This is People’s Daily Tonight, your news source from China.
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Oil prices surge as attack on Saudi facility disrupts output
An attack on a critical Saudi Arabia oil plant pushed crude prices sharply higher Monday.
But its longer-term impact depends on how long production is disrupted and what this weekend’s attack means for the future.
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the attack on the Saudi Aramco facility, Saudi Arabia’s largest oil processing plant.
It halted production of 5.7 million barrels of crude a day.
That’s more than half of Saudi Arabia’s global daily exports and more than 5 percent of the world’s daily crude oil production.
Most output goes to Asia. (AP)
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China sees steady employment in Jan.-Aug.
China's job market remained generally stable in the first eight months of the year, with the number of newly created jobs achieving 89.5 percent of this year's target.
A total of 9.84 million new urban jobs were created during the January-August period, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Monday.
The surveyed urban unemployment rate dropped 0.1 percentage points to 5.2 percent last month, NBS data showed.
The surveyed unemployment rate among the people aged between 25 and 59, who represent the majority of the labor market, stood at 4.5 percent last month, down from 4.6 percent in July, data from the NBS showed. (Xinhua)
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China's retail sales up 7.5 pct in August
China's retail sales of consumer goods rose 7.5 percent year on year in August to 3.39 trillion yuan, or 480 billion dollars.
The pace was 0.1 percentage points lower than the previous month.
Sales of the consumer goods, excluding automobiles, rose 9.3 percent in August to 3.08 trillion yuan.
In the first eight months, retail sales of consumer goods climbed 8.2 percent to 26.22 trillion yuan. (Xinhua)
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South Korea's import of Japanese beer tumbles on boycott campaign
South Korea's import of Japanese beer tumbled in recent months on the campaign in Seoul to boycott Japanese products, caused by a trade spat between the two countries, Yonhap news agency said Monday citing customs office data.
In terms of value, import of Japanese beer plunged to $223,000 in August from $7,566,000 a year earlier. The Japanese beer import was tallied at $4,342,000 in July.
Japanese beer had ranked first among the imported beers from January 2009 to June this year, but the ranking fell to third in July and 13th in August amid the ongoing trade feud between South Korea and Japan. (Xinhua)
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Union votes to strike at General Motors’ US plants
Roughly 49,000 workers at General Motors plants in the US plan to go on strike just before midnight Sunday.
About 200 plant-level union leaders voted unanimously in favor of a walkout during a meeting Sunday morning in Detroit.
Union leaders said the sides were still far apart on several major issues, and apparently weren’t swayed by a GM offer to make new products at or near two of the four plants it had been planning to close.
GM offered to build a new all-electric pickup truck at a factory in Detroit that is slated to close next year. (AP)
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7 killed in small plane crash in SW Colombia
At least seven people were killed when a small plane crashed on Sunday in a residential district of Popayan, a town in southwest Colombia, officials confirmed.
The aircraft, which belonged to an airline called Transpacifico, crashed shortly after taking off from Payan, capital of Cauca department, Colombia's civil aeronautics agency said in a statement. (Xinhua)
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Millennium-old royal tomb found in north China
And Chinese archaeologists have uncovered a royal tomb dating back around 1,000 years in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
They said the ceiling of the single-chamber tomb is decorated with crane-patterned murals.
They also unearthed valuable burial objects such as glass and gold wares, as well as a coping stone made of two huge pieces of granite, which was likely sourced from outside the area. (Xinhua)
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And that’s People’s Daily Tonight. Thanks for joining us.
(Produced by David Nye and Zhan Huilan)