IMF: G20 should prepare for 'Brexit' impact www3.nhk.or.jp

Japan’s Komatsu is buying Joy Global for $3.7 billion www.mining.com

German firms want an over €2bn stake in Russian high-speed railway www.rt.com

French winery wants to invest in Crimea www.rt.com

PayPal seeks to extend reach with Visa tie-up www.reuters.com

Rio Olympics 2016: Russia fails to overturn athlete ban for next month's Games www.bbc.com

Russian track and field athletes will remain banned from the Olympics following claims the country ran a state-sponsored doping programme.

The Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and 68 Russian athletes attempted to overturn the suspension, implemented by the body that governs world athletics.

But the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) has ruled it can stand.

A handful of Russian athletes could still compete as neutrals at the Rio Games, which start on 5 August.

"It's sad but rules are rules," said Olympic 100m and 200m champion Usain Bolt, who is targeting more gold medals in Rio.

He said it was important to send a strong message to the dopers.

"Doping violations in track and field is getting really bad," said the Jamaican, 29. "If you cheat or go or against the rules, this will scare a lot of people."

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Russia ban sends strong message - Usain Bolt
However, Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva - one of the 68 to appeal to Cas - said the ruling was "a blatant political order", while the Russian Foreign Ministry called it a a "crime against sport".

Isinbayeva, the 2012 gold medallist, 34, told the Tass news agency: "Thank you all for this funeral for athletics."

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) said it was "pleased Cas has supported its position", adding that the judgement had "created a level playing field for athletes".

IAAF president Lord Coe added: "This is not a day for triumphant statements. I didn't come into this sport to stop athletes from competing.

"Beyond Rio, the IAAF taskforce will continue to work with Russia to establish a clean safe environment for its athletes so that its federation and team can return to international recognition and competition."

Separately, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is considering calls to ban all Russian competitors from the Rio Games following a second report into state-sponsored doping.

What now for Russia's athletes?

Some Russian athletes could compete in Rio as neutrals if they meet a number of criteria, including being repeatedly tested outside their homeland.

At least two - 800m runner and doping whistleblower Yuliya Stepanova and US-based long jumper Darya Klishina - have gone down that path.

Now the ruling by a three-person Cas panel has cleared the way for others.

Cas said the ROC could still nominate athletes to compete as neutrals. However, a Cas spokesman said the panel had expressed concerns that this left "no possibility" for athletes to comply with the criteria.

Who was on the Cas panel?

Three lawyers from Italy, Britain and the United States, widely regarded as amongst the most experienced judges on the court's list of around 400 approved arbitrators.

The chairman was Milan-based Luigi Fumagalli, who also sat on the panel which upheld Fifa's four-month ban on Uruguay's Luis Suarez for biting Italian defender Georgio Chiellini opponent at the 2014 World Cup.

Retired judge Robert Reid, from England, has chaired disciplinary committees for the Premier League and sat in judgment of Pakistan cricketer Salman Butt's failed appeal to Cas against a ban for fixing.

Finally, Jeffrey Benz from Los Angeles is a former legal adviser to the United States Olympic Committee.

Why were Russian athletes banned?

Russia was suspended from track and field events by the IAAF in November 2015 following the publication of an independent World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report that showed a culture of widespread, state-sponsored doping.

Sports minister Vitaly Mutko apologised for Russia's failure to catch the cheats but stopped short of admitting the scandal had been state-sponsored.

However, another Wada-commissioned report delivered earlier this week - the McLaren report - contained more damaging allegations and suggested senior figures in Russia's sports ministry were complicit in an organised cover-up.

The report implicated the majority of Olympic sports in the cover-up and claimed that Russian secret service agents were involved in swapping positive urine samples for clean ones.

Following Monday's publication of the McLaren report, the IOC faced calls to ban all Russian competitors from the 2016 Olympics and will hold an second emergency meeting on Sunday to decide its course of action.

McDonald's Japan's market cap hits 14-year high on Pokemon Go deal www.asia.nikkei.com

TOKYO -- Shares of the Japanese unit of McDonald's rose on the Jasdaq market in Tokyo on Thursday morning, pushing up the company's market capitalization to the highest level in about 14 years and 8 months.

Flash memory prices rebound as makers introduce larger-capacity chips www.asia.nikkei.com

TOKYO -- Buoyed by a significant demand increase as Chinese and Taiwanese smartphone makers introduce products with larger memory capacity, prices of NAND flash memory chips have rebounded significantly.

The benchmark bulk sales price of NAND flash memory products rose a significant 22% in June compared to a month ago.

Prices of 64 gigabit, multi-level cell-type NAND chips rose in June to about $2.75 per unit, the first rebound in two years and nine months. Such units are sometimes traded at over $3.

Prices of triple-level cell chips, which have higher data capacity, have risen to around $2 and are continuing to rise in July.

The significant spike in NAND flash memory prices is attributed to increased demand from some Chinese and Taiwanese smartphone makers, which are introducing products with more memory capacity.

TOKYO -- Buoyed by a significant demand increase as Chinese and Taiwanese smartphone makers introduce products with larger memory capacity, prices of NAND flash memory chips have rebounded significantly.

The benchmark bulk sales price of NAND flash memory products rose a significant 22% in June compared to a month ago.

Prices of 64 gigabit, multi-level cell-type NAND chips rose in June to about $2.75 per unit, the first rebound in two years and nine months. Such units are sometimes traded at over $3.

Prices of triple-level cell chips, which have higher data capacity, have risen to around $2 and are continuing to rise in July.

The significant spike in NAND flash memory prices is attributed to increased demand from some Chinese and Taiwanese smartphone makers, which are introducing products with more memory capacity.

Vivo Communication Technology and Xiaomi, both Chinese smartphone makers, for example, recently introduced handsets whose internal storage is more than double that of their respective previous products. Such moves have boosted demand to levels exceeding memory manufacturers' expectations.

British market research firm Technavio expects the world's total NAND flash memory shipments to grow 30% in 2016 from a year ago to over 10 billion units.

The market is rising due also to declining supply, caused by a suspension of operations at a Chinese semiconductor plant of South Korea's Samsung Electronics following an explosion at a power substation in Xian, China, in mid-June.

The spike in demand for flash memory chips used in smartphones is also beginning to affect DRAMs used in PCs. Some memory makers including Micron Technology of the U.S. have switched their PC-use chip production lines to production of smartphone chips from April to June, straining supply of PC-use DRAMs, industry sources said.

As a result, prices of 4-gigabit DDR3 units are currently centered around $1.78 per unit, up about 11% from levels in May. Prices of next-generation DDR4 units also rose about 10% to around $1.8.

Another factor contributing to increased demand for memory chips is the increasing number of cyberattacks on corporate servers, which have resulted in a number of high-profile cases of customer information leaks in recent years. Forced to introduce additional security measures, which tend to weigh on computer performance, more companies are increasing the number of DRAMs in their systems to alleviate performance slowdown, another industry source said.

Tesla: Elon Musk reveals latest 'masterplan' www.bbc.com

Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, has published the second part of his self-titled "masterplan".
He said Tesla would be branching out into creating a "solar-roof-with-battery product" that people can have fitted to their homes.
He wants the Tesla electric car range to cover all types of ground vehicles, specifically buses and lorries.
And once the cars have full autonomous driving capability, Mr Musk said Tesla would allow owners to add their cars to a shared fleet, meaning the vehicles can be making money for their owners when they are not using them.
Mr Musk had teased the publication of the plan on Twitter for several days, recently saying he'd pulled an all-nighter in order to finish it.
His ambition, he wrote, was to "accelerate the advent of sustainable energy".
"We must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse.
"Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better."
Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, has published the second part of his self-titled "masterplan".
He said Tesla would be branching out into creating a "solar-roof-with-battery product" that people can have fitted to their homes.
He wants the Tesla electric car range to cover all types of ground vehicles, specifically buses and lorries.
And once the cars have full autonomous driving capability, Mr Musk said Tesla would allow owners to add their cars to a shared fleet, meaning the vehicles can be making money for their owners when they are not using them.
Mr Musk had teased the publication of the plan on Twitter for several days, recently saying he'd pulled an all-nighter in order to finish it.
His ambition, he wrote, was to "accelerate the advent of sustainable energy".
"We must at some point achieve a sustainable energy economy or we will run out of fossil fuels to burn and civilization will collapse.
"Given that we must get off fossil fuels anyway and that virtually all scientists agree that dramatically increasing atmospheric and oceanic carbon levels is insane, the faster we achieve sustainability, the better."
Autopilot controversy
(FILES) This file photo taken on December 2, 2015 shows Elon Musk, CEO of US automotive and energy storage company Tesla, presents his outlook on climate change at the Paris-Sorbonne University in Paris.Image copyrightAFP/GETTY IMAGES
The masterplan comes comes at a time when Mr Musk is facing criticism for the roll-out of Tesla's Autopilot feature, in which cars autonomously travel along motorways, changing lanes and speeding up or down in keeping with traffic.
US road safety regulators are investigating whether Autopilot was at fault in a crash which left one man, the driver, dead. The software appears to have failed to spot a white lorry driving across the Tesla's path.
Mr Musk stressed in his masterplan that Autopilot was in beta mode, and that all drivers are warned of that.
He wrote: "It would no more make sense to disable Tesla's Autopilot, as some have called for, than it would to disable autopilot in aircraft, after which our system is named.
"It is also important to explain why we refer to Autopilot as 'beta'. This is not beta software in any normal sense of the word. Every release goes through extensive internal validation before it reaches any customers.
"It is called beta in order to decrease complacency and indicate that it will continue to improve (Autopilot is always off by default). Once we get to the point where Autopilot is approximately 10 times safer than the US vehicle average, the beta label will be removed."
Uber competitor?
Mr Musk was also under pressure to explain the reasoning behind Tesla's purchase of SolarCity, a solar-power company that many considered to have been struggling. Mr Musk was its chief executive, and some investors said Tesla's purchase was essentially bailing out the ailing SolarCity.
However, Mr Musk rationalised his thinking by saying his vision of sustainable energy in our homes required the two companies to be joined.
"We can't do this well if Tesla and SolarCity are different companies, which is why we need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies."
Mr Musk also seemed to suggest his company would one day compete with the likes of Uber and Lyft for personal transportation.
Once the cars had achieved full, safe autonomy, he said, a service would be set up that allowed owners to make their cars part of a fleet others could summon via an app.
In cities where there were too few Tesla owners to satisfy demand, Mr Musk said Tesla would "operate its own fleet, ensuring you can always hail a ride from us no matter where you are".
Shares in Tesla were marginally up during out-of-hours trading.

US files lawsuit against Malaysian state fund www3.nhk.or.jp

The US Department of Justice has taken a legal action to seize more than one billion dollars in assets from a Malaysian state fund, suspected of involvement in corruption.

Court papers filed by the Department in Los Angles allege that the money from the fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad or 1MDB, was misappropriated and went to Malaysian government officials and their families through several shell companies. The papers also allege that the money was spent on buying real estate and art pieces.

The state fund was set up in 2009 with the encouragement of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, but it was found to have large debts. It has also been alleged that a huge amount of funds were siphoned from the fund to the prime minister.
US Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Wednesday that the funds were stolen and laundered through US financial institutions.

The Malaysian government has already closed its investigation into the case, claiming no wrongdoing took place. But authorities in Singapore and Switzerland are still investigating.