REUTERS/Damir Sagolj
Athletes clear a water obstacle during the women's 3000 metres steeplechase final at the IAAF World Championships at the National Stadium in Beijing, China August 26, 2015.
Chinese markets are currently up, and have been all session. The Shanghai Composite Index is up about 0.99% as of 6:45 a.m.
Other Asian markets are up too. Hong Kong's Hang Seng is up 2.25% and Japan's Nikkei is up 1.21%.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has ruled out working with some major coalition partners. Greece's prime minister on Wednesday raised the political stakes ahead of next month's early national election, saying he will not enter a coalition with the main center-right and centrist opposition parties even if he needs their backing to govern.
Sainsbury's is boosting the basic wage of its staff. British supermarket chain Sainsbury's will hand its 137,000 non-management store staff their highest pay increase in more than a decade this month, it said on Thursday, lifting its basic pay above the recently announced national living wage.
Eurozone money supply and lending figures are coming. Figures on the eurozone's M3 money supply and private lending are coming at 9 a.m. UK time (4 a.m. ET). Analysts expect annual money supply growth of around 5% and private lending growth of about 0.8%, which would be an acceleration on June's figures.
Bill Ackman's Pershing Square is down for the year. Billionaire investor William Ackman's hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management is posting a loss for the year after the recent market decline, it told investors on Wednesday. "At the date of this report, the year to date investment performance has been erased, and the Company is at a loss position for the year," the hedge fund said in its interim financial statement.
The two sides in Ukraine's conflict are seeking a ceasefire from September. Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists, in a gesture to shore up a tenuous ceasefire, agreed on Wednesday to strive for an end to all truce violations from next Tuesday, the OSCE and rebel representatives said.
Amazon is slamming the brakes on its consumer hardware development. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon has "dismissed dozens of engineers who worked on its Fire phone at Lab126, its secretive hardware-development center in Silicon Valley."
Goldman Sachs expects China's growth to rebound a little in Q4. The investment bank's analysts said "A weak 3Q is unavoidable and any potential growth pickup is more likely to be unveiled by September readings, which are scheduled to be released in early/mid-October."
Panasonic is slashing jobs in Beijing. Japanese electronics giant Panasonic on Thursday said it will stop making lithium-ion batteries at its factory in Beijing this month, cutting 1,300 jobs as part of a move to focus on higher-margin products such as electric car batteries.