Asian stock markets fell Wednesday after Australian inflation increased, highlighting global pressure for prices to rise, while investors looked ahead to U.S. economic growth data due out this week.

Shanghai, Tokyo and Hong Kong all retreated.

U.S. regulators are expelling a unit of China Telecom Ltd., one of the country's three major state-owned carriers, from the American market as a national security threat amid rising tension with Beijing.

China Telecom (Americas) Corp. is required to stop providing domestic interstate and international service in the United States within 60 days, under an order approved Tuesday by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC cited the danger that Beijing might use the company to eavesdrop or disrupt U.S. communications and "engage in espionage and other harmful activities against the United States.

Pakistan said Wednesday that Saudi Arabia will deposit $3 billion into its central bank to help bolster the cash-strapped fellow Islamic nation's shrinking foreign reserves.

Shaukat Tarin, Pakistan's top finance ministry official, also said on Twitter that Saudi Arabia will additionally supply 1.2 billion worth of oil to Pakistan on credit.

The global energy transition is perhaps nowhere more perplexing than in the Arabian Peninsula, where Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies are caught between two daunting climate change scenarios that threaten their livelihoods.

In one, the world stops burning oil and gas to cut down on heat-trapping emissions, shaking the very foundation of their economies. In the other, global temperatures keep rising, at the risk of rendering unlivable much of the Gulf's already extremely hot terrain.

Iran's president said Wednesday that a cyberattack which paralyzed every gas station in the Islamic Republic was designed to get "people angry by creating disorder and disruption," as long lines still snaked around the pumps a day after the incident began.

Ebrahim Raisi's remarks stopped short of assigning blame for the attack, which rendered useless the government-issued electronic cards that many Iranians use to buy subsidized fuel at the pump. However, his remarks suggested that he and others in the theocracy believe anti-Iranian forces carried out the assault.

The defense for former Nissan executive Greg Kelly said Wednesday there was no evidence or motives linking him to alleged under-reporting of his ex-boss Carlos Ghosn's compensation.

Kelly's chief defense lawyer, Yoichi Kitamura, said in wrapping up the defense's arguments that Kelly is innocent and he had no knowledge of the complex calculations over Ghosn's unpaid remuneration, tabulated and updated by Nissan Motor Co. secretariat official Toshiaki Ohnuma.

Stocks are opening higher on Wall Street as company earnings reports get into high gear, pushing major indexes further into record heights. The S&P 500 was up 0.4% in the early going Tuesday. Big technology companies were doing much of the heavy lifting, and that helped send the Nasdaq up 0.6%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 0.2%. UPS jumped 7.7% in the early going after the package delivery service reported results that easily beat analysts' forecasts. Microsoft and Google's parent company will report their own results after the closing bell. European markets were higher and Asian markets closed mixed.

Samsung's de facto chief Lee Jae-yong was fined 70 million won (about $60,000) on Tuesday for illegally using the anesthetic drug propofol, about two months after he was released on parole over a separate corruption case.

The Seoul Central District Court said it convicted Lee, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, of violating a law on drug controls. It said Lee was also ordered to forfeit about 10 million won ($8,570).

UPS' third-quarter results beat analysts' expectations, as consumers are paying higher rates to have the package delivery company fulfill their shipping needs.

Shares rose 5% before the market open on Tuesday.

Gas stations across Iran on Tuesday suffered through a widespread outage of a government system managing fuel subsidies, stopping sales in an incident that one semiofficial news agency briefly referred to as a cyberattack.

An Iranian state television account online shared images of long lines of cars waiting to fill up in Tehran. An Associated Press journalist also saw lines of cars at a Tehran gas station, with the pumps off and the station closed.