US President Barack Obama will sign an executive order Thursday to put into action his ambitious strategy to double American exports to ease an unemployment crisis at home, officials said. Obama will sign the order "instructing the federal government to use every available federal resource in support of this effort," an administration official said.

China said Wednesday that its exports in February soared for the third straight month and at the fastest pace in three years, underlining the nation's position as the world's leading exporter. Overseas shipments grew 45. 7 percent on-year last month to 94. 5 billion dollars, the customs bureau said, cementing a turnaround that began in December when a year-long decline in exports ended.

China said Saturday it could take up to three years for its exports to return to pre-financial crisis levels, as the Asian powerhouse shifted its focus to domestic demand. "Our exports have just started growing again," commerce minister Chen Deming told reporters on the second day of the National People's Congress, the annual parliamentary session.

Iraq's oil exports reached their highest level in February since Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, oil ministry spokesman Assem Jihad told AFP on Tuesday.

A Cold War-era nuclear bunker in Britain has been put up for sale on online auction site eBay, and by Sunday bidders had pushed the price up to more than 27,000 pounds (30,000 euros, 40,000 dollars). "A rare opportunity to acquire a piece of Cold War history," read the sale advert on the website. "Set in a stunning location with glorious views.

The head of Germany's exporters' federation BGA called Thursday for harsher measures against Iran over its disputed nuclear policy, saying the time for appeasement had passed. "From Chamberlain I've turned into Churchill," Anton Boerner told the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper, a reference to former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who sought to appease Adolf Hitler and to Britain's subsequent war-time leader.

China has surpassed the United States in short-term average daily imports of oil from Saudi Arabia, US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said in Dubai on Wednesday, adding that the situation will likely continue. The US has long been the top importer of oil from its petroleum-rich Gulf ally. "It's correct, as far as I know," Chu said, when asked if China has recently moved ahead of the United States in terms of average barrels-per-day oil imports from Saudi Arabia.

Vienna's stock exchange is considering acquiring Sofia's stock market to expand its position in central and eastern Europe, Austrian newspaper Wirtschaftsblatt reported Tuesday. "We are seeking information from Bulgaria," Heinrich Schaller, chief of the Vienna stock exchange (Wiener Boerse) told the newspaper.

CME Group, the giant derivatives marketplace, will own 90 percent of a new joint venture with Dow Jones & Co. that will own the Dow Jones Indexes, including the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average, the companies said Wednesday. Dow Jones, a unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, will take a 10 percent stake in the new joint venture, which has approximately 130,000 index properties, the firms said in a joint statement released after the New York stock market closed.

KHARTOUM, December 28, 2009 (AFP) - Sudan, angling to become Africa's leading exporter of ethanol, has sent to the European Union its first shipment of the bio-fuel, an official with the state-owned Kenana compa@