Politics

Bloomberg South Africa’s top court found that parliament failed to hold President Jacob Zuma to account for his role in a scandal involving the misuse of public funds on his private home and ordered it to draft rules governing the circumstances under which he could be removed from office. “The assembly did not hold the president to account as was ...

Bloomberg Almost two dozen government troops were killed in South Sudan during fighting, just a day after a cease-fire agreement came into effect, according to the main rebel group. The nation’s army and rebels last week agreed to cease hostilities from midnight December 24, in a bid to end three years of violence that’s claimed tens of thousands of lives ...

Bloomberg Russia plans to limit the number of airbases the US can use to launch reconnaissance flights under the Open Skies Treaty, in a fresh sign of its deteriorating relationship with Washington. The restrictions will be introduced Jan. 1 in response to US measures to limit Russian military flights in its airspace, said Georgiy Borisenko, head of the Foreign Ministry’s ...

Bloomberg A secessionist push in Cameroon’s English-speaking regions is on the brink of a full-blown revolt, threatening political stability in a country ruled by one of Africa’s longest-ser-ving leaders. Following a crackdown on independence supporters who tried to raise flags on government buildings in the central African nation’s English-speaking regions in October, at least 16 members of the security forces ...

Bloomberg The leader of Japan’s main opposition party said Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is treating the nation’s 70-year-old pacifist constitution as a “toy” in an effort to define his own political legacy. “He wants to change it in whatever way he can so that he can go down in history,” Yukio Edano, head of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, ...

Bloomberg China’s leading policy makers plan to discuss next month a proposal to amend the national constitution for the first time since 2004, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The decision was made on Wednesday at a Politburo meeting headed by President Xi Jinping, according to the report. It provided no details on the possible change to the constitution, which ...

Bloomberg President Vladimir Putin is using the threat of additional US sanctions to encourage wealthy Russians to repatriate some of their overseas assets, which exceed $1 trillion by one estimate. Putin told lawmakers that a new capital amnesty program was needed “given the foreign restrictions, which instead of lessening are now worsening,” according to a transcript posted on the Kremlin’s ...

Bloomberg Syrian rebel groups rejected Russia’s planned Sochi conference on Syria, saying Moscow was seeking to bypass a UN-based Geneva peace process and blam- ing Russia for committing war crimes in the wartorn country. In a statement by around 40 rebel groups who include some of the military factions who participated in earlier rounds of Geneva peace talks, they said ...

Bloomberg China hosted top diplomats from Afghanistan and Pakistan on Tuesday in a bid to mediate a long-simmering conflict between the neighboring countries. Afghan Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani and Pakistan Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif joined their Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Tuesday to discuss possible economic and security cooperation. The first trilateral minister-level dialogue in Beijing comes as China expands ...

Bloomberg Almost a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, the border wall he passionately promoted throughout his election campaign amounts to eight prototypes, no more than 30 feet long each, sitting in a desert outside San Diego. No funding has been appropriated by Congress to advance the project beyond the testing phase. There’s no final design. And despite Trump’s rallying cry ...