World Briefs

CHINA Huawei Technologies Co. founder Ren Zhengfei is ready to license his fifth-generation networking technology only to one other company – and he wants that potential arch-rival to be American.

CHINA has demanded that Washington drop sanctions imposed on Chinese companies and executives for transporting Iranian oil.

PHILIPPINES President Rodrigo Duterte has forgone helicopters, weapons and a proposed train line through Manila worth millions of dollars – all in defense of his deadly drug war.

THAILAND’s army is stepping up purchases of U.S. weapons with a deal for eight armed reconnaissance helicopters, another sign of warming ties after the end of direct military rule in the Southeast Asian nation.

INDONESIA A strong earthquake yesterday killed at least three people and damaged a bridge, hospital and other buildings on one of Indonesia’s less populated islands.

BANGLADESH A Cabinet minister says authorities will build barbed-wire fences around sprawling camps housing Rohingya refugees to stop their expansion.

AFGHANISTAN Millions of Afghans are expected to go to the polls tomorrow to elect a new president, despite an upsurge of violence in the weeks since the collapse of a U.S.-Taliban deal to end America’s longest war, and the Taliban warning voters to say away from the polls.

ISRAEL Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began the daunting task of trying to cobble together a coalition government amid political deadlock that emerged from this month’s repeat elections, which had no clear winner.

FRANCE Jacques Chirac, a two-term French president who was the first leader to acknowledge France’s role in the Holocaust and defiantly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, died yesterday at age 86.

GERMANY Authorities say they have arrested two Pakistani men accused of being part of a criminal gang engaged in a large-scale tax scam involving emissions certificates.

EU The European Union says it is still waiting for useful proposals to come from Britain to unblock stalled negotiations on Britain’s departure terms from the bloc.

USA An Arizona man has become the second person arrested on drug charges as authorities investigate the overdose death of rapper Mac Miller.