AFP The start this week of the first regularly scheduled commercial flights from the United States augurs the likely demise of Cuba’s “mules” — suppliers of last resort for scarce consumer goods on the island. For more than half a century, commercial air travel between Cuba and the United States was all but non-existent, a victim of frosty Cold ...

  Beirut / AFP An IS group militant rammed his explosives-laden car into an army recruitment centre in Aden on Monday, killing 60 people in the deadliest extremist attack to hit the city in over a year. Yemen’s army, supported by a Saudi-led coalition, is training young recruits to join its nationwide war against Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies, as ...

  Maputo / AFP A South African hotelier said on Monday he had picked up a piece of aircraft wreckage off the Mozambican coast in the latest possible find of debris from the missing MH370 flight. Mozambique’s aviation authorities in Maputo said they had been informed of the discovery, but were yet to receive the item. Australia, which is leading ...

  Kashmir / AFP Authorities lifted a curfew in Indian-administered Kashmir after 52 days of lockdown amid deadly violence, but street clashes broke out again on Monday between protesters and security forces. Restrictions were lifted throughout most of the tense Kashmir Valley including the main city of Sringar “following improvement in the situation”, police said in a statement late Sunday. ...

  Sirte /AFP Libya’s pro-government forces on Monday cornered IS group extremist in their last holdouts in the city of Sirte, after heavy fighting that left dozens dead and wounded. The battle for IS’s North African stronghold was launched more than three months ago by forces loyal to the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord. Those forces have been backed by ...

  Dhaka / AFP US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday that there was evidence to link the extremists behind a recent series of deadly attacks in Bangladesh to the IS group. “We talked very openly about this and we made it very clear … that there is evidence that ISIL in Iraq and Syria has contacts with ...

  Kabul / AFP Afghanistan launched a polio vaccination campaign on Monday aimed at reaching children in areas previously controlled by IS group militants, officials said. Afghanistan and Pakistan are the only two countries in the world where polio remains endemic—a fact blamed on opposition to immunisation by extremist groups, who claim the vaccines are a conspiracy to sterilise Muslims ...

  Karbala /AFP Attackers armed with suicide vests, rifles and grenades killed 18 people in the Iraqi oasis town of Ain Al Tamer, many of them guests at a wedding party, local officials said on Monday. “They were carrying Kalashnikovs, hand grenades. One of them blew himself up and the others were killed by the security forces,” said the head ...

  Bloomberg Norway’s $890 billion sovereign wealth fund is acknowledging that rising withdrawals by the government could hamper its quest to manage more risk and generate greater returns as it takes on more and more negative yielding securities. The net outflows are “relevant for how we think about the risk-bearing capacity of the fund,” Egil Matsen, the deputy governor at ...

  Bloomberg GIC Pte reached a preliminary agreement to pay less than $400 million for a 7.7 percent stake in Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam JSC, the nation’s second-biggest listed company, people with knowledge of the matter said. The Singapore sovereign fund will buy Vietcombank stock at a discount to the current market price, the people said, asking not ...