Politics

Bloomberg Fears that a civil war raging in neighbouring Ethiopia’s northern Tigray Region will reverberate across eastern Africa are playing out in Sudan, which is contending with a massive influx of refugees who’ve fled the fighting. More than 40,000 people have streamed across the border from Tigray into eastern Sudan since November 7, the United Nations said. Sudan itself is ...

Bloomberg President-elect Joe Biden said his transition team will not be “so far behind the curve” now that the Trump administration has begun cooperating on the fight against the coronavirus and providing access to intelligence reports after a three-week delay. “We’re already working out meeting with the Covid team in the White House,” Biden said in an interview on “NBC ...

Bloomberg Last year, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam only made it through a few lines of her annual policy address before pro-democracy lawmakers forced her to flee the chamber and deliver it virtually. On Wednesday, she spoke for more than two hours to a legislative body with no members of an opposition that has long resisted the city’s integration ...

Bloomberg China confirmed it’s compiling a global watch list of Taiwanese independence backers it plans to “punish,” marking an escalation in Beijing’s pursuit of its critics. “The list is only targeting the extremely few stubborn Taiwan independence activists and their funders, not targeting the majority of Taiwan compatriots,” Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said at a ...

Bloomberg When Linda Thomas-Greenfield was held at gunpoint on a diplomatic assignment in Rwanda in 1994, she tried her best to look calm as she explained to a “glazed-eyed young man” that she wasn’t the woman he was told to kill. “I was afraid, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t panic,” Thomas-Greenfield, now one of America’s most experienced diplomats ...

Bloomberg President-elect Joe Biden is delivering a not-so-subtle rebuke to President Donald Trump with his choices of nominees to lead two key national-security agencies. For his director of national intelligence, Biden has selected Avril Haines, a former top CIA official with years of experience in the espionage community who would fill a job that Trump had largely reserved for people ...

Bloomberg An informal militia made up of Tigrayan youths killed at least 600 Ethiopian civilians identified as belonging to other ethnic groups on November 9, according to a state-run human rights body. The massacre occurred less than a week after a conflict started between federal forces and Tigrayan soldiers in the northern Ethiopian region. The youths, known as Samri, and ...

Bloomberg Storm Nivar over the Bay of Bengal is likely to turn into a “very severe cyclone” by Wednesday and may cause widespread damage to crops, mud houses and electricity poles in some southern Indian states. The storm will have a sustained wind speed of 120 to 130 kilometres (75-81 miles) per hour, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD). ...

Bloomberg Algeria’s 75-year-old leader flew to Germany last month for treatment after catching Covid-19. He hasn’t been seen in public since and barely a word on his condition reaches home. The prolonged absence of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune is now the hot topic of political debate, supplanting a vote on constitutional reform and the rumblings of war near the country’s western ...

Bloomberg One year ago, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) was in flames. Police and student protesters faced off at the campus — one of Hong Kong’s best-known — in a chaotic 16-day siege last November that became a symbol of the battle between the city’s China-backed administration and anti-government protesters. Today, what had once been a bustling, freely accessible campus ...