...

>HONOLULU President Barack Obama will welcome Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for an official visit to Washington on March 10, complete with a rare state dinner and discussions about energy and climate change, the White House said on Monday."The visit will be an opportunity for the United States and...

>BEIJING Air pollution in China could be big business.Two of the world's largest technology firms, IBM and Microsoft, are vying to tap the nascent, fast-growing market for forecasting air quality in the world's top carbon emitters.Bouts of acrid smog enveloping Beijing prompted authorities in the Chinese capital to...

>CHICAGO Samsung Electronics Co plans to expand its fledgling mobile payment service in the United States next year, allowing users to shop online and with more smartphones that support the electronic wallet.Lower-priced Samsung phones will likely start offering the mobile wallet "within the next year," Thomas Ko, global co-general...

>Syrian rebel chief Zahran Alloush, the leader of Jaysh al Islam who commanded thousands of fighters in the Damascus suburbs, was killed on Friday in an air strike that rebel sources said was carried out by Russian warplanes.Jaysh al Islam was a participant in the Riyadh conference where Syrian...

>NEW YORK By all rights, 2016 should be a good year for the U.S. stock market.The Federal Reserve's recent rate hike signals confidence in the economy and presidential election years typically reward investors. Most experts are predicting a seventh year for the current bull market, with strategists in...

>The value of the dollar's net long position rose to $32.84 billion in the week ended Dec. 22, from $30.39 billion the previous week. The prior week's figure was the lowest since early November. The latest dollar net long figure still remained low compared to the figures over...

>An independent computer security researcher uncovered a database of information on 191 million voters that is exposed on the open Internet due to an incorrectly configured database, he said on Monday.The database includes names, addresses, birth dates, party affiliations, phone numbers and emails of voters in all 50 U.

>MUMBAI Online marketplace Snapdeal, backed by Japan's SoftBank Group Corp and others, will spend more on logistics and technology to better compete with Flipkart and Amazon's (AMZN.O) Indian unit, its co-founder said on Monday.Shopping online is becoming more popular in India due to the rising use of cheaper...

>NEW YORK A U.S. appeals court on Monday cleared Cisco Systems Inc of infringing another company's wifi technology, reversing a near $64-million judgment against the networking equipment maker in the long-running patent dispute. After eight years of litigation that also included a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court,...

>U.S. retail sales, excluding automobiles and gas, had grown 5.5 percent in the period between Black Friday and Christmas Eve last year. Online sales grew 20 percent in the holiday season this year, MasterCard Advisors, which tracks customer spending, said in a report on Monday. "The double-digit growth...

>WASHINGTON In September, U.S. State Department officials invited a foreign delegation to the Guantanamo Bay detention center to persuade the group to take detainee Tariq Ba Odah to their country. If they succeeded, the transfer would mark a small step toward realizing President Barack Obama's goal of closing the prison before he...

>TOKYO Japan's Toshiba Corp may need to curb its ambitions in nuclear power even as it looks set to win a deal in India, battling both competition from emerging market rivals and the impact of its own deteriorating finances, industry experts said.A senior Indian government official told Reuters earlier...

>"Yes, the city of Ramadi has been liberated. The Iraqi counter terrorism forces have raised the Iraqi flag over the government complex in Anbar", joint operations spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool said in a statement broadcast on state television.Victory in Ramadi, which was seized by Islamic State in May,...

>The blasts, one from a car bomb and another from a suicide attack, struck the Zahra district in the middle of the city, said the Britain-based Observatory, which monitors the conflict through a network of contacts on the ground.Syria's state news agency SANA reported two car bomb blasts, but...

>The figure compares with a 3.7 percent decline in October. (Reporting by Polina Devitt; editing by Dmitry Solovyov)...

>The People's Bank of China will keep the yuan basically stable while forging ahead with reforms to help improve its currency regime, it said in a statement summarizing the fourth-quarter monetary policy committee meeting.The PBOC said it would maintain a prudent monetary policy, keeping its stance "neither too tight...

>HOUSTON Energy companies and oil trading firms that teamed up to build several mini-refineries that convert a swelling surplus of ultra-light U.S. crude into fuels for export seemed like a pretty safe investment bet for a while.The bet was built on several converging dynamics: an ever-rising supply of...