Because Economics is Sexy...

The EU has agreed a conditional deal on how to help other nations fight global warming, ahead of a key climate summit, but set no figure on what it would pay.
The EU agreed climate change would need 100bn euros ($148bn; £90bn) a year by 2020, and would pay its “fair share”, conditional on other nations.
UK [...]

Typhoon Mirinae has killed at least two people, and forced thousands to evacuate, after making landfall in the eastern Philippines, officials have said.
The victims drowned in floods in Laguna province just south of Manila, the capital, the local disaster monitoring office said on Saturday.
In Laguna, military and police rescue boats worked to save people who [...]

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. authorities seized nine failed banks on Friday, the most in a single day since the financial crisis began and the latest stark sign that substantial parts of the nation’s banking industry are being crippled by bad loans.
The move brought the total number of failed banks in 2009 to 115 — [...]

Unemployment levels across the 16 countries that use the euro rose to 9.7% in September, the highest rate since January 1999.
This brought the number of people unemployed across the eurozone region to 15.3 million.
The rate across all 27 members of the European Union rose to 9.2%, with 286,000 more people now jobless. This brings the [...]

Roberto Micheletti, Honduras’s de facto leader, has agreed to reinstate Manuel Zelaya, the country’s ousted president, as part of a deal aimed at ending a political crisis.
The two sides have been at odds for four months over whether Zelaya should be reinstated as president before presidential elections.
“I am pleased to announce … my negotiating team [...]

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – It seems the financial crisis isn’t all doom and gloom: one in four people are glad the world’s economy slumped like it did, because it helped them realize their priorities in life, according to a global survey.
Market research firm Synovate polled around 11,400 people across the world and found more than half [...]

Jacques Chirac, France’s former president, has been ordered to stand trial on embezzlement charges dating back to his time as Paris mayor.
A French magistrate on Friday said Chirac, 76, must stand trial for “misuse of public funds” and “breach of trust”.
The trial would hinge on allegations that he gave 21 political allies false contracts [...]

Samsung Electronics posted a record-high operating profit of 4.23 trillion ($3.57 billion) won in the third quarter, led by the dramatic turnaround of its chip and panel businesses.
The world’s top maker of memory chips and LCD panels is fast emerging from the global economic downturn, taking advantage of the crisis to pull ahead of its [...]

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – The ChiNext stock market, China’s long-awaited Nasdaq-style second board, debuted on Friday with a speculative surge that more than doubled the price of all 28 stocks during intraday trade — a good sign for companies lining up to list on China’s stock markets.
The bubbly open to a market that hopes to turn [...]

Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has been deported from Zimbabwe a day after being detained by security officials on arrival in Harare, a UN official has said.
Nowak told reporters after arriving in South Africa that his mission had failed following his detention by security officials in Harare overnight and his deportation on [...]