Politics

Bloomberg An advance team for North Korea arrived in Seoul on Sunday as Pyongyang reversed a decision to cancel the visit, a day after signing an agreement with the South to march under a unified flag at next month’s Winter Olympics. North and South Korea solidified plans to march together and agreed to compete with a joint wom-en’s ice hockey ...

Bloomberg China’s National Defense Ministry said the US should abandon a “Cold War” mindset and view Chinese national security and military efforts “rationally and objectively.” The instigators of militarisation of the South China Sea are “other countries” that don’t seem to want to see peace in the region and are using the banner of “navigational freedom” to undertake military activities ...

Bloomberg South Africa’s ruling party is intensifying pressure on Presid-ent Jacob Zuma to step down and allow his deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, to accelerate his efforts to stamp out corruption and restore investor confidence in the economy. The African National Congress’s top leadership decided at a meeting that Zuma, 75, must leave office but didn’t set a deadline for his exit, ...

BAGHDAD / Reuters Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi met with the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani for the first time since conflict broke out over a Kurdish independence referendum, officials said. The Kurdish referendum on Sept. 25, which produced an overwhelming ‘yes’ for independence, angered Baghdad and Iraq’s neighbours Turkey and Iran, which have their own restive Kurdish ...

Bloomberg The US government officially entered a partial shutdown on Saturday as Senate Democrats and a handful of Republicans blocked a bill to fund the government after the two parties failed to break their deadlock over immigration. The shutdown began one year from the day President Donald Trump was inaugurated. Trump and his aides were typically defiant, with his press ...

Bloomberg South Korea has officially asked North Korea to explain why it cancelled dispatching an advance team to the South to prepare for concerts during the yeongchang Winter Olympics, according to Yonhap. Pyongyang suddenly withdrew an earlier offer to send an advance team over the weekend to South Korea to check performance venues. The team, led by Hyon Song Wol, ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration accelerated its timetable for moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, weighing a plan to retrofit the existing consulate there by the end of 2019 in order to fulfill a key campaign pledge by the president. Building a new embassy would have taken too long and is “cost-prohibitive” so “we’re going to retrofit an existing facility,” Steve ...

Bloomberg Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition plans face a make-or-break vote this weekend as the Social Democrats decide whether to help usher in her fourth term or walk away from government and risk pushing Europe’s biggest economy further into political uncertainty. Germany’s oldest political party is split over its future direction, and those divisions will play out at a national convention ...

Bloomberg The leadership of South Africa’s ruling party decided that President Jacob Zuma must leave office but didn’t set a time-frame for his exit, according to six senior party officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The newly-elected top six leaders of the party will manage the transition that will concentrate power in the hands of his deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, ...

UNITED NATIONS / Reuters Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Iran nuclear deal cannot survive if the United States pulls out of the agreement. US President Donald Trump said a week ago that European allies and Congress have to work with him to fix “the disastrous flaws” in the nuclear pact or face a US exit. Trump wants it ...