Politics

BEIRUT / DAMASCUS / Reuters Three car bombs exploded in Damascus on Sunday, state media said, killing at least seven people in the first suicide bombings in the Syrian capital since extremists attacked in March. A police officer at the scene of one of the blasts put the death toll there at seven with 13 more people wounded. The Syrian ...

DIYARBAKIR / Reuters Kurdish militants shot and killed two officials from the ruling AK Party in southeast Turkey over the weekend, while the Turkish military killed more than a dozen militants in air strikes, state authorities said on Sunday. Orhan Mercan, the AKP’s deputy head in the Lice district of Diyarbakir province, was shot in front of his home on ...

Reuters President Bashar Al Assad has appeared on the Syrian currency for the first time, his portrait printed on a new 2,000-pound banknote that went into circulation on Sunday. Central bank governor Duraid Durgham said the 2,000-pound note was one of several new notes printed years ago but the decision to put it into circulation was delayed “due to the ...

Bloomberg South African President Jacob Zuma lashed out at critics within his African National Congress, saying they’re threatening the ruling party’s hold on power. “Factionalism is a cancer that must be rooted out,” Zuma, 75, said Friday in his opening address to a six-day ANC conference in Johannesburg that will discuss issues ranging from land reform and ownership of the ...

Bloomberg President Xi Jinping warned a divided Hong Kong that challenges to China’s rule wouldn’t be tolerated and said the city’s leaders must find new ways to profit from Chinese economic clout. Xi’s stern speech on Saturday — at a ceremony in which he swore in Carrie Lam, 60, as Hong Kong’s first female chief executive — capped a three-day ...

Bloomberg Terrorism is entrenched in Southeast Asia and will only worsen as IS’s fortunes fade and foreign fighters skilled in bomb making and hijacking return from the Middle East, Singapore’s defense minister said. “When we talk about endemic threats we usually refer to threats like dengue or tuberculosis, which means that it’s here to stay, that despite years of effort ...

Bloomberg UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s inflexible position in negotiations to leave the European Union has made the task more difficult for Brexit Secretary David Davis, a former aide said in a BBC interview. James Chapman, who was Davis’s chief of staff until last month, said May’s ‘absolutist’ stance on ending the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice over ...

Bloomberg Former US President Barack Obama pointed to the importance of the Paris climate accord while criticizing Donald Trump for pulling the world’s biggest economy out of the pact. Trump said last month he would withdraw from the pact and seek to negotiate a better deal, in a move that attracted widespread criticism from counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. The ...

Bloomberg A Tokyo election this weekend gives Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a chance to stop the bleeding from a series of recent scandals that hurt his popularity. Polls indicate that his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) risks losing its position as the largest party in the capital’s assembly on Sunday to a group led by Governor Yuriko Koike, who resigned ...

Bloomberg Qatar will remain cut off from its neighbours unless its leaders meet the full demands of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, a senior Saudi official said, even as the top US diplomat continued efforts towards a negotiated settlement. “We made our point, we took our steps and it’s up to the Qataris to amend their behaviour,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel ...