Mogadishu / AFP At least 10 people were killed on Sunday in two explosions in a town in central Somalia, police said. The Shabaab militant group claimed responsibilty for the blasts in the town of Galkayo, some 700 kilometers (440 miles) northeast of Mogadishu. “There were two car bomb blasts which targeted the local government headquarters. More than 10 ...

  Baghdad / AP Traffic began to file through central Baghdad’s busy Karradah street on Sunday for the first time in nearly two months. After the July 3 attack that killed close to 300 people, the street was sealed off and within days the shells of the charred buildings around the scene of the blast were covered in death notices. For ...

  Kunduz / AFP Afghan forces have recaptured a district that had fallen briefly to the Taliban, officials and residents said on Sunday, after thousands of people fled their homes in Afghanistan’s northeastern Kunduz province. Khan Abad district, which is around 30 kilometres east of Kunduz city—the provincial capital where militants last year scored their biggest ever victory—had fallen to ...

  Nasiriyah / AFP Iraq on Sunday hanged 36 men convicted over the 2014 massacre by extremists and allied militants of hundreds of military recruits, officials said. They had been found guilty of involvement in the “Speicher” massacre, named after a base near Tikrit where up to 1,700 recruits were kidnapped before being executed in a massacre claimed by the ...

Tehran / AFP Iran released images of its first domestically built long-range missile defence system on Sunday, a project started when the country was under international sanctions. Images on multiple state news agencies showed President Hassan Rouhani and Minister of Defence Hossein Dehghan standing in front of the new Bavar 373 missile defence system. The system was designed to intercept ...

  Bloomberg Bank of East Asia Ltd., (BEA) the Hong Kong lender facing pressure from Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, said first-half profit dropped 38 percent as China’s slowing economy dragged on lending and caused loan impairments to surge. The shares fell the most in two weeks. Net income fell to HK$2.1 billion ($270 million) for the six months ended June ...

  Singapore / Bloomberg Rabobank Groep, the second-largest Dutch bank by assets, said first-half profit fell 39 percent, hurt by legal costs and restructuring expenses. Net income dropped to 924 million euros ($1 billion) from 1.5 billion euros a year earlier, the closely held bank said in a statement on Thursday. The lender increased provisions by 514 million euros to ...

  Bloomberg Banco Santander SA, Spain’s biggest bank, hired Credit Suisse Group AG to advise on its negotiations to buy Citigroup Inc.’s retail assets in Brazil, people with knowledge of the matter said. Santander, whose Brazil unit generates about 19 percent of the Madrid-based company’s revenue, also hired a Lazard Ltd. venture in Argentina to advise on its proposal to ...

  Bloomberg Singapore plans to reduce the role of cash and checks in its economy by encouraging banks to switch to digital payments, according to the head of the country’s central bank. “For consumers, the use of cash for daily payments is high,” Ravi Menon, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, said at a financial technology conference. “For ...

  Hong Kong / Bloomberg Free rice cookers and suitcases were among the special deals that tempted Chiu Wing-suet into accumulating her 20 credit cards, many of which are crammed into her wallet. She’s unlikely to accept any more such offers. “I’ve come to realize that most of my cards are useless,” said the 30-year-old Hong Kong nurse. “I basically ...