Politics

WASHINGTON / Reuters A senior US general accused Russia of playing a destabilising role in Syria and acting as “both arsonist and firefighter,” as a brief truce unilaterally declared by Moscow in the eastern Ghouta region collapsed. The United States and Russia have been on different sides of the seven-year-old war, with Moscow heavily backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad whose ...

Bloomberg Among the enduring curiosities of Donald Trump’s presidential run was his announcement that campaign chairman Paul Manafort was an unpaid volunteer. Why would a longtime political fixer do that? That question has grown more persistent thanks to successive indictments of Manafort by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller, each documenting in finer detail Manafort’s allegedly fraudulent scramble for cash just ...

Bloomberg Afghan President Ashraf Ghani presented his most comprehensive peace plan to the Taliban in a bid to bring them to the negotiating table and end the nation’s near 17-year war. Ghani said he would recognize the Taliban as a political group and would initiate talks if they agreed to a cease-fire, he told delegates at a peace conference in ...

Bloomberg The Democratic Republic of Congo reacted angrily to Botswana’s claim that President Joseph Kabila’s decision to remain in power is stoking instability in the vast central African nation. Congo’s communications minister dismissed as “nonsense” the comments from Botswana, which represented the most strident criticism yet of Kabila by an African government. It comes as militia violence flares in Congo’s ...

Bloomberg The European Union will challenge Theresa May on Wednesday when it publishes a draft Brexit treaty that ignores some of the UK prime minister’s most important demands. The bloc is planning to set out in legal detail how it expects the UK to depart in just over one year’s time, and the terms of a transition period that will ...

AMSTERDAM / Reuters The world’s chemical weapons watchdog is investigating recent attacks in the besieged, rebel-held Syrian region of eastern Ghouta to determine whether banned munitions were used, sources told Reuters. The Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) opened an investigation into reports of the repeated use of chlorine bombs this month in the district near the ...

Bloomberg Joseph Yun, the US special representative for North Korea, is set to step down, the State Department said, in a move that comes as Kim Jong Un’s regime says it’s willing to hold talks with Washington. A North Korean official told South Korea this week that the door was open for dialogue, and Washington said it was willing to ...

Bloomberg South African President Cyril Ramaphosa treaded a fine line between his ruling party’s rival factions when he named steady hands to key cabinet posts and purged some of his predecessor Jacob Zuma’s most ineffectual appointees. While keeping a handful of Zuma loyalists in largely minor positions, Ramaphosa brought back as finance minister Nhlanhla Nene, who Zuma replaced in late ...

Bloomberg Venezuela’s opposition has renewed private talks with the government in a bid to push back the date of the country’s presidential elections as President Nicolas Maduro’s administration seeks some legitimacy for the vote, according to people familiar with the matter. Two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, former Governor Henri Falcon and lawmakers from two of Venezuela’s largest opposition parties participated ...

Bloomberg Former general Prabowo Subianto is firming as a candidate for Indonesia’s presidential election, raising the prospect of a rerun of the bitter 2014 race that saw Joko Widodo take power in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy. In the strongest signal yet, the co-founder of the main opposition party known as Gerindra has indicated that Prabowo would be the party’s nominee ...