Politics

BAGHDAD / Reuters France will help reconstruction and reconciliation efforts in Iraq as it emerges from a war against IS, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said after talks with Iraqi officials in Baghdad. France is a main partner in the US-led coalition helping Baghdad fight the militants who seized parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. The coalition provided ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump pardoned former Arizona county sheriff Joe Arpaio, using his first act of presidential clemency to give reprieve to a political supporter known — and criminally convicted — for his tough crackdown on illegal immigration. “Sheriff Joe Arpaio is now eighty-five years old, and after more than fifty years of admirable service to our Nation, he is ...

Bloomberg Angola’s main opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or Unita, said that provisional results that gave the ruling party a majority of the votes in an election earlier this week weren’t valid. “The country doesn’t yet have valid electoral results,” Isaias Samakuva, the leader of Unita, said at a press conference in Viana, on ...

Bloomberg Harvey became the strongest hurricane to hit Texas in more than 50 years, making landfall in the heart of the US energy sector and bringing the danger of a life-threatening storm surge. Harvey came ashore as a Category 4 storm between Port Aransas and Port O’Connor, Texas, packing gusts strong enough to strip the roof off houses and menacing ...

Bloomberg President Nicolas Maduro summoned holders of Venezuelan bonds to a meeting with Economy Minister Ramon Lobo next week to discuss the effects of US sanctions aimed at sovereign and state oil company debt. US-based holders of Venezuela bonds will be hurt the most by the sanctions, Maduro said. President Donald Trump “burned the bonds in their hands” by trying ...

Bloomberg German Social Democratic challenger Martin Schulz returned to his European Union roots in a speech to several thousand supporters in Frankfurt, accusing Angela Merkel of souring relations with EU allies and being unacceptably vague on plans for euro-area integration. Speaking on the German financial capital’s Roemerberg square in the shadow of the financial capital’s medieval city hall, the former ...

Bloomberg North Korea fired three short-range ballistic missiles on Saturday morning, a move that came after Kim Jong Un’s regime strongly criticized US-South Korea joint military drills. US Pacific Command said afternoon that two of the missiles flew 250 kilometers (155 miles), clarifying an earlier statement that an initial assessment had indicated they failed in flight. The other appeared to ...

TAL AFAR / Reuters Iraqi forces have dislodged IS from 70 percent of Tal Afar, a stronghold of the militants in northwestern Iraq, including its central citadel neighborhood, officials and military commanders said on Saturday. “Seventy percent of the city has been liberated…. God willing, the remaining part will be liberated soon,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said at a ...

UNITED NATIONS / Reuters US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley pressed the International Atomic Energy Agency to seek access to Iranian military bases to ensure that they are not concealing activities banned by the 2015 nuclear deal. “I have good confidence in the IAEA, but they are dealing with a country that has a clear history of lying ...

DUBAI / Reuters An air raid struck a building in Yemen’s capital, killing at least 12 people, six of them children, when an adjacent apartment block collapsed, residents said. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) denounced the loss of life as outrageous and put the death toll in the early morning attack on the Faj Attan area of ...