World

COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh: An elite Bangladesh police unit is engaged in the rampant extortion, harassment and wrongful arrests of the Rohingya refugees it has been tasked with protecting, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Tuesday (Jan 17). The Armed Police Battalion (APBn) operates in camps housing nearly one million members of the stateless minority, most of whom fled neighbouring Myanmar after a military crackdown that is now the subject of a UN genocide investigation. But refugees and humanitarian workers told the New York-based watchdog that safety had deteriorated after the unit took charge of camp security in 2020, with some Rohingya telling AFP abuses had become "a regular occurrence". "Abuses by police in the Cox's Bazar camps have left Rohingya refugees suffering at the hands of the...

Media, not the hotels themselves, often label hotels like Burj Al Arab as "six-star" or "seven-star" hotels. Waitforlight | Moment | Getty Images DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Dubai is scrapping its 30% tax on alcohol sales for the rest of the year, the emirate's municipality announced Monday, the latest move in a series of liberalizing policy changes over the last few years aimed at boosting tourism and attracting more foreign residents. "Dubai Municipality has temporarily stopped collecting the 30% fee from alcoholic beverage companies for a period of one year from the beginning of 01/01/2023 to the end of 12/31/2023. The companies authorized to sell in the Emirate of Dubai have been notified of this decision," the Dubai Municipality wrote in a post from its official Twitter account. Th...

"What could possibly go wrong?" should be Wall Street's thesis for 2023. While it's extremely rare for stock prices to fall for two successive years, there's also nothing that suggests it can't happen, as it did from 2000-2002, 1973-1974, from 1929-1932 and then again from 1939-1941. My colleague, Bob Pisani, recently noted that those have been the only four occasions when stocks have fallen two or more years in a row since 1928. But let's look at the laundry list of risks in 2023. First, the Federal Reserve not only plans to raise rates as many as three more times early this year by a cumulative three-quarters of a percent. Fed officials have also publicly stated that once the central bank is finished raising rates, it expects to hold them high for the remainder of the year, apparentl...

STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY? The US recognises China over Taiwan diplomatically, but remains Taipei's most important ally. It opposes any forced change to Taiwan's status and is bound by an act of Congress to supply the island with the means to defend itself. Support for Taiwan is a rare issue of bipartisan consensus in Washington and there has been growing alarm over whether China might resort to a military solution, a fear heightened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Washington has maintained a policy of "strategic ambiguity" towards Taiwan, deliberately making no firm commitment on whether it would come to its defence. That strategy was aimed at making Beijing think twice about the costs of any invasion, and also to deter Taiwan from formally declaring independence. US President Joe Biden ...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella leaves the Elysee Palace after a meeting with the French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on May 23, 2018. Microsoft executives on Tuesday told analysts to expect a continuation of the weak pace of business that emerged in December, which hurt the software maker's fiscal second quarter results. "In our commercial business we expect business trends that we saw at the end of December to continue into Q3," Amy Hood, Microsoft's chief financial officer, said on a conference call. In particular, the company saw less growth than expected in Microsoft 365 productivity software subscriptions, identity and security services, and business-oriented Windows products. Growth in consumption of the company's cloud computing service Azure also slowed down, she said. The ...

NEW YORK :Oil prices rose around 1 per cent on Thursday after posting the biggest two-day loss for the start of a year in three decades with U.S. data showing lower fuel inventories providing support and economic concerns capping gains. Big declines in the previous two days were driven by worries about a global recession, especially following weak short-term economic signs in the world's two biggest oil consumers, the United States and China. U.S. distillate inventories fell more than expected as a winter storm gripped the United States at the end of December, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed on Thursday. U.S. gasoline stocks fell 346,000 barrels last week, the Energy Information Administration said, compared with analysts' expectations in a Reuters poll for a...

United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has declared that the US has hit its federal debt limit, kicking off an intense political battle that puts the global financial system at risk. Congress and the White House have until at least early June to resolve the issue. The very phrase “debt ceiling” sounds austere and restrictive, as if it’s a lid on government spending. In fact, this cap on United States government borrowing affects only the ability to pay existing bills, not to approve more spending. But it has become an explosive political issue with the potential to roil financial markets, since a failure to raise the ceiling could eventually result in a first-ever default on some of the government’s obligations. Here is what you need to know about the situation. Why is there a ...

NEW YORK : The dollar slid on Thursday in choppy trading, as a slew of data continued to show that the U.S. economy was slowing down in the wake of multiple hefty interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, with the market anticipating a pause in tightening this year. "The market is just one-way right now: short dollars and long bonds. It's going to take some time to change that direction because the current data flow is not favorable to the Fed's stance that rates are going to stay higher for longer," said Mazen Issa, senior FX strategist at TD Securities in New York. "That may be what ends up happening. But it's harder for the Fed's message to resonate for markets after so much tightening has been done and also what the data flow has shown." The yen, on the other hand, rallied due i...

NEW DELHI :The growth of Google's Android ecosystem is on the brink of stalling in India due to an antitrust order that asks the company to change how it markets the platform, the U.S. company has said in a Supreme Court challenge seen by Reuters. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) in October fined Alphabet Inc-owned Google $161 million for exploiting its dominant position in Android, which powers 97 per cent of smartphones in India, and asked it to change restrictions imposed on smartphone makers related to pre-installing apps. Google has so far said the CCI decision will force it to change its long-standing business model, but its Indian Supreme Court filing for the first time quantifies the impact and details the changes the company will need to make. Google will need to modif...

The European Central Bank is expected to continue raising rates aggressively in the short-term as the euro zone economy proves more resilient than anticipated. Haussmann Visuals | Moment | Getty Images After China's reopening and a deluge of positive data surprises in recent weeks, economists are upgrading their previously gloomy outlooks for the global economy. Data releases last week showed signs of inflation slowing and less severe downturns in activity, prompting Barclays on Friday to raise its global growth forecast to 2.2% in 2023, up 0.5 percentage points from its last estimate in mid-November. related investing news Barclays downgrades Sunrun, cites weaker demand outlook for residential solar energy "This is largely driven by the 1.0pp increase in our China growth prediction to 4....