Europe, Asia | featured news

Yong-Hee Kim still can't believe that in a prosperous country like Germany, powdered baby formula would ever be rationed and that she would have to scour shops in the German capital to find the right brand for her 13-month-old son.

Foreign ministers from the G8 group of rich countries failed to patch up deep divisions over Syria or come up with a plan on North Korea during a meeting in London on Thursday.

Rosneft is seeking to borrow up to $30 billion from China in exchange for possibly doubling oil supplies, making Beijing the largest consumer of Russian oil and further diverting supplies away from Europe.

Like any nation, China has a host of problems, both societal and economic. It's getting older. It has yet to develop large portions of the west. Corruption is rampant. It has not serious entrepreneurial business culture that can drive the country's economic development. It has untold billions in government investments into states and municipalities that have no investment return for the foreseeable future. But this bridge to nowhere economy, as some naysayers might call it, has one big immediate hurdle. That hurdle is Europe.

The euro zone's economic woes accelerated last month and China's slowdown looked likely to extend to a seventh quarter, surveys on Wednesday showed, while the United States proved the bright spot with better-than-expected news on services and jobs.

A Swedish man deported from Cambodia to serve a prison sentence for his involvement with file-sharing site The Pirate Bay faces new suspicions of hacking against the Swedish tax authority.

One of the masterminds behind file-sharing website The Pirate Bay was arrested last week in Cambodia, months after he was due to begin a one-year prison sentence in Sweden.

Scientists have found alarming levels of the lung disease tuberculosis in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America that are resistant to up to four powerful antibiotic drugs. In a large international study published in the Lancet medical journal on Thursday, researchers found rates of both multi drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) were higher than previously thought and were threatening global efforts to curb the spread of the disease.

German carmaker Volkswagen AG says sales rose 11.9 percent in July as demand in Asia and the United States outweighed slacker sales in crisis-hit western Europe.

Stocks are opening lower on Wall Street, deflated by signs that the global economic meltdown is being felt across Asia... China reported sharply lower growth in its exports. The so-called fiscal cliff, when U.S. government spending cuts and higher taxes kick in on Jan. 1, looms larger now that the distraction of earnings season is over.