Beirut / AFP Lebanon’s Michel Aoun, a former general backed by the powerful Hezbollah movement as well as longtime rivals, was elected president on Monday ending a political vacuum of more than two years. The deeply divided parliament took four rounds of voting to elect Aoun, whose supporters flooded streets and squares across the country to celebrate his victory. ...

  Tehran / AFP Iran’s foreign ministry has rejected accusations from the United States that it has been shipping arms to the Shiite Huthi rebels in Yemen, according to media reports on Monday. A US admiral said on Thursday that warships from the US Navy and allied nations had intercepted four weapons shipments from Iran to the Arabian Peninsula country ...

  Bangui / AFP The Central African Republic’s capital was rocked by deadly overnight clashes as France’s defence minister was due on Monday to formally end a military operation there, hailing it as a “success”. Local sources said about 10 people had been killed in a settling of scores between armed groups Sunday night in Bangui’s restive Muslim PK5 neighbourhood. The ...

  Lagos / AFP Human Rights Watch on Monday accused Nigerian officials of sexually exploiting women and girls living in camps for victims of Boko Haram in the restive northeast. HRW said it had in July documented 43 cases of women and girls in seven internally displaced persons’ (IDP) camps in Maiduguri, the epicentre of the seven-year Islamist insurgency, who had ...

  Tokyo / AFP Japan Airlines on Monday slashed its full-year earnings outlook, and warned its fiscal first-half net profit nosedived owing to a slump in its international business. While falling oil prices have helped carriers’ profits — fuel is often an airline’s single-biggest expense — the loss of a fuel surcharge imposed to deal with previously sky-high crude prices ...

  Dubai / Emirates Business British Airways (BA) launched a direct flight between Muscat and London, further adding convenience to customers travelling between the two regions. The UK carrier, which first began flying to Oman in 1972, inaugurated the new service with a water cannon salute as it landed at Muscat International Airport on Monday. Customers, who previously flew between the ...

  Bloomberg Business-jet deliveries are dropping and won’t rebound before 2018, according to a benchmark forecast of corporate aircraft demand over the next decade. Honeywell International Inc. lowered its annual long-term forecast for private jets by 7 percent, or 600 aircraft, as emerging markets suffer from low commodity prices and the U.S. economy limps along at a slow pace. As ...

  Sydney / AFP Australian carrier Qantas flagged on Monday a hit to first half earnings with falling international airfares offsetting a decline in fuel prices. The airline, which has turned itself around in recent years on the back of aggressive cost-cutting, said it expects underlying profit before tax to be between Aus$800-850 million (US$607-645 million) for the six months ...

  Bloomberg China has a dream of challenging the duopoly of Airbus Group SE and Boeing Co. in the global market for air planes. That ambition is slowly taking shape in a hangar in Shanghai. The state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China Ltd., locally known as COMAC, is building the 168-seat, single-aisle aircraft C919, betting the model would help the ...

  Bloomberg Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd.’s sale of businesses in five Asian markets to DBS Group Holdings Ltd. offers the latest sign of consolidation in the region’s highly competitive wealth industry, which has already seen a retreat by European players like Barclays Plc and Societe Generale SA. DBS will pay S$110 million ($79 million) for retail and ...