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  CAIRO / AP Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi and US President Donald Trump will meet in Washington next month, Egypt’s leading state-owned newspaper said on Sunday. Al-Ahram said in a front-page report the two leaders will meet during the first week of April, in what will be El-Sissi’s first visit to Washington since taking office in 2014. El-Sissi and Trump ...

  BAGHDAD / AP Iraqi government forces have pushed into the area around a highly symbolic mosque in western Mosul where the IS group’s leader made his first and only public appearance. Black smoke billowed from the area around al-Nuri mosque, also known as the Great Mosque, Sunday as helicopters fired into the militants’ positions. At least two large mushroom ...

  NEW DELHI / AP A hard-line Hindu religious leader was sworn in on Sunday as the chief minister of India’s most populous state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other leaders of India’s ruling party attended a ceremony in the Uttar Pradesh state capital of Lucknow, where Yogi Adityanath took the oath of office. Adityanath is a five-time member of ...

  BEIJING / AP The United States is looking forward to the first meeting between President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Sunday, on the final day of a swing through Asia dominated by concerns over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. In talks with Xi in Beijing, Tillerson said Trump ...

  SITTWE / AP Hundreds of hard-line Buddhists in a Myanmar state wracked by religious violence protested against the government’s plan to give citizenship to some members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority community. Rakhine state’s dominant Arakan National Party led the protest in Sittwe, the state capital, where many Rohingya lived before an outbreak of inter-communal violence in 2012 ...

  MANILA / AP Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Sunday that his militarily inferior country can’t stop China’s actions in contested waters, responding to a reported plan by Beijing to construct an environmental monitoring station in a disputed shoal off the northwestern Philippines. Duterte, however, warned that he would invoke a July 12 arbitration ruling that invalidated China’s territorial ...

  Bloomberg Like generations before him, the only light Jurdar Thingya has at night in his one-room mud hut in India’s Maharashtra state comes from a small wood fire on the floor. A broken solar panel is all that the 35-year-old farmer has to remind him of the government’s promise to bring electricity to all of India’s villages. Bhamana, population ...

  Bloomberg Hong Kong’s securities regulator is investigating whether realtors selling overseas properties are illegally marketing investment plans, according to a lawmaker helping investors who lost money on such deals. Buyers argued that developments promoting guaranteed rental income are so-called collective investment schemes, which need approval from the Securities and Futures Commission, said James To Kun-sun, a member of the ...

  Bloomberg Anil Agarwal, an Indian mining billionaire, plans to buy as much as 2 billion pounds ($2.4 billion) of Anglo American Plc shares in the market after a merger proposal failed last year. The full stake would equate to about 13 percent of Anglo’s stock, making Agarwal the second-largest shareholder after South Africa’s Public Investment Corp. It will give ...

  AP As spring crocus blooms approach, some growers have visions of a fall-flowering crocus that produces saffron, the world’s most valuable spice. University of Vermont researchers have been raising the exotic spice now grown primarily in Iran and are encouraging growers to tap into what they hope will be a cash crop. It’s not a hard sell, particularly in ...