TUNIS: Debt-ridden Tunisia unveiled a 2022 budget on Tuesday that will see it borrow almost $7 billion more, as it seeks to stimulate an economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic. 

FRANKFURT: On the 23rd floor of the European Central Bank’s towering Frankfurt headquarters, on the other side of a security door, anti-counterfeiting experts are poring over some of the best fake banknotes in the eurozone. The room, off limits to outsiders, at first glance recalls a high school science lab-an unusually well-equipped one.

BEIRUT: Lebanon is mired in an economic crisis branded by the World Bank as one of the worst in modern times, but officials are yet to strike an international bailout deal. The financial meltdown began in 2019, and Lebanon defaulted on its debt last year.

BRUSSELS: When 12 countries adopted the euro two decades ago, French president Jacques Chirac hailed a Europe that was “affirming its identity and its power”. To the euro’s most starry-eyed promoters, the currency was not only a leap of faith into European unity, but set up a rivalry with the United States and its powerful dollar.

SOFIA: Bulgaria could join the eurozone in 2024, but the EU’s poorest nation is divided over the prospect of ditching its national currency and joining the single European currency club.

PARIS: The ten most expensive weather disasters this year caused more than $170 billion (150 billion euros) in damage, $20 billion more than in 2020, a British aid group said yesterday. 

PARIS: Across a quarter century of UN climate conferences tasked with saving humanity from itself, one was deemed a chaotic failure (Copenhagen/2009), another a stunning success (Paris/2015), and the rest landed somewhere in between.

KABUL: Afghan businessman Shoaib Barak is struggling to pay his workers and suppliers, unable to access funds from a banking system crippled by the freezing of the nation’s overseas assets. 

HONG KONG: Three years of democracy protests followed by a pandemic have devastated Hong Kong retailers who had grown used to relying on cash from mainland Chinese tourists. In a city that once boasted some of the world’s highest retail rents, the market has cratered.