If you’re wringing your hands about prospects for the U.S. dollar, take some comfort: You’re part of a large club. With the Federal Reserve essentially printing money to help the U.S. out of the Great Recession, while keeping interest rates low, there’s not a lot of robust dollar-defending going on. No wonder the buck is
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Storming performances by the German and French economies propelled growth in the euro zone well above forecasts in the first quarter while also highlighting the yawning gap between the bloc's strong and weak. The 17-nation currency area expanded by 0.8 percent in the first three months of the year, data showed on Friday, fueled by
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Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype is likely to boost videoconferencing from workers' desktops, posing further risks to video technology providers like Polycom and Logitech. The cheaper end of the $3 billion videoconferencing equipment market is already suffering from inroads that Skype and other video applications are making in the market, historically controlled by stand-alone
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The Cyprus economy seems to be sliding, with quarterly economic growth in Cyprus slowing for the fifth consecutive quarter in January-March, according to the latest flash estimate from the Statistical Service. On a seasonally adjusted basis, real GDP growth over the previous quarter was zero in the first quarter of 2011, down from 0.4% in
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Greece seems not to have met the terms of its international rescue package, a senior European policymaker said, while Athens countered that playing a "blame game" was hindering any chance of resolving the crisis. "Greece has apparently not fulfilled the conditions sufficiently of late. The issue of privatisations will be the most sensitive point here,"
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Britain's biggest department store chain John Lewis said revenue fell last week even though fashion sales got a boost from shoppers trying to copy the look of Royal Wedding highlight Pippa Middleton. The employee-owned retailer said on Friday sales fell 1.4 percent year-on-year to 54.3 million pounds ($88.4 million) in the week to May 7
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Doctors in Japan used Twitter to reach chronically-ill patients in the wake of the devastating March earthquake and tsunami, telling them where to go to get life-saving treatment after phone networks became unusable. In a letter published in The Lancet on Friday, doctors Yuichi Tamura and Keiichi Fukuda said they sent tweets to 60 patients
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Storming performances by the German and French economies in the first quarter highlight the yawning gap between the euro zone's strong and weak and suggest the forecast for growth in the bloc is well under par. Germany, Europe's largest economy, grew by a startling 1.5 percent in the first three months of the year, data
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The Cypriot Presidency of the EU in the second half of 2012 will be ''extremely important'', Commissioner for the Internal Market and Service Michel Barnier has said. Barnier, who is visiting Cyprus in the framework of a tour in European capitals to discuss the future reforms in the single market, told a press conference the
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Cyprus ranks fourth as regards notifications in the EU rapid alert system for all dangerous consumer products, called RAPEX. Notifications in RAPEX do not include food, pharmaceutical or medical devices. They include other products presenting risks to the health and safety of consumers. According to the RAPEX annual report for 2010, Cyprus ranked fourth among
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