Morning business round-up: Barclays appoints new boss

What made the business news in Asia and Europe this morning? Here's our daily business round-up:

Barclays, the international banking group mired in a number of financial scandals, has appointed Antony Jenkins to be its new chief executive.

The appointment follows the resignation of former chief executive Bob Diamond in the wake of the Libor interest rate-fixing scandal.

Mr Jenkins currently runs Barclays Retail and Business Banking and has been a member of the group's executive committee since 2009.

The announcement comes a day after Barclays said the Serious Fraud Office was investigating the bank.

Global advertising giant WPP has reported half-year pre-tax profits of £358m ($567m), up 7% on the same period last year, with revenues up 5.5% to £4.97bn.

But the group's shares fell 4.2% as it reduced slightly its full-year outlook for 2012, advising "caution".

The US and Western European markets had slowed in the second quarter, it said.

Cabin staff at German airline Lufthansa will begin their strike action on Friday, the workers' union said.

The UFO union did not say where the strikes would take place, but said it would give six hours' notice.

"We do not want to give Lufthansa the opportunity to prepare for the strike by getting replacement crews ready," UFO head Nicoley Baublies told Reuters.

The union and the airline have been at loggerheads over the past year over pay and working conditions.

China has signed a deal to buy 50 planes worth $3.5bn (£2.2bn) from Europe's Airbus.

The agreement is part of a slew of trade deals signed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the start of a two-day visit to China.

An agreement on Airbus plane assembly in China was also signed, according to the Xinhua news agency.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said on Thursday his country would continue to invest in the EU.

In the Philippines, the economy grew at a slower pace in the second quarter as a fall in global demand hurt its exports and industrial output.

Growth was 5.9% in the April to June period, compared with a year ago. That is down from 6.3% annual growth in the first quarter.

Compared with the previous three months, the economy expanded by just 0.2%.

Growth was also hurt by a slowdown in the farming and services sectors.

In Australia, the government plans to link its carbon trading scheme with the EU's, enabling firms to use European permits from mid-2015 to emit carbon dioxide (CO2).

The EU's carbon market is the world's largest and the deal is being seen as a significant step towards cutting greenhouse gas emissions globally.

The aim is to have the Australian and EU schemes fully linked from July 2018.

Australia is the developed world's highest CO2 emitter per head of population. It now taxes big polluters.

The latest Business Daily programme from the BBC talks to the self-styled "most notorious lobbyist in Washington" to find out how America's £3bn political lobbying industry uses hard cash to buy influence.