The Dow and S&P 500 finished at fresh records on Thursday following Chinese comments that pointed to a potential removal of tariffs in the long-running trade war with the United States.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended up 0.7 per cent at 27,674.80, about 180 points above the all-time high of two days ago.
The broad-based S&P 500 gained 0.3 per cent to 3,085.18, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index advanced 0.3 per cent to 8,434.52.
Investors welcomed statements from Chinese officials that the two sides have agreed a plan to remove tariffs imposed on goods in stages if a preliminary "phase one" agreement announced last month is finalised.
However, the White House did not publicly comment on the claim and gains moderated following a Reuters report that described opposition to rolling back tariffs within the White House.
The pullback revealed continued doubt about a US-China trade agreement despite more conciliatory signs from both sides, said Karl Haeling of ...

Dow, S&P 500 end at records on US-China trade deal optimism

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on a visit to EU member Hungary repeated his threat Thursday to "open the gates" for millions of refugees eager to flee to Europe unless more international support was provided.
Erdogan held talks with Hungarian nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban -- a rare EU ally -- in Budapest where several hundred people demonstrated over Ankara's deadly military offensive in Syria, with placards calling the Turkish leader a "genocidal dictator".
Ankara launched the military operation last month to push Syrian Kurdish forces back from its border and create a "safe zone" to take in some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey.
Erdogan has called on EU countries to provide more financial support for his plan to create the "safe zone".
"Whether or not support comes, we will continue to host our guests, but only up to a point," Erdogan said at a news conference alongside Orban.
"If we see that this does not work, just like I said before, we ...

Erdogan threatens to open Europe gates for refugees

Russian troops wearing World War II uniforms on Thursday marched across Moscow's Red Square in memory of the historic 1941 parade when Soviet soldiers went directly to the battlefield to fight the Nazis.
The annual re-enactment featuring some 4,000 troops and T-34 tanks commemorated the legendary November 7, 1941 parade whose participants marched from Red Square to the front line, becoming a symbol of courage and patriotism.
Some 7,000 guests including World War II veterans watched the parade.
"Our duty is to continue to be victorious and build a great country," Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said at the event.
The Red Army's triumph in the deadliest war in history is seen as a huge point of pride in Russia.
In recent years, the victory in the 1941-1945 conflict -- known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War -- has acquired signs of cult status.
Nazi Germany's invasion on June 22, 1941 caught Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin by surprise and Nazi troops were able to come close to Moscow.
The 

Russia re-enacts historic wartime parade

A US healthcare company has identified a new subtype of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and said the finding showed that cutting edge genome sequencing is helping researchers stay ahead of mutations.
The strain, HIV-1 Group M subtype L, has been recorded in three people from blood samples taken between the 1980s and 2001, all in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Abbott laboratories told AFP on Thursday.
To classify a new subtype, three cases must be discovered independently, according to guidelines issued in 2000.
Group M is the most prevalent form of the HIV-1 virus. Subtype L is now the 10th of this group and the first to be identified since the guidelines were issued.
Antiretroviral drugs, which reduce the viral load of an HIV carrier to the point at which the infection is both undetectable and cannot be transmitted further, have generally performed well against a variety of subtypes, according to research.
But there is also some evidence of subtype differences in drug ...

US lab identifies rare new HIV strain

South Sudan President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar have been given another 100 days to form a power-sharing government after failing to resolve differences over a peace deal.
The two leaders, whose fall out in 2013 sparked a conflict that has left hundreds of thousands dead, were granted the extension after a rare face-to-face meeting held with regional heavyweights in Uganda.
It is the second time the deadline has been pushed back since the rivals signed a truce last September that brought a pause to fighting.
Both sides had agreed to join forces in a coalition government by November 12.
But with the date looming and key issues far from resolved, regional leaders brokered high-level mediations in Entebbe to chart a way forward.
"It was really impossible to have them reach agreement in five days. We've given them three months and we will continue our engagement," Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa told AFP following the closed-door discussions at State House in ...

South Sudan rival leaders given 100 days to form unity government

Cyprus announced Thursday it had signed its first natural gas exploitation deal worth USD 9.3 billion with a consortium comprised of industry giant Shell, US-based Noble and Israel's Delek.
"Noble Energy, Shell and Delek now have in their hands the first exploitation license granted by the Republic of Cyprus so they can commercialise the deposit," said Energy Minister George Lakkotrypis, shortly after the agreement was signed.
The 25-year license is for the Aphrodite gas field, the first to be discovered off Cyprus, by Texas-based Noble Energy, in 2011.
It is estimated to contain over four trillion cubic feet (over 113 billion cubic metres) of gas.
The signing of the deal comes after the cabinet approved revisions to a production sharing agreement, made at the companies' request due to a significant fall in hydrocarbon prices since mid-2014.
The re-working of the production contract means Nicosia is set to receive an average yearly income of $520 million over an 18-year ...

Cyprus signs USD 9 billion gas deal with energy majors

Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren offered to meet Bill Gates after the Microsoft billionaire expressed skepticism about her proposal for a "wealth tax" affecting the richest Americans.
Gates, speaking at a New York Times conference on Wednesday, said he favored "progressive" taxation but worried about the impact of a large wealth tax on "innovation." "I've paid over $10 billion in taxes, I've paid more than anyone," Gates, one of the world's wealthiest individuals, said in the interview.
"If I had to pay $20 billion, it's fine but when you say I should pay $100 billion I'm starting to do a little math ... You really want the incentive system to be there." Asked if he would consider meeting Warren, Gates said, "I'm not sure how open-minded she is, or that she would even be willing to sit down with somebody who has large amounts of money." Warren took the cue from Gates in a response on Twitter, offering to meet the Microsoft founder and philanthropist.
"I'm always happy .

Elizabeth Warren challenges Bill Gates on 'wealth tax'

Two French police officers will stand trial for alleged violence against "yellow vest" demonstrators taking part in anti-government rallies in Paris in recent months, a senior prosecutor said Thursday.
Participants in the year-old protest movement have long accused authorities of using heavy-handed tactics that have left dozens of people seriously injured.
They denounce in particular the use of large rubber bullets from so-called "defensive ball launchers," as well as sting-ball grenades.
Yellow vest activists say 23 protesters lost the use of an eye, five lost a hand, and one a testicle, while dozens sustained other injuries.
The two officers were charged over incidents at this year's May Day protest in Paris, a traditional day of labour union rallies that was joined by yellow vest activists.
One officer will stand trial for allegedly slapping a protester in the face, while the other is accused of throwing a paving stone at demonstrators in Paris -- both scenes were captured on ...

Two French police to stand trial over 'yellow vest' violence

Thousands of Guinean protesters took to the streets in the capital Conakry Thursday, in fresh demonstrations days after deadly clashes erupted during a funeral march for those killed in recent anti-government rallies.
The poor West African country has been shaken by violence during weeks of protest over opposition suspicions that President Alpha Conde is seeking to prolong his rule.
Demonstrators clad in the red of the opposition stretched across several kilometres of a highway leading to the capital's 28 September stadium, an AFP reporter said, adding it was difficult to quantify the exact number of protesters.
"Walk peacefully and quietly," and "Don't respond to provocations", the National Front for Defence of the Constitution (FNDC), an alliance of opposition parties and unions, warned on social media in a bid to avoid confrontation with security forces.
Demonstrators demanded the release of government critics imprisoned since the beginning of the anti-government unrest.
Dozens of .

Protesters take to streets in tense Guinea capital

Jordan, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates have regularly violated the UN arms embargo imposed on Libya since 2011, according to a confidential report by UN experts seen Thursday by AFP.
The three countries "routinely and sometimes blatantly supplied weapons with little effort to disguise the source," a summary of a year-long study by UN experts said.  According to diplomats, Jordan was accused of having trained troops of Khalifa Haftar, a military strongman in eastern Libya who launched an offensive in April in a bid to seize Tripoli.
The United Arab Emirates, another Haftar backer, is suspected of using attack aircraft on behalf of his forces.
Turkey, which openly supports the government of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, supplied his forces with military material ranging from armored vehicles to drones, according to the sources.
"Both parties to the conflict received weapons and military equipment, technical support... in non-compliance with the sanctions measures related to ...

UN report finds Jordan, Turkey, UAE violated Libya arms embargo

NATO partners argued Thursday over the alliance's worth after French President Emmanuel Macron said it was undergoing "brain death", prompting a fierce defence of the bloc from Germany and the US while drawing praise from non-member Russia.
"What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO," Macron told The Economist magazine in an interview published Thursday, ahead of a NATO summit next month.
But German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the 70-year-old military alliance as "indispensible" and said Macron's "sweeping judgements" were not "necessary".
Addressing journalists by Merkel's side, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg warned that a weakened transatlantic alliance could "divide Europe", while the US Secretary of State, also in Germany, insisted NATO was "important, critical." In the interview, Macron decried a lack of coordination between Europe and the US and lamented recent unilateral action in Syria by Turkey, a key member of the 70-year-old military alliance.
"You ...

NATO allies clash after Macron says alliance experiencing 'brain death'

An international effort to better tax tech giants such as Google or Facebook has achieved surprising results, a top EU official said on Thursday.
Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who takes over as the EU's digital supremo next month, made her comments at the Web Summit in Lisbon, a major European conference for high tech.
Expectations are rife that the G20 group of the world's biggest economies will seal an OECD proposal that aims to find an agreement on taxing global tech giants by June next year.
If achieved, the deal will have survived major resistance, including by Washington and low tax nations such as Ireland or Luxembourg where big tech have set up international headquarters.
"Usually there is no reason to be optimistic about taxes... but when it comes to digital taxation, development has been fast and quite ambitious on the level of the OECD," Vestager told reporters.
The proposal "is met with quite some enthusiasm also outside of Europe," she added.
According to ..

EU hails 'fast, ambitious' pace towards digital tax

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday rejected French President Emmanuel Macron's view that NATO was experiencing "brain death", saying there was no need for such "sweeping judgements".
Macron "used drastic words, that is not my view of cooperation in NATO," said Merkel after talks with visiting chief of the transatlantic defence alliance Jens Stoltenberg.
"I don't think that such sweeping judgements are necessary, even if we have problems and need to pull together," she added.
Stoltenberg meanwhile stressed that "NATO is strong", adding that the United States and Europe were working "more together than we have done for decades".  Macron's explosive comments came ahead of a NATO summit in Britain next month.
"You have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its NATO allies. None," the French president charged.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking during a visit to the German city of Leipzig as part of anniversary events for ...

Merkel rejects Macron's 'sweeping' NATO judgement

EU countries have a "short window" to decide whether to repatriate their nationals -- including hundreds of very young children -- held in camps in Syria after the defeat of the Islamic State group, MEPs heard Thursday.
A US troop withdrawal and subsequent Turkish military incursion into northeast Syria last month has injected urgency into the issue, the European Parliament lawmakers were told, in a session on the fate of children of foreign fighters.
Control of the camps is slipping as Kurdish SDF fighters formerly allied to the US become squeezed between the hostile Turkish and Syrian armies, raising the risk of those in the camps escaping, perhaps to Europe in some cases, or falling into the hands of President Bashar al-Assad's forces, they heard.
"There's a short window now, of perhaps one or several months, while the camps with family members of European foreign fighters are still under the control of the SDF," Christiane Hoehn, a senior EU counter-terrorism official told the ...

EU sees 'short window' to decide IS repatriations from Syria

The bodies of four migrants were found off the coast of Spain's holiday island of Lanzarote on Thursday, bringing to nine the number confirmed dead when their boat capsized, local officials said.
Rescuers managed to save four migrants, while the bodies of five others were recovered, on Wednesday when the boat hit rocks in rough weather and sank as it tried to reach the island.
"According to the survivors, 15 people were on board the boat and emergency services continue to search the area," a spokesman for the local government of Lanzarote said.
Two helicopters and several boats were taking part in the search, which was hampered by stormy seas, with waves of four to five metres (16 feet), said Isidoro Blanco, the spokesman for emergency services on the island, one of Spain's Canary Islands.
About 100 kilometres (60 miles) of Atlantic Ocean separate the Spanish archipelago from the coast of Morocco.
At least 80 people have died or have gone missing this year trying to reach the Canary ..

Toll from Spain migrant boat sinking climbs to nine

Vietnam said Thursday it was working to repatriate 39 bodies now identified as Vietnamese nationals found in a truck near London last month, in a case that exposed the deadly risks of illegal migration to Europe.
The country's embassy in London said a government delegation already in Britain was coordinating with officials to get the bodies home "at the earliest time".
It came as British police confirmed that those discovered in the refrigerated truck on October 23 all came from the southeast Asian nation.
In a letter obtained by AFP to the families of the 31 men and eight women who died, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said the tragedy had caused them and Vietnamese people worldwide "endless pain" and vowed to "soon bring the victims back to the homeland".
Essex Police, the local force investigating last month's gruesome discovery, said a coroner had now formally identified all the victims and their families in Vietnam had been informed.
"This is an important step in the ...

Vietnam to repatriate 39 nationals found dead in UK truck

Saudi Arabia's King Salman hosted the Central Intelligence Agency's director Thursday, state media said, after three people were charged in the US with spying on Twitter users critical of the royal family.
The king and Gina Haspel "discussed a number of topics of mutual interest", the official Saudi Press Agency said, without offering details.
The meeting in Riyadh was attended by a number of Saudi officials including Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and intelligence chief Khalid al-Humaidan.
Haspel's visit comes after a US court on Wednesday charged three people, including two Saudis, with spying on Twitter users critical of the kingdom's royal family.
The trio -- including two former Twitter employees -- allegedly worked to unmask the ownership details behind dissident Twitter accounts on behalf of someone prosecutors designated "Royal Family Member-1".
The Washington Post reported the latter to be Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler.
Ties between 

Saudi king hosts CIA chief for talks

A British Army reject who travelled to Syria to fight the so-called Islamic State was on Thursday jailed for one year for attending a terror training camp.
Aidan James, 29, from Formby near Liverpool, was also given an additional three-year sentence for dealing cocaine before he left.
James stayed at an Iraqi refugee camp on his way to Syria in 2017, where he received firearms training from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a terror group banned under British law.
Video footage showed him learning to fire an AK47 at the camp at Mahkmour, while his activities were also detailed in his diary, judge Andrew Edis told the Old Bailey court in London.
James later received "much more substantial training" in Syria from the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), the judge said.
But he was acquitted on that front because the jury was not convinced the training was for a terrorist purpose.
The YPG at that point was training people to fight the IS group, and in some of their activities had ...

Briton who went to fight IS jailed for terror training

A national security aide to Vice President Mike Pence arrived in Congress Thursday to testify in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump as momentum in the investigation picked up ahead of next week's open hearings.
Jennifer Williams listened to Trump's controversial July 25 phone call with Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky, and could either support or dampen allegations that Trump abused his powers by pressuring Zelensky to investigate Trump's possible 2020 election rival.
Democrats allege that Trump held up $391 million in military aid for Ukraine to force Zelensky to find dirt on Democrat Joe Biden, and also to find evidence supporting a widely discredited theory that Ukraine helped Democrats in the 2016 election.
A veteran diplomat who advises Pence on Europe and Russia, Williams will be the first person from the vice president's office to testify.
"We expect her testimony will largely reflect what is already in the public record," her lawyer Justin Shur said in a ..

Pence aide testifies in Trump impeachment inquiry

Russian investigators on Thursday launched a probe following social media posts by a woman who boasted about flying a passenger plane without training after the pilot gave her the controls.
Investigators in the Siberian region of Yakutia said the 33-year-old woman took over during a scheduled flight by the regional IrAero company that had other passengers on board.
"One of the crew members illegally let a young woman into the cockpit who had no permit or certificate to fly planes ... and gave her the controls of the Antonov An-24 plane," the investigators said in a statement.
"There were passengers on board" the plane which can carry up to 52 plus the crew, investigators added.
The probe would focus on the provision of services that endangered customers' lives, the statement said.
Russian media had earlier picked up posts on Instagram published by a user called @madam_dupon.
One was a video of a young woman in a pink shirt gripping the controls of a plane mid-flight as a man who ...

Russian pilot probed after handing controls to passenger

At least 10 Nigerian soldiers have been killed and nine severely injured in an ambush by jihadists in restive northeast Nigeria, military sources said Thursday.
Another 12 soldiers were missing after a column of troops on patrol was ambushed by the fighters on Wednesday in Damboa district of Borno state, a military officer told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Fighters loyal to the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the killings, but said they had slain 22 soldiers after an assault by the army.
A decade-long jihadist insurgency in northeast Nigeria has killed 35,000 people, displaced two million others and spilt into neighbouring countries.
"We lost 10 troops in the intense fighting with the terrorists who ambushed our soldiers conducting a clearance operation in the area," said the officer, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorised to speak about the incident.
"Nine soldiers were injured and 12 are still missing." The troops came under attack while ...

AFP

AFP

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