Tokyo—From prime minister to ordinary people, Japanese responded with shock Sunday at a video purportedly showing one of two Japanese hostages of the extremist Islamic State group had been killed.

New Delhi—President Barack Obama was greeted in India Sunday with an elaborate welcome at the country’s sprawling presidential palace, then he solemnly laid a wreath at a memorial honoring the father of India’s independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi.

Riza Lozada (First of two parts) Overshadowed by the papal visit was the “birth” of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) economic community, a bloc envisioned to be similar to the European Union, and which Philippines officials hope to put the country in equal footing with its neighbors in the association.

Luis Leoncio Underspending in the government remains a spoiler to the Philippines’s economic growth momentum, according to the Philippines Economic Update that the World Bank (WB) released recently as the multilateral lender slashed growth projections this year to 6.5 percent from the previous 6.7 percent.

BRUSSELS — With Europe on edge, soldiers fanned out to guard possible terror targets in Belgium Saturday while police in Greece detained at least two suspects as part of a widening counterterrorism dragnet across the continent.

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama will call for increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans then using the revenue to fund new tax credits and other cost-saving measures for the middle class in his first address before a Republican-led Congress.

SINGAPORE—US academics and former senior officials met with North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator in Singapore on Sunday to get a feel for each other’s positions amid a yearslong standoff over the North’s nuclear weapons buildup.

Gregory Katz London—Kalashnikov assault rifles. Plenty of ammunition. Molotov cocktails, a grenade, a death-dealing Skorpion machine pistol and a few handguns.

Obama will use a Monday event at the Federal Trade Commission to lay out the next steps of a plan to tackle identity theft and improve consumer and student privacy.