Politics

BAGHDAD / Reuters Iraqi forces backed by Shi’ite paramilitaries began fighting house-by-house in the one town left to take from IS before they can declare complete victory over the group’s former stronghold of Tal Afar, military commanders said. Hundreds of battle-hardened IS militants are defending al-Ayadiya, a small town outside Tal Afar which itself is about 80 km (50 miles) ...

Bloomberg ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ US President Donald Trump said that “all options” are under consideration in response to North Korea firing an unidentified ballistic missile over Japan on Tuesday as Kim Jong Un’s latest provocation rattled markets. “The world has received North Korea’s latest message loud and clear: this regime has signaled its contempt for its neighbors, for all members of the ...

Bloomberg It keeps getting deeper for Houston, the epicenter of the US oil industry. As floods inundated the nation’s fourth-largest city on Monday, with more than a foot of rain likely still to come through Friday, predictions of damage ranged as high as $100 billion. Wall Street and Washington braced for the repercussions of the costliest US natural disaster since ...

BANGKOK / Reuters Thailand has no immediate plan to revoke the passports of former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, the foreign minister said on Tuesday, after she fled the country last week ahead of a court ruling in a negligence case. Yingluck, 50, was elected Thailand’s first female prime minister in 2011 and is the sister of ousted former prime minister ...

Bloomberg Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi has set himself a possibly insurmountable challenge. He intends to work with arch-rival India to achieve peace across South Asia. It’s likely to be a tall order for Abbasi considering the two nuclear-armed nations haven’t had high-level dialogue for almost two years and given the institutional opposition of Pakistan’s military against reconciliation ...

Bloomberg Malaysia’s opposition alliance said it won’t cooperate with the country’s largest Islamic party at the next elections, raising the possibility of multiple-cornered fights that could benefit the ruling coalition. Pakatan Harapan is working on a strategy to avoid three-cornered contests, it said in a statement on Tuesday, without elaborating. The alliance is made up of four parties. The Islamic ...

Bloomberg ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ US President Donald Trump’s strategy for the nation’s longest-running war in Afghanistan will meet the same fate as the plans of his predecessors, according to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi. Failure. “From day one we have been saying very clearly the military strategy in Afghanistan has not worked and it will not work,” Abbasi, who took over ...

BEIRUT / Reuters The Syrian army and Hezbollah on Monday prepared to escort IS fighters to eastern Syria from their enclave on the border with Lebanon under an agreement following a week-long offensive against the extremist group. It will end any Sunni militant presence on the border, an important goal for Lebanon and the Shi’ite Hezbollah group, and is the ...

BANGKOK / Reuters Thailand’s defence minister on Monday said he did not know the whereabouts of former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, days after she failed to show up for a verdict in her trial for negligence at which she faced up to 10 years in prison. Yingluck, whose government was ousted in a 2014 coup, fled via Singapore, sources in ...

Bloomberg Anna Kinberg Batra stepped down as leader of Sweden’s biggest opposition party as the center-right bloc finds itself in disarray one year ahead of elections in the largest Nordic economy. Kinberg Batra resigned amid growing internal discontent over her stewardship and falling support in public opinion polls. Only 6 percent of all voters and a third of her party’s ...