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  ISLAMABAD / AP Ahmad Waqas Goraya couldn’t see anything through the black hood, but he could hear the screams. A blogger with a penchant for criticizing Pakistan’s powerful military and taking the government to task, Goraya was kidnapped in January along with four other bloggers. “I could hear the screams of torture,” he said in a telephone interview with ...

  Bloomberg More Asian LNG buyers are trying to avoid taking the US supplies they signed up for just a few years ago in order to cut shipping costs. GAIL India Ltd. and Indonesia’s PT Pertamina are both seeking to trade liquefied natural gas cargoes they are contracted to buy from the US in exchange for supplies shipped from projects ...

  Bloomberg Argentina is planning at least four energy auctions this year that are expected to attract as much as $7 billion in investments as president Mauricio Macri seeks to boost generating capacity for both conventional and renewable power plants. The country will hold two auctions for new thermal capacity, one for renewable energy and one for new transmission lines, ...

  Bloomberg OPEC and its allies improved their collective compliance with a supply-cuts agreement last month as deeper reductions from members of the group offset weaker implementation from other producers. The group of oil producers implemented 94 percent of their pledged 1.8 million barrels a day of supply cuts in February, up from 86 percent the previous month, according two ...

  Bloomberg Farmer Zhang Qingjun said his cooperative in China’s northeast corn belt will slash this year’s planting of the crop by at least 40 percent when sowing starts next month because swollen government stockpiles of the grain have cut profits. “We can’t accept such low corn prices — you can barely make enough to feed the whole family,” Zhang ...

  Bloomberg India’s Adani Group plans to begin extracting coal from the $16.5 billion Carmichael project in Australia in 2020 after environmental protests had delayed the first phase of the mine. The company will begin work on the project three months after it gets final approval from Australia’s federal government, Gautam Adani, billionaire chairman of the Indian group said. Adani ...

  Reuters Stock markets in the Middle East diverged on Sunday with the insurance sector boosting Saudi Arabia and a depreciating currency lifting export and real estate shares in Egypt, while blue chips weighed on the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Saudi Arabia’s index added 0.5 percent as the insurance sector surged. All but three of the 35 listed insurers ...

  Bloomberg US equities rose this week thanks largely to advances in companies with high dividends that investors turn to when bond yields fall. The S&P 500 Index added 0.2 percent to 2,378.25. The biggest boost came Wednesday after the Federal Reserve raised the benchmark lending rate a quarter point and maintained its projection for two more increases this year. ...

  Bloomberg Fish farmers will need to get more kroner out of every fish to provide the next lift for the Oslo exchange’s best-performing sector over the past five years. That means making their product less a commodity and more a consumer friendly, ready-to-eat staple to provide more stable earnings, according to Leif Eriksrod, head of equities at Alfred Berg ...

  Bloomberg The Wi-Fi icon — a dot with radio waves radiating outward — glows on nearly every internet-connected device, from the iPhone to thermostats to TVs. But it’s starting to fade from the limelight. With every major US wireless carrier now offering unlimited data plans, consumers don’t need to log on to a Wi-Fi network to avoid costly overage ...