South Africa’s central bank on Thursday cut its key interest rate for the fifth time this year in a bid to breathe life into the coronavirus-stricken economy. Along with other central banks around the world to aggressively lower borrowing costs in a bid to soften economic blow from COVID-19, the South African Reserve Bank cut […]

A Jordanian couple in Saudi Arabia burst into tears of joy to be among the chosen ones for next week’s scaled-down hajj pilgrimage, but countless rejected applications have stirred resentment. For the first time in modern history, millions of pilgrims outside Saudi Arabia have been barred from the hajj — a key pillar of Islam […]

China aims to launch a rover to Mars on Thursday on a journey coinciding with a similar US mission as the powers take their rivalry into deep space. The two countries are taking advantage of a period when Earth and Mars are closest to send their probes, with China’s mission due to lift off by […]

The World Trade Organization (WTO) exiting chief in his last press conference as WTO director-general before stepping down at the end of August, Roberto Azevedo insisted that he and his team had “achieved everything we could” have over the past seven years. “There was no effort spared,” he said, responding to a question on how […]

The Swedish unemployment rate jumped to its highest level since 1998 in June, at nearly 10 percent, due to the economic fallout from the novel coronavirus, Statistics Sweden said Thursday. The seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate among 16 to 64-year-olds, the statistics agency’s longest-running series, reached 9.4 percent last month, surpassing the nine per cent peak in […]