Politics

Bloomberg Pro-government forces pounded the rebel-held district of eastern Ghouta outside the Syrian capital Damascus, in a surge of violence that a war monitor said had killed at least 250 people since Sunday night. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it was the highest 48-hour death toll in the Syria conflict since a 2013 chemical attack on eastern ...

Bloomberg US Vice President Mike Pence was willing to meet with Kim Jong Un’s envoys earlier this month during the Winter Olympics in South Korea, but the North Koreans backed out, the Trump administration said. “North Korea dangled a meeting in hopes of the vice president softening his message, which would have ceded the world stage for their propaganda during ...

Bloomberg Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called President Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem a “dangerous” development in a speech before the United Nations, then walked out before US envoy Nikki Haley retorted that “we will not chase after you.” The encounter before the Security Council reflected the tensions in US-Palestinian relations since Trump’s declaration ...

Bloomberg Venezuela’s main opposition parties say they will shun this year’s presidential elections, claiming the vote has been rigged to guarantee a victory for President Nicolas Maduro. Justice First, the country’s largest opposition party, announced that it would not be participating in April 22 elections. “We won’t help out a dictatorship that only cares about maintaining power on the backs ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump ordered a ban on gun accessories known as “bump stocks” that allow semiautomatic rifles to be fired more rapidly, taking the administration’s first concrete measures in response to a Florida school shooting last week. Trump said that he had signed a memorandum directing the Justice Department to come up with rules prohibiting “all devices that turn ...

Bloomberg US Special Counsel Robert Mueller is the latest top official to sound the alarm that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, but there’s no sign that Donald Trump is listening yet. The president’s silence has some experts worried that Trump and his administration aren’t taking the threat from Russia to this year’s elections, with Republican control of Congress at ...

Bloomberg Thousands of mourners, many clad in red, laid Morgan Tsvangirai to rest in his home village on Tuesday after the man who led Zimbabwe’s main opposition party for almost two decades and came close to toppling President Robert Mugabe died of colon cancer. Buses and trucks formed a long line on the highway near the village of Humanikwa, about ...

Bloomberg North Korean cyber-spy group “Reaper” is emerging as a global threat, conducting espionage well beyond the Korean peninsula in support of Pyongyang’s military and economic interests, FireEye Inc. said. The group, known also as APT37, in 2017 began attacking targets in Japan, Vietnam and the Middle East after having focussed on its southern neighbour for years, FireEye said in ...

Bloomberg Peru’s President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski rejected calls from opposition lawmakers for his resignation and said allegations he lied to Congress are groundless. Kuczynski said his decision to pardon former President Alberto Fujimori is the real reason why leftist lawmakers are seeking a new motion to impeach him. “I won’t resign,” he told business leaders at an event in Lima. ...

Bloomberg The US effort to put Iran in a financial vice was working. European banks were paying big fines and closing off its money flows, and severe sanctions on the country’s banking and energy sectors were forcing it to the table on a nuclear deal. But as US enforcement officials would soon discover, Iran had found a new channel for ...