AFP Ethiopia on Saturday inaugurated a hydroelectric dam that aims to double the country’s electricity output, but which critics say is a threat to locals and a UNESCO-listed lake in Kenya. The Gibe III dam, which reaches 243 metres (800 feet) in height, is the third-largest dam in Africa and the biggest in a series built along the Omo ...

  Bloomberg Verizon Communications Inc.’s deal with Yahoo! Inc. has hit a rocky patch, but the phone giant is forging ahead with a strategy focusing on mobile advertising and still has appetite for more deals. Whether or not the $4.83 billion Yahoo deal goes through, the company is likely to look at purchasing digital media companies that could drive more ...

  Bloomberg DeepMind, the London-based division of Alphabet Inc. that’s responsible for numerous recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, is hiring its first researcher in the US to boost collaboration across the Atlantic. The “applied research scientist position” described in a job posting on DeepMind’s website will be located at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. It would be the first ...

  Bloomberg General Motors Co. will begin producing self-driving cars at a Michigan factory — and testing them on the state’s roads — in a step toward building the vehicles on a large scale, Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra said. “We believe GM will be one of the first automakers to build high-volume autonomous vehicles in an assembly plant,” Barra ...

  Bloomberg After the worst French wheat crop in decades this season, the European Union’s largest producer looks set to return to global export markets. Output of soft wheat is expected to jump by about a third to 37.7 million metric tons in the season starting July, according to estimates from Tallage, publisher of the Strategie Grains report. That will ...

Washington / AFP President Barack Obama declared that Bashar Al-Assad’s Syrian regime, Iran and Russia are responsible for the carnage in Aleppo and argued there was nothing Washington could have done to stop the war, short of a military takeover of Syria. And he warned Assad, who has been engaged in a brutal civil war against opposition forces since 2011, that ...

  Kandahar / AFP Gunmen on motorcycles shot dead five female airport workers and their driver in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, underlining the dangers facing employed women in the conservative, conflict-torn country. The women, employees of a private company that provides luggage and body search services for female passengers, were in a van driving to the airport in Kandahar when three ...

  Tehran / AFP Iran formally requested a meeting of the commission that oversees its nuclear deal with world powers to complain about the renewing of sanctions by the United States, state television reported on Saturday. The request was made in a letter by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to the European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, calling for “a ...

  Istanbul / AFP Thirteen Turkish soldiers were killed and dozens more wounded on Saturday in a suicide car bombing targeting off-duty conscripts blamed on Kurdish militants, the latest in a string of attacks to rock Turkey in recent months. The government said all signs so far suggested the the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was behind the bombing in the ...

  Qayyarah / AFP The battle to retake Mosul from the IS group is leaving a legacy of environmental damage and health risks that will pose dangers to people for years to come. Iraqis have already paid the initial price from burning oil wells and a sulphur factory that IS set alight south of Mosul, Iraq’s last extremist-held city which is ...