Politics

SULAIMANIA / BAGHDAD / Reuters A senior Iranian military commander repeatedly warned Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq to withdraw from the oil city of Kirkuk or face an onslaught by Iraqi forces and allied Iranian-backed fighters, Kurdish officials briefed on the meetings said. Major-General Qassem Soleimani, commander of foreign operations for Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, travelled to Iraq’s Kurdistan region ...

Bloomberg Catalan separatists say Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into as he moves to quash their campaign for independence. As the government in Madrid prepares to deploy its most powerful legal weapons, three leading members of the movement in Barcelona said Rajoy isn’t equipped to achieve his goals and risks a damaging entanglement in ...

Bloomberg Austria’s president called on Sebastian Kurz, the 31-year-old likely to be the country’s next leader, to form a government committed to the European Union and human rights as he considers the nationalist Freedom Party as a potential partner. As President Alexander Van der Bellen mandated Kurz and his People’s Party to begin coalition talks, his comments hinted at the ...

Bloomberg President Xi Jinping warned of “severe” challenges while laying out a road map to turn China into a leading global power by 2050, as he kicked off a twice-a-decade party gathering expected to cement his influence into the next decade. In a speech that ran for more than three hours on Wednesday, Xi declared victory over “many difficult, long ...

Bloomberg Iraqi forces pressed their campaign to retake oil-rich territory from Kurdish fighters, widening a conflict that has roiled markets and could stoke tensions outside the country’s borders. Militiamen in the Popular Mobilization Forces operating alongside federal government troops captured the town of Sinjar without resistance, Rayan Al-Kildani, a spokesman, said. “The next step is to continue imposing security, order, ...

Bloomberg The top US military commander in the Pacific warned the situation in North Korea is a “recipe for disaster,” as the region prepares for Donald Trump’s first visit to the region as president. Admiral Harry Harris, head of the US Pacific Command, said in a speech in Singapore that China must do more to pressure its neighbor and ally ...

Bloomberg Angela Merkel is facing pressure to put her stamp on Germany’s next government as the chancellor begins talks on uniting four disparate parties into a coalition to govern Europe’s biggest economy. Almost a month after her Christian Democratic-led bloc emerged weakened from a national election, Merkel meets separately with the pro-market Free Democratic Party and the Greens on Wednesday ...

Bloomberg South African President Jacob Zuma’s decision to fire communist party leader Blade Nzimande from his cabinet is widening a rift with two of the African National Congress’s closest allies before a key leadership conference in December. In dismissing Nzimande as higher education minister, Zuma, 75, targeted the communist party, which along with the main labor confederation, Cosatu, has said ...

Bloomberg North Korea warned that a nuclear war “may break out any moment” as the US and South Korea began one of the largest joint naval drills off both the east and west coasts of the peninsula. Kim In Ryong, North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said that his nation had become a “full-fledged nuclear power which possesses ...

BAGHDAD / KIRKUK / Reuters The Baghdad government recaptured territory across the breadth of northern Iraq from Kurds on Tuesday, widening a sudden and dramatic campaign that has shifted the balance of power in the country almost overnight. In the second day of a lightning government campaign to take back towns and countryside from forces of the Kurdish autonomous region, ...