Russia is set to charge Ukraine $500 for 1,000 cubic metres of natural gas, reported the New York Times on Sunday, $100 more than what it was already charging and nearly a third higher than what Russia’s gas company, Gazprom, charges clients elsewhere.
Russia’s central bank has revoked the license of Master Bank, a mid-sized Moscow-based lender, after an investigation uncovered “large-scale dubious operations” related to money laundering and false accounting, reported Reuters on Wednesday.
The news was significant given that a member of Master Bank’s board was the cousin of President Vladimir Putin, while the bank also holds around $1 billion in individual deposits.
Spain’s National Court has issued an international arrest warrant for China’s former president Jiang Zemin, after it ruled that the Chinese leader may have been responsible for “genocide, crimes against humanity, torture and terrorism” against Tibetans during the 1980s and 1990s.
In a bid to promote a new high-speed train system, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has offered to fully pay for the first phase of construction of a possible rail route in the u.S., linking Washington to New York in just one hour.
Africa will have to spend between $200-350 billion a year in climate adaptation costs by 2070, if the current global temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius, according to a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report on Tuesday.
Publicly listed German companies will soon have to ensure a 30 percent female presence in their supervisory boards, reported AFP, after the nation’s top political parties on Monday agreed on a plan to fix the large gender imbalance in businesses.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is set to revise the method it uses to calculate the national GDP, in order to bring it in line with global standards, reported Reuters on Monday.
The new system, if implemented, will come online by the end of 2014 at the earliest, said NBS’s vice head Xu Xianchun; and would see China’s accounting measures adhere more closely to the 2008 United Nations system of national accounts.
The governments of Spain and Ireland on Thursday separately announced plans to exit from international banking bailout programmes, while opting too against taking up a precautionary credit line, as market conditions and banks’ stability improve.
According to Reuters, Spain had taken up 41 billion euros of aid last year to rescue a number of banks. Ireland on the other hand had sought 67.5 billion euros of rescue funds in November 2010.
China is set to usurp India as the world’s largest gold consumer this year, according to forecasts from the World Gold Council (WGC) on Thursday, as a slide in the rupee’s value and strict import curbs saw India’s gold demand drop by nearly 24 percent.
In a study, the WGC reported that China had already imported 797.8 tons of gold up till September 30 this year, while Indian demand stood at just 715.7 tons.
Chinese gold imports are expected to grow further to 1,000 tons by the end of year, while Indian will purchase around 900 tons.
China will send nearly 10 million yuan ($1.64 million) worth of aid to the Philippines for the Typhoon Haiyan disaster relief effort, reported the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, after the government changed its mind of pledging just $100,000 initially.
