World

NEW YORK :Oil prices rose on Wednesday after a larger-than-expected drawdown in U.S. inventories, shaking off worries about the likely hit to economic activity from the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant. Brent crude futures ended the day up US$1.31, or 1.8per cent, to US$75.29 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures settled at US$72.76 a barrel, up US$1.64, or 2.3per cent. U.S. inventories fell more than expected, with crude stocks down by 4.7 million barrels, though that is in part due to year-end tax considerations that encourage companies not to store crude barrels. "We saw a drop in production, we saw inventories and crude fall, so that’s giving the market a supportive outlook," said Phil Flynn, senior analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago. "Because su...

SINGAPORE: With the cost of living likely to be a key issue in 2022, the Workers’ Party (WP) will track what the Government does to support Singaporeans who require assistance, secretary-general Pritam Singh said in his New Year’s Day message on Friday (Dec 31). “2022 will be a year of new challenges for Singapore and Singaporeans,” Mr Singh said in the message, posted on the WP Facebook page. “Apart from the unpredictability of COVID-19, the cost of living is likely to be a major pressure point for many Singaporean households, particularly the low to middle-income, and most acutely, those with both young children and aged parents to care for.” Mr Singh highlighted several basic needs that “hit the headlines” recently because they will cost more for Singaporeans, including transport, ac...

Nino Cerruti, the Italian fashion designer credited with revolutionising menswear in the 1960s and who gave Giorgio Armani his first fashion break, has died, Italian media reported Saturday (Jan 15). He was 91. Cerruti died in northwestern Italy, where his family has operated a textile company since 1881, the Italian news agency LaPresse reported. The Italian daily Corriere said he had been hospitalised for hip surgery. Cerutti inherited the family business, based in the city of Biella in the Piedmont region, at age 20 upon his father's death in 1950. He launched his first menswear company, Hitman, in 1957 near Milan, dedicated to creating sartorial elegance on an industrial scale and becoming part of the nascent men's ready-to-wear sector. Armani was hired as a young talent at the Hitm...

SINGAPORE: Singapore's manufacturing output continued to rise in November, although the pace of growth slowed to 14.6 per cent year-on-year, official data on Friday (Dec 24) showed. In October, manufacturing output had expanded by a revised 17 per cent. Excluding biomedical manufacturing, November's year-on-year output grew 12.4 per cent, the Economic Development Board (EDB) said in a media release. On a seasonally adjusted month-on-month basis, production increased 2.3 per cent. Excluding biomedical manufacturing, output grew 2.7 per cent. SLOWER GROWTH IN BIOMEDICAL MANUFACTURING, CHEMICALS, TRANSPORT ENGINEERING The biomedical manufacturing, chemicals and transport engineering clusters eased in November, while the electronics, precision engineering and general manufacturing industr...

TOKYO : Japanese manufacturers turned less positive about their business conditions in January, in a sign the economy faces pressure from the Omicron variant as well as rising energy and raw material costs, the Reuters Tankan poll showed. Manufacturers and service sector firms were more optimistic about the coming three months, the monthly poll, which tracks the Bank of Japan's closely watched "tankan" quarterly survey, showed. Some firms in the poll of 502 big and mid-sized companies, of which 254 responded, said their bottom lines were being pressured by commodity inflation, while others were more optimistic as they benefited from strong global demand. "There's a demand rush before prices are raised," a manager at a metal products maker said in the Dec. 22-Jan. 7 poll. The Reuters Ta...

Trade ministers of Japan and Singapore on Wednesday pledged to maintain the high standards of market access and rules of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal, which China and Taiwan made a bid to join last year, Japan’s government said. In a joint statement, trade minister Koichi Hagiuda and his Singaporean counterpart Gan Kim Yong confirmed their countries’ commitment to “building a free and fair rules-based trading system including through maintaining” the high standards of the deal, according to Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Japan and Singapore are part of the 11-member TPP, formally known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Singapore chairs the TPP Commission, the bloc’s decision-making body, this year, following J...

SEOUL: North Korea appeared to test-fire a ballistic missile on Tuesday (Jan 11) that may be more advanced than a "hypersonic" one it launched less than a week ago, South Korea's military said, as Pyongyang pursues increasingly powerful weapons. Tuesday's launch, condemned by authorities in Washington and Tokyo and prompting an expression of concern from the UN secretary general, underscored North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's New Year's vow to bolster the military with cutting-edge technology at a time when talks with South Korea and the United States have stalled. Initial estimates found the missile travelled more than 700km to a maximum altitude of 60km at up to 10 times the speed of sound (12,348 kmh), South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in a statement. "We assess that this...

NEW YORK : The dollar fell against a basket of currencies on Thursday to a two-month low, a day after data that showed an expected surge in U.S. consumer prices in December fell short of offering any new impetus for the Federal Reserve's policy normalization efforts. The U.S. Dollar Currency Index, which tracks the greenback against six major currencies, was down 0.2per cent at 94.791, its lowest since Nov. 10. The index, which rose 6.3per cent in 2021, is down about 1per cent for the week, on pace for its worst weekly performance in about eight months. "Coming into the new year the dollar positioning was very much skewed to being long," said Mazen Issa, senior FX strategist at TD Securities. "Yesterday's inflation numbers, in conjunction with (Fed Chair Jerome) Powell's testimony for h...

Biendi Maganga-Moussavou had a problem. As Gabon’s minister of fisheries, agriculture and food security, he helps oversee the African country’s marine protected areas, some of the most extensive in Africa. Covering 27% of Gabon’s Exclusive Economic Zone, these waters are supervised using monitoring technology that tracks larger vessels, which are required to report their catch. But many of Gabon’s fishers run smaller operations that don’t have such systems, or even automated identification. “Thousands of boats were going out and we didn’t know where they were going or for how long,” Magana-Moussavou said in an interview. And since whatever they caught and where they caught it wasn’t registered, scientists couldn’t tell whether fishing restrictions were being respected or whether fish sto...

The final week of 2021 saw a third straight week of investment outflows from cryptocurrency funds, even as it capped a year of strong inflows into digital asset investment products, data from digital currency manager CoinShares showed. Outflows from the sector totaled US$32 million last week, taking the tally for the last three weeks to US$260 million, although the trend was diminishing following record weekly outflows in mid-December, CoinShares said. For 2021 as a whole inflows hit US$9.3 billion, a 36per cent jump from 2020 as the launch of bitcoin futures ETFs lured big institutional investors. By comparison, the increase in inflows from 2019 to 2020 was 806per cent. Total assets under management ended the year at US$62.5 billion in 2021 versus just US$2.8 billion at the end of 2019...