Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has reassured Egypt's new Islamist president that the United States would continue with plans to expand economic assistance despite anti-American protests that cast new shadows over US engagement with the region.
Clinton met Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi in New York, where both are attending this week's UN General Assembly meeting, and reinforced the Obama administration's continued commitment to provide both military and economic aid for Cairo, a senior State Department official said.
"What he heard from the secretary is that she is committed to following through on what she has said we will do," the official said following the 45-minute meeting.
Brent crude climbed above $110 a barrel on Tuesday, recovering from a more than 1 percent drop in the previous session, as escalating tensions surrounding Iran offset concerns about weak demand in a still-fragile global economy.
Washington on Monday tightened sanctions against Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions, while Tehran increased its rhetoric against Israel, intensifying worries about the conflict between the two and the impact on crude supplies from the region.
"The markets have been flipflopping between worries over weak demand and tight supplies, so I'm not surprised to see some volatility in prices," said Natalie Rampono, commodity strategist with ANZ in Melbourne.
Lebanon's gross public debt reached $55.4 billion at the end of July 2012, an increase of 3.3 percent from the end of 2011 and 5 percent from July 2011, according to figures released by the Association of Banks in Lebanon.
“When measured against the size of the economy, gross public debt accounted for 136.4 percent of GDP at end-July 2012, reporting a relative standstill since year-end 2011,” said the report, which was published by Bank Audi’s Lebanon Weekly Monitor.
It added that domestic debt decreased by 0.9 percent from the end of 2011 and was up by 1.3 percent from the end of July 2011 to reach a total of $32.4 billion at the end of July 2012.
The International Monetary Fund is set to cut its forecast for global growth next month when it updates its projections for the world economy, the head of the IMF said on Monday.
"We continue to project a gradual recovery, but global growth will likely be a bit weaker than we had anticipated even in July, and our forecast has trended downward over the last 12 months," IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said in a speech previewing the IMF/World Bank meetings in Tokyo on October 12-14.
The biggest factor weighing on the world economy was uncertainty among investors over whether policymakers in advanced economies will deliver on promises, Lagarde added.
Morocco has awarded a Saudi-led consortium a $1 billion contract to build a 160 megawatt solar power plant, the first in a series of vast solar energy projects planned in the North African kingdom.
A consortium made up of Saudi developer ACWA Power International (95 percent) and the Spanish firms ARIES and TSC (five percent between them), beat off bids from three other groups, one of them led by Italian energy giant Enel.
The bids were evaluated on the basis of price per kilowatt/hour proposed by the competing firms, with the ACWA group offering 1.60 dirhams (0.14 euros), some 27 percent less than the nearest bidder.
Royal Dutch Shell expects to resume production at its Majnoon oilfield in Iraq in the first quarter of 2013, a senior company official said on September 18, as a pipeline construction delay means it is likely to miss a year-end production target.
Shell then expects to lift output to 175,000 barrels per day (bpd) – the level of production required for it to start recovering costs under its contract with Baghdad – by March or April, Arne de Kock, commercial general manager for Iraq, told Reuters in an interview at an energy conference in Istanbul.
Asked when operations at Majnoon would begin again, de Kock said: "It will be some time next year. Our plans are to have mechanical completion by the end of the year. Then we will enter hydrocarbons into the system sometime in Q1."
