Budget carrier FlyDubai has announced record profits, benefitting from a surge in air travel following the lifting of pandemic restrictions.

The state-owned carrier, based in the business and tourism hub of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, reported $327 million in profit in 2022, up 43% from the previous year. Annual revenue for 2022 was up 72%, to $2.5 billion, it said.

Lebanon’s unofficial dollar exchange rate dropped by more than LBP 10,000 on Wednesday evening, shortly after Central Bank chief Riad Salameh announced that the bank will start buying and selling dollars at a Sayrafa platform rate of LBP 70,000.

China's factory activity accelerated in February as the economy revived following the end of anti-virus controls that kept millions of people at home and disrupted travel and trade, two surveys showed Wednesday.

Purchasing managers' indexes issued by a business magazine, Caixin, and the official China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing rebounded to levels that show activity growing. Measures of production, exports and new orders all rose.

Hungary's Prime Minister Victor Orban has thanked Egypt for its role in capping Europe-bound migration as the two countries inked a series of preliminary agreements in Cairo.

Orban's praise for Egypt, and its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, came during his visit to the Egyptian capital in which the two governments signed various memorandums of understanding in nuclear cooperation, education and sports. Few further details were immediately given about the deals.

A group of women stands in front of a vegetable vendor at a street market in one of Cairo's oldest neighborhoods, yelling in frustration.

"Every day there are new prices," one said. "When will this war end?" another shouted, cradling a baby in her arms.

Swiss regulators have found that Credit Suisse made a "serious breach" of law in connection with a now-bankrupt firm linked to Australian financier Lex Greensill and have opened a probe that could lead to penalties against four former bank managers.

Switzerland's financial markets authority, FINMA, said Tuesday that it has concluded enforcement proceedings opened two years ago against Credit Suisse after bank partner Greensill Capital went bankrupt. At the time, Credit Suisse closed four funds linked to the partnership, in which bank clients had invested about $10 billion.

Wall Street veered toward small gains in premarket trading Tuesday with another batch of earnings on tap to close out a month of losses fueled by anxiety over more interest rate hikes and a possible recession.

Futures for the Dow Jones industrials were up 0.3% before the bell and futures for the S&P 500 rose 0.4%.

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak traveled to Belfast on Tuesday to sell his landmark agreement with the European Union to its toughest audience: Unionist politicians who fear post-Brexit trade rules are weakening Northern Ireland's place in the United Kingdom.

The U.K. and the 27-nation EU announced Monday that they had struck a deal to resolve a dispute over Northern Ireland trade that has vexed relations since the U.K. left the bloc in 2020. The agreement will ease customs checks and other hurdles for goods moving to Northern Ireland from the rest of the U.K. that were imposed after Brexit to maintain an open border between the north and its EU neighbor, the Republic of Ireland.

Ever bigger cars pose a growing problem for the environment because they produce more greenhouse gas emissions and need larger batteries than their smaller cousins, according to the International Energy Agency.

The Paris-based body suggested Monday that it's time for the car industry to downsize its vehicles, citing data that showed the world's 330 million sports utility vehicles, or SUVs, pumped out almost 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022.

Nearly all flights at Germany's Cologne-Bonn airport and the majority at nearby Duesseldorf were canceled or diverted on Monday as a result of strikes that also affected local transportation, day-care facilities and local administration in Germany's most populous region.

Cologne-Bonn airport said that all but two of the day's 136 planned flights wouldn't depart from or arrive there, German news agency dpa reported. In Dusseldorf, only 89 of the planned 330 flights were expected to take place as scheduled, with most of the rest being canceled.