Politics

BEIRUT / Reuters Syrian government forces pounded a town in the eastern Ghouta with air strikes on Wednesday in an effort to slice the rebel enclave in two as they intensified a campaign to deal the opposition its biggest defeat since 2016. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group says 800 civilians have been killed by government bombing and ...

Bloomberg Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing to extend a sweeping government overhaul that would give the Communist Party greater control over everything from financial services to manufacturing to entertainment in the world’s second-largest economy, two people familiar with the matter said. The changes are part of a proposed “CPC leadership system” approved by the party on February 28, the ...

Bloomberg North Korea is willing to give up its nuclear weapons if the safety of Kim Jong Un’s regime is guaranteed, South Korea said, boosting pressure on the US to agree to peace talks. Kim will meet South Korean President Moon Jae-in for a summit along their shared border at the end of April, the statement said, adding that North ...

Bloomberg Longtime Donald Trump associate Sam Nunberg said he doesn’t plan to cooperate with a subpoena from Special Counsel Robert Mueller requesting he appear before a grand jury investigating Russian interference in the 2016 elections. “They want me in there for grand jury on Friday. I’m not paying the money to go down there,” Nunberg said in an interview with ...

Bloomberg Sri Lanka has declared a state of emergency for 10 days to rein in the spread of communal violence, a government spokesman said on Tuesday, a day after Buddhists and Muslims clashed in the Indian Ocean island’s central district of Kandy. Tension has been growing between the two communities in Sri Lanka over the past year, with some hard-line ...

Bloomberg Extremist attacks, gasoline shortages, worsening violence over grazing land, simmering unrest in the southeast — the crises keep mounting for Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari less than a year before general elections. The most recent setback came on March 1 when suspected Boko Haram militants killed three United Nations aid workers and eight soldiers in an attack in the northeastern ...

Bloomberg Jacob Zuma’s forced resignation as South Africa’s president did more than revive confidence in the ruling African National Congress. It’s deepened divisions between the two main opposition parties, threatening their control of the nation’s key cities. Together with the ANC’s shift to support expropriation of land without compensation, Zuma’s replacement by Cyril Ramaphosa has thawed its relations with the ...

Bloomberg Sierra Leone will hold elections on Wednesday in which an unprecedented number of political parties will compete as discontent over the government’s handling of an economy battered by the Ebola outbreak has soared. The vote marks a departure from a decades-old tradition that mainly divided the balance of power between the All People’s Congress and the opposition Sierra Leone ...

Bloomberg North Korean leader Kim Jong Un held talks with top aides to South Korea’s Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang on Monday, the president’s office said, in the first meeting between the leader of the isolated nation and officials from Seoul since he took power in 2011. National Security Office head Chung Eui-yong and National Intelligence Service chief Suh Hoon were ...

TEHRAN / Reuters France’s foreign minister visited Iran on Monday on a delicate mission to affirm Europe’s support for a nuclear deal that opened Iran’s economy while echoing US concern about Tehran’s missile programme and role in regional conflicts. Jean-Yves Le Drian aims to save the 2015 nuclear deal, which US President Donald Trump has threatened to quit unless European ...