Politics

Bloomberg President Joe Biden provided an official explanation of the airstrike that targeted Iranian-backed fighters in eastern Syria, saying he was using his authority to deter attacks on US and allied personnel in Iraq. Biden’s letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Leahy, president pro tempore of the Senate, follows criticism by some Democrats of the circumstances of his ...

Bloomberg After the deadliest fighting in decades, India and China are setting up demilitarised areas along their Himalayan border — a move that has rankled some members of India’s security establishment. Soldiers from both countries for now will no longer patrol a nine-kilometer (six-mile) stretch on the north bank of Pangong Tso, a glacial lake some 14,000 feet above sea ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong police charged dozens of opposition activists including Joshua Wong with violating the city’s national security law, taking formal action against them less than a week before China’s highest-profile annual political meeting. Of the 55 opposition figures initially arrested in January, 47 were charged with conspiracy to commit subversion on Sunday. They had previously been facing allegations of ...

Bloomberg A string of mass abductions is disrupting education in Africa’s most populous country, which already ranks among places with one of the highest number of out-of-school children globally. In the most recent incident, armed men on motorbikes seized 317 girls at a school in the northern state of Zamfara. The students were taken into a forest, where they are ...

Bloomberg President Joe Biden said US airstrikes in Syria that killed militants linked to Iran were a warning to the Islamic Republic to be cautious as its proxies challenge American allies in the Mideast. Asked while visiting a National Guard vaccination site in Houston what message the strike was intended to send to Iran, Biden said: “You can’t act with ...

Bloomberg The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) approved a UK-drafted resolution calling for local cease-fires in conflict zones so that coronavirus vaccinations can take place. The passage of the resolution, which calls for cooperation to overcome “logistical barriers to equitable access,” was seen as an early sign of cooperation between the new Biden administration and China, which supported the document ...

Bloomberg Donald Trump’s niece is balking at the former president’s claim that she waited too long to file her multi-million dollar fraud suit against him, saying she would have sued sooner if he hadn’t covered his tracks so well. Mary Trump asked a judge to deny Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss the suit, which she filed in September against her ...

Bloomberg Ethiopia’s government criticised a report by Amnesty International that alleged war crimes in the northern town of Axum last year. Amnesty said that Eritrean troops massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians in November. It based its conclusions on interviews with 41 survivors and witnesses. The methodology used to produce report had “limitations” as it relied on information gathered from refugees ...

Bloomberg Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said their nations would adopt a unified approach toward the pandemic, climate change and China, setting aside trade and other tensions in what the White House called the new US president’s first bilateral meeting. After about a two-hour virtual meeting between the two leaders and their staffs, Biden said that they ...

Bloomberg Republican Mitt Romney said Donald Trump likely would win the GOP presidential nomination if he decided to run again in 2024. The Utah senator, the only Republican who voted to convict Trump in both of his impeachment trials, said he expects the former president will continue to play a big role in the Republican Party even though he was ...