Politics

Bloomberg The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee criticised the Trump administration’s response to questions about its vetting and security clearance process following a series of controversies about staff with access to the country’s most classified information. Representative Trey Gowdy’s spokeswoman on the committee, Amanda Gonzalez, said that a five-paragraph letter sent to the committee by White House Director ...

Bloomberg South Korean President Moon Jae-in tried to tamp down expectations for his planned summit with Kim Jong Un, as he prepared to send envoys to Washington to discuss their meeting with the North Korean leader. “This is just a start, and we can’t be optimistic just yet,” Moon told leaders of five South Korean political parties in Seoul on ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump said Russia had “no impact on our votes” in the last presidential election and vowed to prevent any interference in the upcoming congressional elections. “We’ve actually been working very hard on the ‘18 election,” Trump said during a press conference at the White House with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven. He added that the US would ...

Bloomberg Strikes protesting Ethiopia’s state of emergency spread across the restive Oromia region ahead of US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s arrival for talks with the Horn of Africa nation’s embattled government. The closing of shops and roads by members of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group is the latest sign of discontent in Oromia state, where unrest has prompted the country’s ...

Bloomberg Voters in Sierra Leone are going to the polls to elect a successor for President Ernest Bai Koroma in a campaign where an unprecedented number of political parties is making the outcome too close to call. As Koroma nears the end of his second five-year term, 16 parties are competing in the elections in the West African nation. His ...

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 ...