INVESTMENT

Asian shares wobbled Thursday as doubts deepened about Europe's ability to stop its sovereign debt crisis from spinning out of control, with Germany and France split over the European Central Bank's bond buying role.

Growing investor demand for silver will help boost its price above $50 per ounce by the end of next year, a top official at Thomson Reuters GFMS said Wednesday.

As winter draws in across Canada's northern Yukon territory, big mining companies are prospecting for bargains among the army of junior explorers staking claims in what's shaping up as the region's second big gold rush.

Several factors are at work in oil's latest push back above the psychologically-significant $100 per barrel level -- a price that U.S. motorists wince at.

Vodafone India, buffeted by brutal competition and regulatory woes, expects a shakeout within two years.

The conflict between humanity and nature has never been as serious as it is today.

As equity investors play the ups and down of the stock market, fixed income money managers that provide day-to-day financing to the banks, investors in medium-term bonds and the peer banks themselves are scrambling for cover. The result: a dollar financing crunch that could deeply affect the banks and how they do business.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said it may take similar skills to navigate Washington politics as it does to make advances in physics research, a field in which he won a Nobel Prize in 1997.

The Paris Club of creditor nations said members agreed on Tuesday to reduce the Ivory Coast's foreign debt burden and said reforms underway should lead to further relief.

A budget crunch in Swaziland, Africa's last absolute monarchy, has reached a critical stage with the government struggling to maintain spending on HIV/AIDS, education and the elderly, the International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday.

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe won praise on Wednesday as a great African figure and old friend of Beijing, underscoring China's commitment to boosting business ties to a leader shunned by Western governments.

Gold extended an earlier slide on Wednesday in its largest one-day fall this month as the escalating euro zone debt crisis kept the euro near one-month lows against the dollar, making it more attractive to non-U.S. investors to sell bullion.

TransCanada Corp is committed to building the $7 billion Keystone XL project despite a 12-to-18-month delay in U.S. approvals, the company's chief executive said on Wednesday.

Supporters of the Canadian Wheat Board took their protest to Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, in a last-ditch effort to sway legislators to keep the world's last major agricultural monopoly.

Pakistan's Baluchistan province has rejected a mining lease application from Chilean copper producer Antofagasta and Canada's Barrick Gold , raising questions over the future of their Reko Diq copper-gold project.

China's Shandong Gold Group, the parent of Shandong Gold Mining and a big gold producer, has made a $1 billion offer to acquire Brazil's Jaguar Mining, two sources close to the deal told Reuters on Wednesday.

With a banking sector that seemingly cycles from reticence to lend, lending at prohibitive interest rates, and outright banker-to-banker mistrust (the latest round of which is being driven by renewed concern about Italy's debt), is today's U.S. banking sector where Framer/Founding Father Alexander Hamilton wanted it to be?

It was reported that the energy major was in talks to buy a stake in cash-strapped Kingfisher Airlines, but a spokesman for Reliance Industries denied the report.

Japan's disgraced Olympus Corp is preparing to take legal action, including possible criminal complaints, against any executives found responsible for the accounting scandal engulfing the firm, according to an internal staff email.

Foreign direct investment into China climbed nearly 16 percent in the first 10 months of 2011 from a year earlier as foreign investors continued to flock to the world's fastest-growing major economy despite the global economic malaise.

Shares in Japan's disgraced Olympus Corp jumped on Wednesday on speculation that it can escape delisting over an accounting scandal and that the brunt of any punishment will be borne by a few executives rather than the firm itself.