Prime Minister Najib Miqati confirmed Monday that the parliamentary polls will be held before May 21st. "No one can prevent the holding of elections,” he affirmed.

He also said that the negotiations with the International Monetary Fund are “on the right track,” and that the World Bank is “fully cooperating.”

Global stock markets and Wall Street futures declined Monday after stronger U.S. hiring and a double-digit rise in Chinese exports.

London and Frankfurt opened lower. Tokyo, Hong Kong and Sydney declined while Shanghai advanced.

SoftBank Group Corp. sank into red ink for the July-September period, dragged down by losses on its investments in China, the Japanese technology conglomerate said Monday.

SoftBank reported a 397.9 billion yen ($3.5 billion) loss for the fiscal second quarter, compared to a 627 billion yen profit recorded the same period the previous year.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is asking on Twitter whether he should sell 10% of his stock in the electric-vehicle company amid pressure in Washington to increase taxes on billionaires like him.

Some Democrats have been pushing for billionaires to pay taxes when the price of the stocks they hold goes up, even if they don't sell any shares. It's a concept called "unrealized gains," and Musk is sitting on a lot of them with a net worth of roughly $300 billion.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced ambitious plans to build the "metaverse" — a virtual reality construct intended to supplant the internet, merge virtual life with real life and create endless new playgrounds for everyone — he promised that "you're going to able to do almost anything you can imagine."

That might not be such a great idea.

Soon-to-be father Hermann Outrequin felt optimistic in 2019 when he gave up his fishing company job of 16 years to go independent. The Normandy fisherman wanted a fresh start to have time for his newborn son.

But now a political spat over fishing rights between Paris and London has thrown cold water over his plans.

The Dutch Supreme Court on Friday handed Russia at least a temporary victory in an appeal of what's believed to be the world's largest award in an arbitration case after former shareholders of bankrupted Russian oil giant Yukos accused the Kremlin of taking down the company to silence its CEO, a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin.

The decision further extends what already has been a yearslong legal battle between Russia and former Yukos shareholders. It quashed a lower court ruling, effectively setting aside a $50 billion award made to the former shareholders in 2014 and sending the case to another court in Amsterdam to consider Russian claims that the shareholders committed fraud in the original arbitration hearings.

The top negotiators of the European Union and recently departed Britain sought a belated renegotiated deal Friday on how trade in Northern Ireland should be dealt with amid signs that increasingly acrimonious relations could lead to a trade war.

On top of the dispute on how to smooth the trade in goods in the UK's Northern Ireland, where the complicated Brexit deal has left the region also in the EU's single trading zone, both sides are fighting over symbolically important UK fishing licenses off France.

OPEC and allied oil-producing countries rebuffed pressure from U.S. President Joe Biden to pump significantly more oil and lower gasoline prices for American drivers, deciding Thursday to stick with their plan for cautious monthly increases even as prices surge and the global economy is thirsty for fuel.

The OPEC+ alliance, made up of OPEC members led by Saudi Arabia and non-members led by Russia, approved an increase in production of 400,000 barrels per day for the month of December at an online meeting.

The IMF has begun "preparatory" talks with Lebanon on a new aid package after receiving an official request from Beirut, an IMF spokesman said Thursday.