Politics

Bloomberg Tens of thousands of Afghan families are fleeing to escape the Taliban’s rapid advance into the country’s northern region, part of a larger refugee crisis that is brewing as the US speeds up its troop withdrawal after two decades of war. The militants have burned down farmland and forced citizens to leave their towns and villages, Mohammad Amiri, a ...

Bloomberg A Hong Kong court sentenced a US lawyer to prison for a scuffle with a plainclothes police officer at the height of pro-democracy protests in 2019. Samuel Bickett, 37, was given a term of four months and two weeks on Tuesday on one charge of assaulting a police officer. The former Asia-Pacific compliance director at Bank of America Merrill ...

Bloomberg President Joe Biden’s effort to reverse a free fall in US-Russia relations encounters an early test in Syria as an agreement over international aid corridors into the country is set to expire this week. Keeping aid flowing into Syria was a key request Biden made of President Vladimir Putin at their summit in Geneva last month, but that will ...

Bloomberg Japan and the US would have to defend Taiwan together in the event of a major problem, Kyodo News reported Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso as saying, marking some of the highest-level remarks from Tokyo on the sensitive subject. In comments at a political fundraising party in Tokyo, Aso said an invasion of Taiwan by China could be seen ...

Bloomberg China’s President Xi Jinping warned against politicising the pandemic in a speech to a summit of political organisations from around the world that sought to show the ruling communist party’s broad foreign support. “The achievements of the Chinese Communist Party cannot be separated from the support of people around the world,” Xi told the online gathering of representatives from ...

Bloomberg South Africa’s ruling African National Congress distanced itself from former President Jacob Zuma’s attempt to discredit the Constitutional Court after it found him guilty of contempt, and slated threats by his supporters to block the authorities from arresting him. All South Africans have a responsibility to respect and observe the law, and the judiciary and law-enforcement agencies need to ...

Bloomberg China’s Xi Jinping is expected to speak this week with Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron, people with knowledge of the matter said, as they attempt to keep human rights disputes from scuttling efforts at cooperation. The agenda for the joint video call between the leaders isn’t yet known, according to the people, who asked not to be ...

Bloomberg A triumphant President Joe Biden all but announced an end to the pandemic in the US, celebrating what he called a “heroic” vaccination campaign on the country’s Independence Day holiday. Speaking at a party on the White House’s South Lawn with more than 1,000 people in attendance, Biden declared that the US had achieved “independence” from the coronavirus, though ...

Bloomberg Former South African President Jacob Zuma, who is facing a 15-month jail sentence for contempt, accused the nation’s top court of unfairly convicting him, and said he feared that judicial system was being compromised. “I’m very concerned that South Africa is fast sliding back to apartheid-type rule. I am facing a long detention without trial,” Zuma told reporters at ...

Bloomberg Poland’s highest-ranking European official ever returned to domestic politics with guns blazing, branding the ruling party’s euroskeptic policies as a gift for Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Donald Tusk, who served as president of the European Council until 2019, took the reins of the country’s biggest opposition party, Civic Platform, at the weekend after nearly seven years in Brussels. He’s ...