STEPANAKERT, Nagorno-Karabakh The military commander of this breakaway Armenian republic predicted in an interview here Monday that a fragile cease-fire could collapse within days. By that night, Azerbaijani shelling had killed two Armenian soldiers in a northern border town, amid accusations by each side that the other had violated the truce. The “frozen conflict” here, stalemated for 22 years, ...

Saudi Arabia’s ambitious strategy to restructure the Kingdom’s economy is seen as an unprecedented departure from oil dependency to diversification. In recent years, Riyadh has relied on oil revenues for about 90% of its budget. The new economic paradigm shift involves diversification, privatisation of massive state assets — including the energy giant Aramco — tax increases and subsidy cuts. Prince ...

  Tim Culpan / David Fickling Companies in both China and the U.S. want to develop driverless cars. Slick videos and flashy powerpoint slides envision a future where humans sit back and relax while their transport pods glide across highways, seamlessly merge into traffic and pull up smoothly at the kerb. Miles Google’s driverless cars have clocked 1.5 million. What ...

  On the surface, the concept of a Russian pivot to Asia made sense, particularly greater cooperation between Moscow and Beijing. But, as a pair of fellows from the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin and a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center made clear in separate articles published this month, Russia’s Asia pivot has failed so far ...

  The presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, the two countries most affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, used the meltdown’s 30-year anniversary on Tuesday to make political statements. It looks like neither of them — nor Russian President Vladimir Putin — has drawn the right conclusions from the tragedy, which probably hastened the Soviet Union’s demise. Unit 4 of the ...

  Britain is asking itself whether quitting the European Union would be good or bad — for Britain. President Barack Obama is advising Britain to stay — presumably because he thinks that would be good for the U.S. But what if Brexit would be good for Britain and the U.S. mainly because it would be good for Europe? I’m led ...

  London / Reuters Barclays reported a worse than expected 33 percent slump in pretax profits for the first three months of the year, as the lender followed its US peers in reporting falling investment banking revenues in a weak global market environment. Barclays said first quarter pretax profits fell to £793 million ($1.15 billion), just below the average forecast ...

  Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters expects erratic swings in global markets to continue for at least the rest of this year, complicating his efforts to reinvigorate earnings and restore the Asia-focused lender’s dividend. Reviving “depressed” revenue in the face of a sluggish economy and a slump in commodities prices is “the big challenge,” Winters said. ...

  Doha / AFP Qatar National Bank (QNB) said it is investigating an alleged hack which potentially exposes the names and passwords of a large number of customers. Media reports claimed that a 1.4GB trove of documents has been leaked online anonymously. Among the information reportedly leaked are the bank details of several journalists working for satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera. Another folder ...

Bloomberg Banco Santander SA, Spain’s biggest bank, reported lower first-quarter profit as revenue slumped in its home market and operations aboard were hit by currency effects. Net income fell 5 percent to 1.63 billion euros ($1.84 billion) from 1.72 billion euros a year earlier, the bank said on Wednesday. That beat the 1.5 billion-euro average estimate in a Bloomberg survey ...