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  Reuters Kuwait’s central bank has issued new governance rules for Islamic banks, including requirements for external sharia audits, as regulators seek more transparency and accountability in the sector. Regulatory scrutiny over Islamic banks has been building as they now hold around a quarter of total banking assets in the Gulf, while in Kuwait that figure stands at around 40 ...

  DPA Donald Trump costs just 3 dollars, complete with a film of street dust that comes with every book purchased at Norman Maina’s stall tucked between a supermarket and a bus stop. Displayed on metal mesh a few centimetres off the ground, Maina’s second-hand book range includes Robert Ludlum thrillers and the success stories of the new US president ...

  DPA Biologist Sacha Dench recently took to the skies in a powered paraglider to follow flights of swans on their 7,000-kilometre winter migration. The number of Bewick’s swans migrating from the Russian tundra to north-western Europe fell by over a third between 1995 and 2010. The Flight of the Swans project by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) aims ...

  Aleppo / AFP German authorities came under fire on Thursday after it emerged that the prime suspect in Berlin’s deadly truck attack, a rejected Tunisian asylum seeker, was known as a potentially dangerous extremist. Prosecutors have issued a Europe-wide wanted notice for 24-year-old Anis Amri, offering a 100,000-euro ($104,000) reward for information leading to his arrest and warning he ...

  London / AFP Populists across Europe have seized on the truck attack in Berlin as a way to criticise Germany’s immigration policy but key players have held back on jumping to conclusions as the investigation continues. Former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage, a key ally of US President-elect Donald Trump in Europe, said the attack which killed ...

  Moscow / AFP President Vladimir Putin on Thursday bade farewell to Andrei Karlov at a packed memorial ceremony in Moscow for the diplomat who was assassinated in Turkey by an off-duty policeman. Dozens of colleagues and relatives attended the ceremony for Karlov, the ambassador to Turkey whose death was labelled by Moscow as an act of terror while President ...

  Tokyo / AFP A rapidly-spreading fire engulfed more than 100 buildings and sparked evacuations in a northern Japanese city on Thursday, leaving two people injured and forcing authorities to mobilise the military. Aerial footage broadcast live on Japanese TV showed massive orange flames and thick grey smoke spewing out of buildings throughout much of the day in the city ...

  London/ AFP European equities drifted mostly lower on Thursday in quiet pre-holiday trade, with investors awaiting news on the fate of crippled bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena (BMPS). Wall Street also eased at the opening, slipping further away from the elusive 20,000 target on the Dow index. “The long awaited 20,000 benchmark on the Dow isn’t breached yet ...

  Reuters Saudi Arabia’s stock market edged up on Thursday before the release of the kingdom’s state budget for 2017, while Egypt’s uptrend slowed. Other Gulf markets were mixed in modest trading volumes. The Saudi stock index added 0.4 percent. Much activity focused on second-tier stocks such as Saudi Printing and Packaging, which jumped 10 percent. Saudi Electricity climbed 0.7 ...

  Bloomberg The oil industry must brace for five energy “tsunamis” that threaten to drag prices as low as $10 a barrel in less than a decade, according to Engie SA’s innovation chief. The falling cost of solar power and battery storage, rising sales of electric vehicles, increasingly “smart” buildings and cheap hydrogen will all weigh on crude, Thierry Lepercq, ...