Bloomberg A change to drier weather in Argentina is paring the biggest monthly gain for soybeans since 2014 after floods damaged the country’s crops. Dry weather will prevail in Argentina, the world’s third-largest exporter of soybeans, through early next week, allowing harvesting to accelerate, MDA Weather Services said in a report on Saturday. The harvest is 24 percent complete, ...

  Caracas, Venezuela / AFP With their country gripped by an economic crisis, Venezuelans will lose half an hour of sleep when their clocks are moved forward to save power on President Nicolas Maduro’s order. At 2:30 am local time, the oil-dependent South American nation will shift its time ahead by 30 minutes — to four hours behind Greenwich Mean Time. ...

  New York / BLOOMBERG American International Group Inc. raised $1.25 billion selling shares of Chinese insurer PICC Property & Casualty Co. near the low end of a marketed range. The largest commercial insurer in the U.S. and Canada sold 740 million shares of PICC P&C at HK$13.08 apiece, after earlier offering them at HK$13.06 to HK$13.35, according to terms ...

  Aleppo / AFP The United States demanded that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces halt their bombardment of Aleppo and help restore a nationwide ceasefire, with Secretary of State John Kerry due to head to Geneva for talks on the conflict. Terrified residents fled a new wave of air strikes on rebel-held areas of the divided city as key regime backer ...

  BEIJING / AP Taiwanese officials have protested Malaysia’s deportation of 32 of the self-ruled island’s nationals to China to face wire fraud charges. The deportation follows the sending of nearly four dozen Taiwanese from Kenya to China last month, a case that has raised concerns Beijing is exerting diplomatic pressure over the island it considers its own territory. The Taiwanese ...

  Bashir / AFP Iraqi Kurdish and Turkmen Shiite forces have recaptured the town of Bashir from the IS extremist group, officials said. Pressure for an operation to retake the town had grown in March after IS launched a chemical attack from Bashir on the nearby town of Taza that killed at least three children. Kurdish peshmerga forces and Turkmen ...

  Ankara / AFP Turkish police on Sunday detained four suspected IS extremist who were allegedly planning an attack on May Day celebrations in the capital Ankara, the state-run Anatolia news agency said. Initial investigations showed that the four were Syrian citizens who had been in Ankara for some time, the agency added, without giving details on the nature of ...

  Istanbul / AFP A car bomb on Sunday hit the Turkish city of Gaziantep, a major refugee hub near the Syrian border, killing at least two policemen and wounding 22 other people, with the country on edge after a succession of militant attacks. In a separate attack in the province of Mardin to the east, three Turkish soldiers died in ...

  Bloomberg Iraq declared a state of emergency in Baghdad after supporters of Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr breached Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone and stormed parliament to protest against corruption and the country’s political paralysis. Mobile-phone video footage broadcast on Iraqi televisions showed hundreds of Al Sadr’s supporters inside the legislature on Saturday. Al-Sadr earlier accused lawmakers of sectarianism in ...

  Zamboanga / AFP Ten Indonesian sailors held hostage by Abu Sayyaf militants were freed in the southern Philippines on Sunday, officials said, less than a week after the gunmen beheaded a Canadian captive. Unknown men delivered the 10 tugboat crewmen outside the home of provincial governor Abdusakur Tan Jnr on the remote island of Jolo during a heavy midday ...