Reuters

Turkey has purchased its third offshore drilling ship which will arrive in Turkey next month, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday, adding that the ship will begin operations in 2020.

The head of the Eurogroup Mario Centeno said on Monday he expected the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on the eurozone economy to be temporary.
"We expect it to be a temporary effect," Centeno told reporters in Brussels, adding that the EU should carefully assess developments also for the long-term. [Reuters]

The plight of the cruise ship off Japan with more than 200 coronavirus infections and the shunning of another luxury liner by five ports despite no known cases has led to a sharp change in tack for an industry in shock: Avoid Asia.

Greece will kick off the sale of a minority stake in power distribution operator HEDNO in September, Energy Minister Kostis Hatzidakis said on Friday.

Speaking on the sidelines of the signing of a loan agreement between the European Investment Bank (EIB) and PPC, Hatzidakis told reporters that the sale process for a 49% stake will begin in September.

Russia's foreign ministry on Thursday called on Turkey to refrain from making provocative statements about events in Syria amid rising tensions over the Syrian province of Idlib.

Air China will cancel flights to Athens, Greece, from Feb. 17 to March 18 as a precaution to stem the coronavirus outbreak, an Air China company official in Greece said on Wednesday.

"The reason is public safety because of the coronavirus and there are operational reasons as well," an officer at the airline's Athens office said.

A Turkish delegation will go to Moscow in coming days to discuss the escalating conflict in Syria's Idlib region, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Wednesday, adding that around 1 million people had been displaced there due to Russian-backed Syrian attacks.

Greece's benchmark 10-year government bond yield fell below 1 percent for the first time on Wednesday, marking a milestone for a country bailed out three times in the last decade.

The Greek 10-year bond yield fell to as lows as 0.992 percent, Tradeweb pricing showed GR10YT=TWEB, dropping below 1 percent for the first time ever.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday the Syrian government will pay a "very heavy price" for attacking Turkish troops in northwest Syria's Idlib region, where 13 soldiers have been killed in just over a week, prompting a retaliation.

The coronavirus outbreak poses a "very grave threat for the rest of the world", the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said in an appeal for sharing virus samples and speeding up research into drugs and vaccines against a new type of coronavirus, which has killed more than 1,000 people so far.