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Germany's upper house of parliament has rejected a deal with Switzerland to tax German assets held in Swiss bank accounts.
The deal would have allowed Germans with undeclared assets in Switzerland to avoid punishment by making a one-off payment of between 21% and 41% of the value of their assets.
The deal had been negotiated in April and was due to take effect in January.
But it needed to be ratified by both parliaments.
The rejection by the German upper house, the Bundesrat, prolongs the dispute between the two countries over how to deal with the estimated 180-200bn euros (£145-160bn) of German assets hidden in Switzerland.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble had called for support for the deal, saying: "The agreement tries to find a better solution for a situation which is unsatisfactory."
But Norbert Walter-Borjans, of the main opposition Social Democrats, told the Bundesrat it was a deal which made "honest taxpayers feel like fools".
Swiss Finance Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said her government remained "committed to a successful ratification".
And the Swiss Bankers Association said in a statement: "The German upper house has missed a major opportunity to reach a fair, optimum and sustainable solution for all parties to definitively settle the bilateral tax issues."
Aston Martin owner denies receiving two offers for firm
The owner of Aston Martin, Kuwait's Investment Dar, has denied reports it has received competing bids for a 50% stake in the luxury British car brand.
Italian private equity fund Investindustrial is widely reported to have made an offer of nearly £250m ($400m) for Aston Martin.
India's Mahindra and Mahindra is understood to have made a higher offer.
But in an interview with Kuwait's Al Watan newspaper Investment Dar chairman Adnan Al Musallam denied the story.
Earlier this month, Investment Dar dismissed a Bloomberg story which said it was looking to sell its stake in the British car maker as having "no truth to it".
At the time, the investment house said it had "a long-term plan and commitment with Aston Martin and has no plans to sell its stake in Aston Martin in the short term".
Despite that statement on 12 November though, reports of a bidding war between Investindustrial and Mahindra and Mahindra have become more widespread.
Mahindra and Mahindra declined to comment, while Investindustrial could not be reached.
Aston Martin, based in Gaydon, Warwickshire, will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year.
Its cars have been immortalised in James Bond films over the last few decades.
The company was sold in 2007 by Ford for £479m to a consortium of Investment Dar and another Kuwaiti investment fund, Adeem Investment.
The consortium was fronted by Dave Richards, former Formula One Benetton and BAR boss, who remains as chairman of Aston Martin.
The new owners targeted higher sales in China, but sales in the UK and North America have been hit in the financial crisis.
Gas tanker Ob River attempts first winter Arctic crossing
A large tanker carrying liquified natural gas (LNG) is set to become the first ship of its type to sail across the Arctic.
The carrier, Ob River, left Norway in November and has sailed north of Russia on its way to Japan.
The specially equipped tanker is due to arrive in early December and will shave 20 days off the regular journey.
The owners say that changing climate conditions and a volatile gas market make the Arctic transit profitable.
Long-term preparation
Built in 2007 with a strengthened hull, the Ob River can carry up to 150,000 cubic metres of gas. The tanker was loaded with LNG at Hammerfest in the north of Norway on 7 November and set sail across the Barents Sea. It has been accompanied by a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker for much of its voyage.
The ship, with an international crew of 40, has been chartered from its Greek owners Dynagas by the Russian Gazprom energy giant. It says it has been preparing for the trip for over a year.
"It's an extraordinarily interesting adventure," Tony Lauritzen, commercial director at Dynagas, told BBC News.
"The people on board have been seeing polar bears on the route. We've had the plans for a long time and everything has gone well."
Mr Lauritzen says that a key factor in the decision to use the northern route was the recent scientific record on melting in the Arctic.
"We have studied lots of observation data - there is an observable trend that the ice conditions are becoming more and more favourable for transiting this route. You are able to reach a highly profitable market by saving 40% of the distance, that's 40% less fuel used as well."
The Norwegian LNG plant at Hammerfest was developed with exports to the US in mind. But the rapid uptake of shale in America has curbed the demand for imported gas.
Meanwhile in Japan, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, there has been a growing interest in alternative power sources, especially gas.
"The major point about gas is that it now goes east and not west," says Gunnar Sander, senior adviser at the Norwegian Polar Institute and an expert on how climate change impacts economic activity in the Arctic.
"The shale gas revolution has turned the market upside down; that plus the rapid melting of the polar ice."
He stresses that the changes in climate are less important than the growing demand for oil and gas.
"The major driver is the export of resources from the Arctic region, not the fact that you can transit across the Arctic sea."
There is an expectation that because of changing climactic conditions, sea traffic across the northern sea route will increase rapidly. 2012 has been a record year both for the length of the sailing season and also for the amount of cargo that has been shipped.
-BBC
Argentina debt showdown - NY judge: The court will be obeyed
Argentina has finally run out of wiggle room in a billion-dollar showdown over foreign debts unpaid since the country's world-record default a decade ago, and the stakes couldn't be higher for President Cristina Fernandez.
A US federal judge in New York late Wednesday ordered Argentina to pay immediately and in full everything it owes to what Fernandez calls "vulture funds" that she blames for much of her country's troubles.
That adds up to US$1.3 billion, due by December 15.
The judge also barred Argentina from paying other bondholders until it satisfies this judgment, putting the president's back against the wall: If she doesn't reverse her long-standing position and pay up, she risks triggering another historic Argentine debt default, this time totalling more than US$20 billion.
"It is hardly an injustice to have legal rulings which, at long last, mean that Argentina must pay the debts which it owes. After 10 years of litigation, this is a just result," US District Judge Thomas Griesa concluded.
Argentine Economy Minister Hernan Lorenzino responded to the judge Thursday by pledging to battle "judicial colonialism."
Lorenzino said Argentina would defend its stance using all legal means and would take the ruling to the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday.
"Paying the vultures is not only unfair, but illegal following our internal rules," Lorenzino told reporters, referring to Argentina's "ley cerrojo," or "lock law," which bans the reopening of debt restructuring.
"We'll fight all decisions that are against the interests of our country," Lorenzino said, adding that Argentina is also ready to appeal to the US Supreme Court and take its case before any international body.
"We still believe the US justice system will fix this in a way that won't affect Argentina, its legitimate creditors and, in an international context where the importance of these decisions is patent ... in terms of the financial international architecture," he said.
Argentina's president had insisted earlier this week that her administration wouldn't pay a single dollar to the plaintiffs.
No room for evasion
But the judge gave Fernandez no room to manoeuvre meanwhile, lifting his stay and ordering that the money be put in an escrow account for the plaintiffs to collect.
"These threats of defiance cannot go by unheeded," the judge wrote. "The less time Argentina is given to devise means for evasion, the more assurance there is against such evasion."
If Fernandez refuses, the judge said that the Bank of New York, which processes Argentina's bond payments, will find itself in violation if it doesn't hold up payments to all other bondholders.
"It's a mess. This does not help Argentina. Default could happen," Goldman Sachs analyst Alberto Ramos in New York said Thursday. "The markets will react negatively to this."
The remedy also sent jitters through the legal departments of the most powerful financial institutions in the United States.
The US Federal Reserve and the Clearing House, a trade group representing the world's largest commercial banks, told the judge to make sure his order won't affect the US funds-transfer system, which automatically moves an average of US$2.6 trillion a day in a half-million transfers between more than 7,000 banks.
The entire system depends on transfers being "immediate, final and irrevocable" when processed. Requiring intermediaries to identify, stop and divert payments according to court orders "would impede the use of rapid electronic funds transfers in commerce by causing delays and driving up costs."
The judge dismissed these concerns Wednesday night, saying among other things that "if Argentina complies with the rulings of the Court of Appeals, there will be no problem."
As with so many other things involving Argentina, this case is rooted in the bloody dictatorship that ruled in 1976-1983.
The military junta more than tripled the country's foreign debts. By 2001, the burden had become unsustainable and the economy collapsed.
Argentina's US$95 billion default still stands as a world record.
Sovereign debt is supposed to be paid no matter who runs a country, but Fernandez has always considered this defaulted debt to be illegitimate, forced onto the Argentines by dictators acting in concert with international financial speculators.
She and her late husband and predecessor as president, Nestor Kirchner, who took office in 2003, have never made any payments on the defaulted bonds.
Instead, they offered new bonds paying less than 30 cents for each dollar owed in default, and by 2010, some 93 per cent of the original bondholders agreed to the swaps.
The debt relief granted by these "exchange bondholders" enabled Argentina to climb out of a deep economic crisis, and many analysts have described it as a model for Greece and other debt-burdened countries to consider.
Holdouts led by NML Capital Ltd, an investment fund owned by US billionaire Paul Singer, refused the swaps, insisting on payment in full plus interest.
Seeking assets
Singer's lawyers have travelled the world since then seeking to embargo Argentine assets, even getting its naval training ship Libertad seized in Ghana as collateral. But they have never collected.
The judge's solution to all this is to force Argentina to pay the holdouts an equal amount each time it makes a payment to the exchange bondholders.
And since the latter group is due to get US$3.3 billion on December 15, the judge said the holdouts must get their entire US$1.3 billion by then as well.
Exchange bondholders who collectively own US$20 billion in the restructured Argentine debt had argued that they "already suffered tens of billions of dollars in losses" and that it was not fair to harm their already diminished returns so that a few holdouts can earn up to 200 per cent on debt they bought for pennies on the dollar after Argentina's collapse.
If allowed to stand, this kind of remedy will make it impossible for other countries to get critical debt relief, they argued.
But the judge said his remedy was fair.
"The exchange bondholders bargained for certainty and the avoidance of the burden and risk of litigating," while the holdouts spent years unsuccessfully trying to make Argentina pay, he wrote.
- AP
Anti-Morsi Protest in Egypt Turns Deadly, Stocks Tumble
Opponents of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi have stormed an office of his Muslim Brotherhood movement in the country's north, triggering a fight that killed one person and wounded at least 40 others.
Brotherhood leaders identified the fatality as a 15-year-old Islamist youth, but it was not clear how he was killed in Sunday's incident in the Nile Delta town of Damanhour. The teenager is the first person known to be killed since reformist and liberal activists began street protests to denounce Mr. Morsi for granting himself sweeping powers in a decree last Thursday.
Opposition activists camped in Cairo's Tahrir Square for a third day to demand a reversal of the presidential decree. The protesters blocked traffic and engaged in intermittent battles with police in nearby streets.
Egypt's main stock index slumped nearly 10 percent Sunday as investors gave their first response to Mr. Morsi's move and subsequent protests. It was one of the market's biggest losses since the days and weeks after longtime president Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular uprising last year.
In his decree, President Morsi said he was barring courts from challenging his decisions, in a move aimed at speeding up Egypt's democratic transition and bringing accountability to former officials accused of crimes under Mubarak. Critics accused Mr. Morsi of taking on dictatorial powers like those of his predecessor.
Some Egyptian judges observed a strike on Sunday to protest the decree. But Egypt's Supreme Judicial Council urged them to return to work and said it will meet with Mr. Morsi on Monday to try to resolve the dispute. The council of senior judges said it will try to persuade the president to restrict his absolute powers to sovereign matters such as war and peace.
Mr. Morsi's office issued a statement Sunday reiterating what he called the “temporary” nature of his decree, which he said will last until Egypt elects a new parliament under a revised constitution. The president also pledged to hold a dialogue with all political forces in Egypt on the drafting of the new constitution.
Reformists and liberals fear the Islamist-dominated assembly revising the charter will produce a document with an Islamist slant.
Mr. Morsi's opponents and supporters have called for rival mass rallies in Cairo Tuesday.
Bangladesh faactory kills At Least 11o
Fire officials say a lack of emergency exits contributed to the deaths of at least 110 people, when a fire swept through a garment factory in Bangladesh.
Authorities said Sunday that the blaze broke out on the ground floor of a multi-story building the night before in a factory outside the capital, Dhaka.
Firefighters fought the blaze for several hours, while many workers remained trapped on the upper floors of the building. Some workers jumped to their deaths before authorities arrived on the scene.
Officials say they are not sure what caused the fire and that they are investigating. A director for the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity told the French news agency that the blaze was the deadliest in the history of the country's apparel industry.
Bangladesh has about 4,000 garment factories that make clothes for international brands. The country earns about $20 billion annually from exporting clothing.
Meanwhile, authorities say the girders of an overpass that was under construction in southeastern Bangladesh have collapsed, killing at least 11 people.
Officials say the girders crashed Saturday evening in the port city of Chittagong.
Police say dozens of people are missing.
Nationalists Take Election in Spain’s Catalonia
Official results from local parliamentary elections in Spain's northeastern region of Catalonia show the majority of seats will go to nationalist parties that favor independence from Spain.
Returns from Sunday's vote show the national alliance of incumbent regional president and pro-independence candidate Artur Mas fell short of a majority, taking just 50 seats in the 135-seat parliament, down from 62. The separatist Republican Left (ERC) more than doubled its share of seats, taking 21.
The Socialist party (PSC), which does not favor independence, lost eight seats in the vote, bringing it from 28 to 20 seats.
In a televised appearance from Barcelona after the vote, Mas thanked his alliance for its support, but acknowledging that it now must share responsibility for governing.
The Mas government called early elections as part of a power struggle with the central government run by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
Catalonia, which is home to factories, banks and other industries, is responsible for around one-fifth of Spain's economic output.
Many Catalans believe the central government gives back too little, considering the region's contributions.
Syrian Rebels Claim Capture of Helicopter Base Near Damascus
Syrian rebels say they have captured a government helicopter base near Damascus as they try to close in on President Bashar al-Assad's seat of power in the capital.
A video released by Syrian activists on Sunday appears to show anti-Assad rebels roaming around the Marj al-Sultan air base, about 15 kilometers east of Damascus, after they launched an assault the previous day. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the rebels killed at least eight soldiers and destroyed two helicopters at the base, while at least 15 rebel fighters also were killed.
There was no government confirmation of the report.
Activists say Syrian opposition forces trying to end President Assad's autocratic rule have been gradually expanding their territory around Damascus, despite being heavily outgunned by government forces who remain entrenched in the capital.
In other developments Sunday, the Observatory said rebels seized a training base of a pro-Assad Palestinian militant faction near Damascus. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine condemned the attack on its base, which it said has been used to train thousands of Palestinians to fight Israel in the past 30 years.
Elsewhere, the Observatory said a bomb attack on a bus killed at least five people in southern Syria.
Syria's government describes the rebels as foreign-backed terrorists. The rebellion began in March 2011 with pro-democracy protests against Mr. Assad before evolving into a civil war. It is difficult to verify details of the fighting independently because Syria tightly restricts reporting by foreign journalists.
Egypt’s Morsi to Meet Judicial Council on Decree
Egyptian state media says President Mohamed Morsi will meet members of the country's highest judicial authority Monday to discuss his decree shielding his decisions from judicial review.
Mr. Morsi and the judiciary hinted at compromise Sunday to avert a full-scale political crisis.
The Supreme Judicial Council said the president's decree seizing new powers should apply only to “sovereign matters.” Although it did not clarify what that meant, its statement – read on television – suggested it did not reject the move outright. It called on judges and prosecutors who have called for a strike to return to work.
Mr. Morsi repeated assurances that the measures would be temporary, and said he wanted dialogue with political groups.
Egypt's stock market plunged nearly 10 percent Sunday in its first day open since the president's decree set off street violence. The losses on the Egyptian exchange are among the biggest since the turbulent days and weeks after the ouster of authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak last year.
Earlier Sunday, protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the site of the 2011 uprising that toppled Mubarak, threw rocks at police. Security forces fired back with rounds of tear gas in the third day of violence since the president's decrees put him above judicial oversight and extended the same protection to two Islamist-dominated bodies — the assembly writing a new constitution and the upper house of parliament.
President Morsi's supporters and opponents are both planning demonstrations on Tuesday that many fear will lead to more violence.
Prominent Egyptian democracy advocate Mohammed ElBaradei called Saturday for President Morsi to rescind the near absolute powers he has granted himself.
ElBaradei, addressing crowds in Tahrir Square, said the president must take the action to avoid the possibility of increased turmoil in the country that has recently shed its longtime repressive government.
Egypt's highest body of judges, the Supreme Judicial Council, also condemned President Morsi's decree.
The judges Saturday called the move “an unprecedented attack” on the independence of the judiciary. Judges in Alexandria have gone on strike, saying they will not return to work until the decree is withdrawn.
The protests began Friday, a day after President Morsi declared that his decisions cannot be appealed by the courts or any other authority. He cited a need to protect the achievements of the 2011 revolution that led to the ouster of Mubarak after three decades in power.
Mr. Morsi's decree Thursday includes an order for retrials of former officials who used violence to suppress last year's popular revolution against Mubarak. It also bars Egypt's judiciary from dissolving the upper house of parliament and an assembly drafting a new constitution – both dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Eurozone output contracts again, PMI survey says
Business activity in the eurozone continued to contract in November, a survey suggests.
The Markit eurozone Purchasing Managers' Output Index was little changed from October, up to 45.8 from 45.7. A reading below 50 indicates contraction.
A sharper rate of decline in the services sector was offset by an easing of the contraction among manufacturers.
The survey also warned of a 0.5% drop in GDP in the fourth quarter.
Official figures released earlier this month showed that the eurozone economy contracted by 0.1% in the third quarter, between July and September.
"The PMI suggests that the downturn is set to gather pace significantly in the fourth quarter. The final three months of the year could see GDP fall by as much as 0.5%," Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit said.
"The eurozone economy continued to deteriorate at an alarming pace in November, and is entrenched in the steepest downturn since mid-2009," he added.
Sentiment among services businesses fell to the lowest since March 2009, said Markit.
Firms also continued to cut employment at the second-fastest rate since January 2010.
ING economist Peter Vanden Houte said it looked like the manufacturing sector was "bottoming out", as the contraction was becoming less severe.
"On the contrary, if you look at the services sector, we see that the PMI continues to fall and is now at the lowest level since 2009 and this is a reflection of extremely weak domestic demand and with the budgetary austerity continuing in Europe for sure, domestic demand is going to remain negative in the near future," he said.
'Anxious'
Economists watch surveys such as the PMI closely, particularly because they give an indication of future business activity.
The amount of goods purchased for use in production, which indicates how much demand companies are expecting, fell steeply in November, Markit said.
"Firms have clearly become increasingly anxious about the economic outlook and are seeking to control costs as much as possible. All this suggests that any swift return to growth is unlikely," Markit said.
Although the rate of output decline eased in France and Germany, it remained "substantial", Markit said, especially in France.
Concern is focused on Germany's service sector, which is contracting at its fastest pace in three-and-a-half years.
Eurozone economies are struggling as governments focus on reducing debt levels following the financial crisis by cutting spending and increasing taxes, measures that are undermining growth.
European markets were generally positive, despite the disappointing outlook. They were reacting to more positive news on the state of the Chinese economy.
The purchasing managers index for China's manufacturing sector expanded in November, for the first time in more than a year.
The latest data follows a rise in fixed asset investment, industrial production and retail sales in October, announced before China's leadership transition.