BANJA LUKA / AP Bosnian Serbs voted in a referendum banned by the country’s constitutional court, risking Western sanctions against their autonomous region and criminal charges against their leaders. The vote on Sunday was whether to keep Jan. 9 as a holiday in Republika Srpska, commemorating the day in 1992 that Bosnian Serbs declared the creation of their own state, ...

  Paris / AFP Two teenage girls from the French city of Nice are being held on suspicion of planning an attack directed by a notorious Syria-based French extremist, a source close to the investigation said on Sunday. The suspects, aged 17 and 19, live in the same area of Nice as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the radicalised Tunisian man who ...

  The Harvard Management Co., which oversees Harvard University’s endowment and other investments, just released its 2016 annual report. It’s grim reading: The fund had a negative return of 2 percent and was worth about $2 billion less than a year earlier, underperforming its benchmarks by a significant margin. At $35.7 billion, the university’s endowment is the biggest in the ...

Imagine an entirely plausible scenario for the effects of climate change in 2045. The Greenland ice sheet has melted entirely, adding 20 feet to the oceans. Unprecedented outbreaks of pests have ruined crops of corn, wheat and rice around the world, causing food shortages and riots. In the U.S., the army patrols major cities. In such a desperate situation, could ...

  Lawyers, beware. Robots really are coming for your jobs. Exhibit A: Venture-capital firm Invoke Capital just made a multi-million-dollar investment in Luminance, which is developing artificial intelligence to automate the legal drudgery involved in corporate mergers and acquisitions. The robot lawyer is just one of many — including offerings from Ross Intelligence and Kira Systems — aiming to replace ...

  AFP Former IMF chief Rodrigo Rato stands trial on Monday accused of overseeing a “corrupt system” that helped him and other executives misuse funds on hotels, parties and luxury shopping when he was a Spanish bank boss. Uncovered in 2013 by a journalist who saw a hacked email alluding to “black credit cards,” the case threatens to land the ...

  Bloomberg As far as Citigroup Inc. is concerned, Mexico has little choice but to carry out an unprecedented interest-rate increase to arrest a plunge in the peso triggered by Donald Trump’s recent surge in US presidential polls. Mexico’s exchange rate has tumbled 6 percent in the past month, the biggest slide among the world’s major currencies. Citigroup economist Sergio ...

  Bloomberg As Indian Overseas Bank tackles the highest ratio of soured loans among lenders in Asia’s third-largest economy, it doesn’t help that there hasn’t been a chief executive officer at the helm for about three months. The state-controlled lender based in the southern city of Chennai has had a leadership vacuum since R. Koteeswaran retired on June 30 after ...

  Bloomberg National Bank of Canada (NBC) is set to become the first North American bank to issue panda bonds, joining international lenders including Standard Chartered Plc and HSBC Holdings Plc in issuing yuan-denominated securities in China’s domestic bond market. National Bank, the nation’s sixth-largest lender by assets, was approved to sell up to 5 billion yuan ($750 million) of ...

  Bloomberg A Kenyan lender that transformed from an also-ran into the country’s biggest deposit-taker, mainly through a mobile-phone banking service started four years ago, plans to use the product as a beachhead to expand outside its East African home base. Commercial Bank of Africa Ltd., which also has units in Tanzania and Uganda, is seeking to export its M-Shwari ...