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  Sydney / AFP A firebomb attack outside an Australian mosque while worshippers were at prayer was condemned on Wednesday by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, with one Islamic leader calling it a “hate crime”. No one was injured in Tuesday night’s blast which destroyed a car parked outside a mosque and Islamic college in the Perth suburb of Thornlie. “It ...

  Beirut / AFP US-backed rebels advanced on a key IS group supply line between Syria and Iraq overnight, seizing a small airbase near the border, a monitor said on Wednesday. The New Syrian Army said the operation—launched on Tuesday—is aimed at the severing the supply line through the Albu Kamal crossing that links areas under IS control in eastern ...

  Washington, / AFP South Korea, Japan and the United States held an unprecedented trilateral missile defence exercise, aimed at countering the growing threat from nuclear-armed North Korea which denounced it as a “military provocation.” The drill in waters off Hawaii came less than a week after North Korea flight-tested a powerful new medium-range ballistic missile that leader Kim Jong-Un ...

  Seoul/ AFP A high-profile South Korean politician and presidential hopeful resigned as the head of his new opposition party that has been rocked by a bribery scandal. Ahn Cheol-Soo, a former IT software tycoon, stepped down as co-leader of the People’s Party, amid allegations that its members received tens of thousand of dollars in kickbacks from two local companies ...

  Phnom Penh / AFP Prime Minister Hun Sen, accused of intensifying a crackdown on dissent before Cambodia’s 2018 election, threatened on Wednesday to jail an opposition leader who has refused to come forward over an alleged sex scandal. Political tensions have risen in recent months, with rights groups accusing Hun Sen’s government of arresting scores of critics and tying ...

  Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG, Barclays Plc and 11 other foreign banks have spent several billion dollars in the past three years complying with a new Federal Reserve rule that will trap capital in the US and boost costs. Legal, technology and other compliance expenses totaled from US$100 million to as much as US$500 million at some of the biggest ...

  Bloomberg Years of excessive optimism and financial innovation led to record household debt and a banking crisis in Denmark in the naughts. Conditions are ripening again for a similarly heady combination, according to the country’s financial watchdog. The Financial Supervisory Authority laid out today the strategy that will guide its work until 2020. Denmark’s lenders are now healthier than ...

  Bloomberg Federal Reserve Governor Jerome Powell said global risks have shifted further to the downside after Britain’s vote to exit the European Union, introducing new uncertainties that may merit reassessing monetary policy. “The Brexit vote has the potential to create new headwinds for economies around the world, including our own,” Powell said in remarks prepared for delivery to the ...

  Bloomberg Moody’s Investors Service lowered the outlook on 12 UK lenders, including Barclays Plc and HSBC Holdings Plc, after predicting last week’s vote to exit the European Union will reduce their profitability. “We expect lower economic growth and heightened uncertainty over the UK’s future trade relationship with the EU to lead to reduced demand for credit, higher credit losses ...

  Bloomberg Just days after Raghuram Rajan announced plans to a return to academia, he’s battling to preserve the Reserve Bank of India’s independence. The government this month revived a proposal to dip into the central bank’s emergency funds to recapitalise commercial lenders hurt by rising bad loans. The idea was first floated in February by the Finance Ministry’s top ...