With the Japanese stock market at 16-month lows, foreign investors fleeing the market and the strong yen decimating the country's leading exporters, the Tokyo Stock Exchange is fighting to remain relevant and compete with its Asian rivals - especially those in China.

KABUL-Afghanistan's government inched closer to bailing out the country's largest bank, setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars that could be used to keep Kabul Bank solvent, officials said.

With the job market stuck in neutral, the Obama administration is moving toward using the revenue from expiring tax cuts for the wealthy to finance about $35 billion of tax cuts for small businesses and workers, administration and congressional officials said Friday.

Shinhan Bank has filed a complaint with Seoul authorities against the chief executive of Shinhan Financial Group, its parent and South Korea's largest financial company by market value, alleging embezzlement and breach of trust.

Royal Bank of Scotland is axing another 3,500 jobs, taking to almost 27,000 the number of staff cut since Stephen Hester took over as chief executive of the troubled UK bank less than two years ago.

Many news outlets are doing far less accountability reporting than in the past, bad news indeed for the public. New nonprofit investigative ventures have emerged, but they can't pick up the slack by themselves.

By Mary Walton

Mary Walton (marywalton2000@yahoo.com) is a former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her most recent book, "A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot," was published by Palgrave Macmillan in August.

Alistair Darling admitted on Wednesday that Britain's controversial supertax on bankers' bonuses had failed to change the industry's behaviour over pay as "imaginative" financiers devised ways to avoid it.

Illegal immigration to the U.S. has slowed sharply since 2007, with the bleak U.S. job market apparently discouraging people from heading north.

Rosatom, Russia's state-owned atomic power corporation, has launched an international charm offensive as the country's most secretive and controversial industry attempts to come in from the cold.

Global meat prices have hit a 20-year high as robust demand from emerging countries has coincided with a drop in production by exporters such as the US and Australia, fuelling concerns about rising food inflation.