Asia stocks held steady yesterday, despite a record-smashing lead from Wall Street, ahead of a week of major monetary policy announcements around the world.

American businesses stand to lose more than 3 million days of operations from flooding in 2022 and will face worsening economic fallout in the coming decades as climate change fuels ever more extreme weather events, researchers said yesterday.

Vietnam’s biggest conglomerate Vingroup said on Sunday it had started building a $174 million battery cell plant for its VinFast electric vehicles business so the company can own its battery supply chain.

Shrouded by acrid smoke, a young Afghan crouches sorting waste he has pulled from the trash bins of Istanbul, anxious that Turkey will soon strip him of even this subsistence.

Malaysia’s palm oil producers are racing to adjust to an acute shortage of workers due to the coronavirus and sharply higher costs of recruitment as they make changes in response to accusations of forced labour.

The Biden administration has ordered US government agencies to immediately stop financing new carbon-intensive fossil fuel projects overseas and prioritize global collaborations to deploy clean energy technology, according to US diplomatic cables.

Much like the coronavirus pandemic, and the economic disruption that it has caused, a global shipping crisis looks set to go on delaying goods traffic and fuelling inflation well into 2023.

Israel on Thursday led a 10-country simulation of a major cyberattack on the global financial system in an attempt to increase cooperation that could help to minimise any potential damage to financial markets and banks.

Malaysia has charged Dyson supplier ATA IMS with four violations of labour law on accommodation for workers as it investigates complaints of forced labour, authorities said on Saturday.

Canada on Friday threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on American goods and suspend parts of a landmark North American trade deal if Washington rewards electric cars made in US union shops, to the detriment of Canada’s auto sector.

Research teams at Intel Corp on Saturday unveiled work that the company believes will help it keep speeding up and shrinking computing chips over the next ten years, with several technologies aimed at stacking parts of chips on top of each other.

A regional office of the Global Institute for Food Security, a research organisation of University of Saskatchewan in Canada, was opened in Dhaka yesterday to help the country’s agricultural researchers gain advanced knowledge and skills.

Dubai welcomed 4.88 million visitors in the period January- October 2021, its Department of Economy and Tourism (DET) said on Saturday, adding that international visitors in the month of October alone had exceeded one million.

Shell shareholders on Friday overwhelmingly backed plans to switch the oil giant’s headquarters from the Netherlands to Britain after a century and drop Royal Dutch from the name.

Drugmakers have targeted the U.S. market to earn outsized profits from old medicines, according to a report released on Friday by the House Oversight Committee that highlighted Eli Lilly and Co, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi, which dominate the market for insulin.

Europe’s automotive sector has become too reliant on Asia and other regions for vital components such as semiconductors and battery cells, Bosch’s outgoing chairman told a German newspaper.

The US Federal Reserve’s experiment with running a “hot” economy has edged into historically uncharted territory, with an unemployment rate never reached without associated central bank rate increases and now levels of inflation that in the past also prompted a policy response.

The Spanish government adopted Friday measures to attract so-called digital nomads -- remote tech workers who can do their job from anywhere with a good internet connection.

US consumer prices rose last month at a rate not seen in nearly 40 years, the government reported Friday, underscoring how inflation threatens the world’s largest economy and President Joe Biden’s public support.

Over the past five decades, Bangladesh managed to transition to an increasingly manufacturing-based and service-oriented economy and fared well in social indicators. It has registered average gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of more than 6 per cent in the last 10 years and over 8 per cent in the fiscal year 2019.