The quarterly profit of Sagicor Group Jamaica Limited declined to $1 billion, or half of year-earlier levels, due to one-off expenses related to insurance contracts and reduced market values on certain investments, including Jamaica bonds. Sagicor...
The Japanese economy shrank at an annual rate of two per cent in the first quarter of this year, as consumption and exports declined, the government said Thursday. Although unemployment has stayed relatively low in the world’s fourth largest...
Google on Tuesday rolled out a retooled search engine that will frequently favour responses crafted by artificial intelligence over website links, a shift promising to quicken the quest for information, while also potentially disrupting the flow of...
Argentina’s monthly inflation eased sharply to a single-digit rate in April for the first time in half a year, data released Tuesday showed. Prices rose at a rate of 8.8 per cent last month, the Argentine government statistics agency reported, down...
The head of Brazil’s state-controlled oil and gas giant Petrobras has stepped down, the company said on Wednesday, following months of tensions with the federal government. Petrobras opted not to pay extraordinary dividends to its shareholders...
A trade war over clean technologies is brewing. The United States and the European Union, worried that Chinese subsidies threaten their green industries, have warned that they will respond with import restrictions. China, in turn, has lodged a...
Bondholders will decide next Tuesday whether to grant a second extension to Specialty Coffee Investments Company Limited, an outfit connected to businessman and investor Michael Lee-Chin, for the repayment of the debt. If they vote in favour, the...
Relatives of Lundine Anderson of Trouble Hill currently live on sections of his 100-acre farm, allowing them to keep watch over his crops. That solved some of his farm-theft problems, but last November he lost about 20 per cent of his coffee crop...
A large group of Republican attorneys general on Monday took legal action against the Biden administration and California over new emissions limits for trucks. Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers is leading the group of GOP attorneys general...
Mining giant Anglo American PLC plans to break up its sprawling worldwide business – including spinning off the DeBeers diamond operation – as it seeks to fend off a takeover and focus on minerals that are expected to boom amid the global shift to...
A tiny, low-priced electric car called the Seagull has American automakers and politicians trembling. The car, launched last year by Chinese automaker BYD, sells for around US$12,000 in China, but drives well and is put together with craftsmanship...
US airlines are suing to block the Biden administration from requiring greater transparency over fees that the carriers charge their passengers, saying that a new rule would confuse consumers by giving them too much information during the ticket-...
Motorists will pay less for gas and diesel when they go to the pumps on Thursday. The state-owned oil refinery, Petrojam, says E-10 87 is to move down by $0.25 to sell for $174.19 per litre and a litre of E-10 90 will go down by $0.25 to sell for $...
The man at the centre of the pandemic meme stock craze appeared online for the first time in three years, sending the prices of the quirky and volatile shares sharply higher Monday. Keith Gill, better known as “Roaring Kitty,” posted an image...
The United States government’s highway safety agency has opened another investigation of automated driving systems, this time into crashes involving Waymo’s self-driving vehicles. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, posted...
The international development sector has become fixated on calculating financing gaps. Hardly a day goes by without new estimates of the funds low and middle-income countries, grouped as LMICs, need to meet their climate targets and achieve the...
Higher metal prices benefited Jamalco which returned to profit in the March quarter, parent company Century Aluminum has reported. “Production at Jamalco also improved through the first quarter, and I’m pleased to say the refinery returned to...
MPC Caribbean Clean Energy Limited, a regional investor in renewable energy, booked a profit of US$232,000 for the March quarter, which reversed losses of US$39,000 from the prior year, and added momentum to the earnings racked up in the past...
In the popular imagination, the Caribbean is paradise, an exotic place to escape to. But behind the images of balmy beaches and lush hotel grounds lies a crisis, the likes of which its residents have never experienced. Caribbean islands are in a...
OpenAI’s latest update to its artificial intelligence model can mimic human cadences in its verbal responses and can even try to detect people’s moods. The effect conjures up images of the 2013 Spike Jonze move Her, where the (human) main character...
The Biden administration announced plans to slap new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, advanced batteries, solar cells, steel, aluminum and medical equipment – an election year move that’s increasing friction between the world’s two largest...
Artificial intelligence is just about everywhere you look these days – including the workplace. That means training staff about the technology and using it responsibly is critical. It’s a tall order, especially as the commercialisation of...
The sharp interest rate hikes of the past two years will likely take longer than previously expected to bring down inflation, several United States Federal Reserve officials have said in recent comments, suggesting there may be few, if any, rate...
The International Monetary Fund, Argentina’s biggest creditor, agreed Monday to release the next tranche of loans due under a bailout program, endorsing government austerity measures so severe they even surpass the terms of its US$43 billion loan...
National Commercial Bank Jamaica, NCB, has seen only moderate movement in its non-performing loans amid the near one-third jump in past-due consumer loans and residential mortgages reported across the wider banking sector. “We are not seeing the...
