Bloomberg Paintings by Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani gave the auction market a much-needed boost on Tuesday when they fetched the highest prices for Sotheby’s in London since 2010. Picasso’s 1909 Cubist painting “Femme Assise” sold for £43.3 million ($63.5 million), surpassing the estimated target of £30 million. Moments later, Modigliani’s “ Jeanne Hebuterne (au Foulard)” took £38.5 million, ...

  London / AFP Bosses from more than half of Britain’s biggest companies on Wednesday urged Britons to vote Remain on the eve of a critical EU membership referendum. Almost 1,300 business executives — including those from 51 of London’s top FTSE 100 listed companies —wrote in a letter to The Times newspaper that Britain leaving the EU could cause ...

  Bloomberg The U.K. could find itself hard pressed to replicate access to Asia’s lucrative markets — from New Zealand to India — should voters in the world’s fifth-biggest economy opt to leave the EU. With Asia accounting for two-thirds of global growth, the U.K.’s trade ties with the region are crucial for it. While some politicians such as Boris ...

  ARSAL, Lebanon / ap In a remote corner of Lebanon near the border with Syria, Lebanese troops have been quietly making steady progress, fighting against extremists holed up in the rugged mountains. It is a fight less visible than the US-led war against the IS group in Syria, Iraq and Libya. But hardly a day passes without army artillery ...

  Beirut, Lebanon / AFP Air strikes on the IS group’s de facto Syrian capital Raqa killed 25 civilians, six of them children, a monitoring group said on Wednesday. “Dozens more were wounded, some of them critically,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding it was not immediately able to determine who carried out the Tuesday raids. The Syrian ...

  United Nations / AFP The UN Security Council on Tuesday urged the international community to live up to its “moral and political obligation” to aid Iraqi civilians who fled an operation against the IS group in Fallujah. Council members “welcomed the successful counteroffensive” launched by Iraqi forces and coalition partners on May 22-23 to retake Fallujah, a key extremist ...

  Seoul, South Korea / AFP Nuclear-armed North Korea conducted two back-to-back tests of a powerful new medium-range missile on Wednesday, with both achieving a significant increase in flight distance over previous failed launches, South Korea’s Defence Ministry said. Both tests were believed to be of a much-hyped, intermediate-range Musudan missile — theoretically capable of reaching US bases as far away ...

  New Delhi / AFP India successfully launched on Wednesday a rocket carrying a record 20 satellites as its famously frugal space agency looks to grab a larger slice of the lucrative commercial space market. The rocket blasted off from the southern spaceport of Sriharikota carrying satellites from the US, Germany, Canada and Indonesia, the most in a single Indian mission. ...

  Diffa, Niger / AFP Outside the Diffa grand mosque in Niger’s southeast, two soldiers stand at the ready, rifles pointed at the wave of worshippers walking towards them. Unbidden, the men raise their “boubous”, the traditional wide-sleeved robes worn across West Africa. They need to show they’re not hiding explosives under the tunics. This is one of the ways ...

  United Nations / AFP The United Nations urged South Sudan’s government to hold accountable the perpetrators of February’s violent attacks on a camp sheltering nearly 50,000 displaced civilians in the northeastern oil hub Malakal. A May inquiry found that assailants, some wearing South Sudan army (SPLA) uniforms, entered the camp on February 17 and 18 through a breached fence and ...