Australia formally signed a Aus$50 billion "strategic partnership" with France to build 12 state of the art submarines Monday, a signal of Canberra's willingness to project power across the Pacific.

A record investment package being prepared by Saudi Arabia for Pakistan will likely provide welcome relief for its cash-strapped Muslim ally, while also addressing regional geopolitical challenges, analysts say.

The world's top energy companies booked enormous profits last year thanks to higher oil prices and keeping a tight lid on spending, even if that risked limiting their medium-term production capacity.

President Donald Trump's choice to lead the World Bank is a firebrand critic of the world's largest anti-poverty lender -- an institution he has called wasteful, corrupt and overly generous to China.

Lawyers for French carmaker Renault have criticized their Japanese alliance partner Nissan for its handling of an internal probe into the Carlos Ghosn scandal, a Sunday newspaper has reported.

Public debt has rapidly increased in many Arab countries since the 2008 global financial crisis, due to persistently high budget deficits, the International Monetary Fund warned Saturday.

"Unfortunately, the region has yet to fully recover from the global financial crisis and other big economic dislocations over the past decade," IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said.

Amazon has struck a deal that will allow hundreds of thousands of products forced offline because of new e-commerce rules to return to its Indian site, a source said Friday.

European Union ambassadors adopted a French-German compromise on Friday allowing Berlin to remain the lead negotiator with Russia on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe, diplomats said.

France and Germany have struck a compromise allowing Berlin to remain the lead negotiator with Russia on the Nord Stream II gas pipeline to Europe, a proposed deal showed Friday.

Nieves Ribullen, a Venezuelan oil worker sick of struggling to get by as his country falls apart, is betting it all on far-away Iraq's Kurdish region to give his family a better life.

Over the years he's watched dozens of co-workers abandon poverty wages and dangerous working conditions at the rundown complex of refineries in Punto Fijo on Venezuela's Caribbean coast for jobs in far-flung places like Kuwait, Angola and Chile.