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Beijing / Bloomberg The head of China’s securities regulator has been removed from his post after last year’s $5 trillion stock-market bust, an unprecedented government rescue and a renewed crisis as plunging Chinese equities last month reverberated around the world. Xiao Gang, 57, a former head of Bank of China Ltd., had been chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission ...

MADRID / AFP Six officials of Chinese megabank ICBC have been placed in detention by Spanish authorities on suspicion of laundering tens of millions of euros, judicial sources said. They were detained overnight and while three of them can be freed if they post bail of 100,000 euros ($111,000) each, the others will remain in custody for the time being, ...

New Delhi / AP The yen rose, posting its longest run of weekly gains since September, as investors look past signs of improvement in the US economy and instead channeled their cash into haven assets. Japan’s currency strengthened against all its 16 major peers even after a U.S. report showed inflation rose the most in more than four years last ...

New Delhi / Bloomberg India’s government will provide 40 billion rupees ($580 million) to upgrade the infrastructure of the first 20 cities selected under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s smart cities program, according to a statement from the Ministry of Urban Development on Saturday. Six cities — Jabalpur, Indore and Bhopal in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, and Jaipur and ...

Tokyo / Bloomberg Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that he’s not considering a snap general election this summer to coincide with a scheduled upper house poll, and that he has no intention of delaying a planned increase in the nation’s consumption tax. Speaking in an interview on Nippon Hoso radio, Abe said he would raise the levy to 10 ...

Columbia / AP After a week of bitter attacks, Republicans face off in South Carolina’s presidential primary, a contest that could determine Donald Trump’s strength as a front-runner and help clarify whether a more mainstream politician will ever emerge to challenge him. Democrats are holding a caucus on Saturday in Nevada, the first test for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders ...

Washington / Bloomberg President Barack Obama and thousands of other mourners paid respects to the late Justice Antonin Scalia as his flag-draped casket lay in the US Supreme Court’s ceremonial hallway. Pallbearers carried Scalia’s casket up the court’s marble staircase into the building as his somber, and in some cases tearful, former colleagues waited along with family members, former law ...

Bloomberg The US Supreme Court cleared the way for a new congressional voting map in North Carolina this year, rejecting a Republican bid to reinstate district lines thrown out by a lower court. The order was one of the high court’s first since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. It came without published dissent. A three-judge panel said Feb. 5 ...

Bloomberg Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe warned that rivals within his ruling party must “shut up” and stop sowing internal divisions or face punishment. “Those who are saying we belong to this faction or that faction, I say to them shut up. You belong to Zimbabwe first and foremost whatever you might say,” Mugabe said in a televised national address, flanked ...

Seoul / AP Sounds of explosions caused South Korean residents of a front-line island to prepare to evacuate early Saturday, but it was later determined the noise came from a North Korean artillery drill across the rivals’ disputed maritime border, officials said. The false alarm was indicative of the high anxiety between the Koreas in the wake of the North’s ...