Seoul / AFP The US government has suspended millions of dollars in funding to several organisations providing aid for Syria after discovering they were systematically overpaying Turkish companies for basic goods with the collusion of some of their staff. The US Agency for International Development’s independent government auditor said it had “established grounds resulting in the suspension of 14 ...

  Washington / AFP Barack Obama will this month become the first sitting US president to visit atomic bomb-struck Hiroshima, but the White House said he will not offer an apology for the devastating attack on the Japanese city in 1945. Obama, accompanied by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, will make the deeply symbolic visit on May 27, after attending a ...

  Munich / AFP A man killed one person and wounded three others in a knife attack at a German railway station Tuesday that prosecutors said had “an apparent extremist motive”. It is Germany’s third knife attack with an apparent extremist motivation since September. Police said they had arrested a 27-year-old German man who had slashed four people around 5 ...

  Islamabad / AP Afghan and international forces freed the kidnapped son of a former Pakistani prime minister during a raid on an Al-Qaeda cell in Afghanistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan said Tuesday, three years after he was kidnapped in a hail of bullets. Ali Haider Gilani, son of Yousaf Raza Gilani, was “released from the terrorists” during the raid in ...

  Jerusalem / AFP Israeli authorities have refused to renew the travel documents of a leader of a campaign to boycott the Jewish state, officials said on Tuesday. Omar Barghouti is one of the most prominent campaigners in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which campaigns for a global boycott of Israel until, amongst other demands, the country withdraws ...

While speaking with a Chinese journalist recently about the American presidential election, he asked me what the best way was to translate Donald Trump’s election slogan, “Make America Great Again!” The two of us discussed several Chinese wordings that might be a suitable translation of this saying, and I suddenly realized this slogan is actually the exact same as Chinese ...

  Philippines president-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s pledge to restructure power in favour of the disadvantaged regions in the country looks quite ambitious, as he would need cooperation of political and business classes to realise this noble dream. The president-elect’s new plan to negotiate with China over disputed China South Sea, represents a departure from the Philippines’ traditional politics and will not ...

  Cal Wong China is preparing to invest RMB 77 billion ($11.9 billion) into domestic aviation infrastructure, with a particular focus on airports in rural areas, said the country’s civil aviation regulator at a State Council executive meeting last week. The announcement suggests this will be a multi-pronged initiative. One of the aims is to build more airports in remote ...

  Central Asia has no shortage of critical, politically fraught, logistically challenging, and financially important energy projects. There’s the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan India gas pipeline (TAPI) and the Central Asia South Asia Electricity Transmission and Trade Project (CASA-1000), both of which have been discussed in depth here at Crossroads Asia and feature in an excellent recent podcast from RFE/RL. But there’s another ...

  Much to Islamabad’s chagrin, the message coming out from Washington is loud and clear. Pakistan is now being asked to pay for F-16 jets out of its own pocket. The message that the U.S. Congress is sending to Pakistan after it threatened to yank financing for F-16 jets ordered by the country cannot be more categorical. Pakistan can still ...