CHINA

The French fashion house synonymous with Audrey Hepburn and Breakfast At Tiffany's is eyeing Asia as its next big growth market, spurred by the rapidly rising incomes of the region's nouveau riche.

Specialised laser maker IPG Photonics said growth in China resulted in better-than-expected quarterly results and forecast first-quarter results above expectations.

Trading in the shares of SAIC Motor Corp, China's top car maker, will remain suspended for another five working days from Monday, the company said in a filing with the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Friday.

Bankers are predicting a burgeoning offshore market for renminbi-denominated bonds as corporates increasingly turn to the Chinese currency to issue debt, making it only a matter of time before the renminbi is on a par with dollars, euros and yen.

China's banking regulator has drawn up a tough new set of capital requirement rules as part of efforts to implement Basel III guidelines, according to a document obtained by Reuters on Friday.

Violent aftershocks hampered desperate efforts to find survivors in the quake-ruined New Zealand city of Christchurch on Saturday as the death toll climbed to 123 and was set to rise further.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Institute are using candid cameras to catch wildlife in their natural habitats.

Ford Motor Co is reshaping its relationship with suppliers, allowing more coordination from design to production, as it focuses on global platforms and shared parts, a top Ford executive said this week.

Canada will outpace the United States and Mexico in first-quarter automobile production growth, which will add roughly 1.5 percentage points to the country's economic growth, according to a report released by Bank of Nova Scotia.

For most of the last three millennia, the world's commercial centers have used one or another variant of a gold standard. It should be one of the best understood of human institutions, but it's not. It's one of the worst understood, by both its advocates and detractors. Though it has been spurned by governments many times, this has never been due to a fault of gold to serve its duty, but because governments had other plans for their currencies beyond maintaining their stability. And so,...

The United Nations Human Rights Council has condemned the ongoing violence in Libya and ordered an international probe into alleged abuses carried out by government forces against protesters.

Global listings activity has been the highest on record so far this year, with firms raising a total of $24 billion to date, according to Thomson Reuters data, boosted by buoyant stock markets and improved investor interest.

Volkswagen's record year results beat expectations, showing Europe's largest carmaker has enough financial firepower to complete its planned takeover of Porsche.

A Taiwan-owned plant making parts for Apple Inc said it is offering around 80,000 yuan ($12,177) as compensation to each of the 115 workers hit by chemical poisoning but some of the affected Chinese workers said the sum was not enough.

China's government investors more than doubled their investments in major Japanese blue-chip companies in 2010, the Wall Street Journal said, citing investment advisory firms and people familiar with the matter.

China's Sinopec clinched the second-largest single Chinese liquefied natural gas deal, and ventured for the first time into a foreign unconventional gas asset to feed a domestic boom for the clean fuel.

China is going ahead with a G20 seminar on March 31 to develop ideas on reshaping the global monetary system, but has moved it to the city of Nanjing, near Shanghai, a French government source said on Friday.

Japan aims to cut rare earth consumption by a third within a few years and reduce its reliance on China, by providing subsidies for recycling and investing in new ways to limit their use.

A unit of China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd, the country's No.2 mobile operator, will make a 16 billion yuan ($2.4 billion), 180-day short-term commercial paper issue, sources said on Friday.

China has so far evacuated 12,000, or about a third, of its citizens from turmoil in Libya, many of them workers for Chinese-run projects and businesses in the oil-rich nation, official media said on Friday.

Perennial China Retail Trust lodged the prospectus for its planned S$1.1 billion ($861 million) initial public offering in Singapore, in what is likely to be the first of several large asset-backed trust IPOs in the city-state.