Manila / AFP US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday said Washington wanted to avoid “confrontation” in the South China Sea, after an international tribunal rejected Beijing’s claims to most of the waters. Kerry made the remarks after meeting with Philippine Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay in Manila where they discussed the Southeast Asian nation’s sweeping victory in the arbitration ...

  Brussels / AFP European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker on Wednesday appointed veteran French politician and former EU commissioner Michel Barnier to lead the negotiations with Britain on its exit from the bloc. Britain’s June 23 vote to quit the 28-nation European Union shocked EU leaders who had bet on a vote to remain but they have since rallied, with France ...

  Cilacap / AFP Indonesia will be “on the wrong side of history” if it proceeds with a fresh round of executions this week, rights groups warned Wednesday, as authorities confirmed 14 prisoners will face the firing squad. A group of drug convicts including foreigners have been given notice of their executions and could be put to death as early ...

Beirut / AFP A double bomb attack killed 31 people and wounded dozens in the Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli in northeastern Syria on Wednesday, Syrian state television reported. In a breaking news alert, state television gave an “initial toll” of 31 dead and 170 wounded, adding that rescue workers were still retrieving victims of the blasts. The Syrian Observatory for Human ...

  Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer John Cryan signaled Germany’s largest lender may have to deepen cost cuts after second-quarter profit was almost wiped out by a slump in trading revenue and costs tied to job reductions. The shares declined. Net income decreased to 18 million euros ($20 million) from 796 million euros a year earlier, the Frankfurt-based ...

  BLOOMBERG Europe’s stocks are far from cheap. That’s according to Robert Parkes, head of European equity strategy at HSBC Holdings Plc, who says the market is “fully valued and bordering on expensive.” To illustrate, he pointed to the MSCI Europe Index’s price-earnings ratio, which at about 20 times reported profit is near the highest since 2004. That’s even after ...

  Bloomberg China’s central bank boosted the supply of cash in the financial system, helping push the benchmark money-market rate down from a three-month high. The People’s Bank of China sold 180 billion yuan ($27 billion) of seven-day reverse-repurchase agreements, which inject funds into the banking system. That’s the biggest single-day offering of the contracts since June 29. This comes ...

  Bloomberg Bank regulators from Tokyo to Frankfurt are joining forces to resist a US-backed push for stiffer capital rules that could heap billions of dollars of new requirements on lenders. Highlighting the stakes, top regulators from Europe, Japan and India are pressing their case in public, shedding light on divisions in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision as it ...

  Bloomberg Egypt plans to secure a $12 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to ease a crippling dollar squeeze and restore confidence in the economy, an accord that would be the fund’s biggest aid package in a region pummeled by political unrest and the plunge in oil prices. Stocks surged after authorities said on Tuesday evening they will ...

  KHOBAR / Reuters Foreign engineering companies have bid to build Saudi Aramco’s clean fuels project at the state oil giant’s Ras Tanura refinery, industry sources said. The bid deadline was July 17 for the $2 billion-plus scheme which will remove sulphur from refined oil products and is part of a drive by the kingdom to meet stricter environmental standards ...