Bloomberg Egypt has reached a $2.7 billion currency swap agreement with China, moving closer to mustering the outside financing needed to win final approval of a $12 billion International Monetary Fund loan. The agreement is being processed by the Chinese authorities, an Egyptian central bank official said Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity. The official didn’t provide additional details ...

  Reuters Hyundai Engineering and Construction signed a contract to build a project for Saudi Aramco’s Uthmaniyah plant for 833.10 billion won ($727 million), the South Korean company said. Hyundai expects the contract to be completed by Nov. 26 2019, it said in a statement. Sources told Reuters on Thursday that Hyundai had won the deal after offering discounts to ...

  Luanda / AFP Angolan state-owned oil company Sonangol rode the commodities boom that drove the country’s extraordinary growth after civil war ended in 2002, but today it symbolises a national economic crisis. The Luanda-based company has increasingly been in focus since Isabel dos Santos, the billionaire daughter of long-time President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, was appointed CEO in June. ...

  Qayyarah / AFP Iraqi paramilitary forces battled the IS group southwest of Mosul on Sunday, the second day of an operation to cut extremist supply lines between the city and neighbouring Syria. Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga fighters have been advancing on Mosul from the north, east and south after the launch on October 17 of ...

  Istanbul / AFP Turkish authorities have fired over 10,000 additional civil servants as the government presses a crackdown over the failed July coup, the official gazette said. A total of 10,131 government employees were removed, mainly from the education, justice and health ministries, according to announcements published late on Saturday. The government also announced the closure of 15 pro-Kurdish and ...

  Frankfurt / AFP The IS extremist group claimed responsibility for a knife attack in Hamburg on October 16 that left a teenager dead, IS-affiliated news agency Amaq reported. “A soldier of the IS stabbed two individuals in Hamburg city on the 16th of this month,” the release said, in response to “calls to target the citizens of coalition countries” that ...

  Beirut / AFP French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian heads to the Central African Republic on Sunday to formally end Operation Sangaris, begun three years ago to halt mass killings there but which failed to disarm militias terrorising the population. The formal end to the French mission comes as a fresh wave of bloodshed shook the troubled nation, spearheaded ...

  Washington / AFP The death rate among Afghan security forces is surging far above last year’s levels, a US government watchdog said Sunday, and slew of social gains in the war-torn nation is also eroding. Afghan forces are nearing the end of their second year providing security across their war-torn country, after NATO moved into an advisory and training ...

  Didymoteicho / AFP “I want to go back to Syria. There is war in my country, but we’ve been living for seven months in Greece like prisoners.” Adan, from Aleppo, has abandoned his dream of building a new life in Europe, like thousands of other Syrians trapped in Greece. He’s just arrived at the station in Didymoteicho, a village near ...

  Miami / AFP Donald Trump stepped up his attacks against Hillary Clinton, seeking to exploit the FBI’s decision to reopen an investigation into her emails, as America’s bruising election campaign heads into its final stretch. Just 10 days before the country goes to the polls to elect either the former US secretary of state or the bombastic Republican billionaire, ...