Politics

  BEIJING / AP China is drafting policies to attract Taiwanese to live and work on the mainland, a government spokesman said on Wednesday, in a direct appeal to the island’s population amid a deepening political standoff between the governments in Taipei and Beijing. The Cabinet’s Taiwan Affairs Office said on Wednesday that residents of the self-governing island democracy will ...

  MOSCOW / AP A prominent rebel leader in eastern Ukraine has been killed in an explosion in his office, his associates said on Wednesday. The rebels’ Donetsk News Agency said Mikhail Tolstykh, better known under his nom de guerre Givi, died early Wednesday morning in what it described as a terrorist attack. The agency said 35-year old Tolstykh was ...

  JERUSALEM / AP A Palestinian Cabinet minister on Tuesday called on the international community to punish Israel for a contentious new law, just hours after the Israeli parliament adopted the bill to retroactively legalize thousands of West Bank settlement homes built unlawfully on private Palestinian land. The explosive law, approved by lawmakers late on Monday, is the latest in ...

  MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE / AP President Donald Trump is accusing the media of deliberately minimizing coverage of the threat posed by the IS group, saying news outlets “have their reasons” for not reporting what he described as a “genocide” underway at the hands of the group. The president did not immediately offer evidence to support his claim, made ...

  BEIJING / AP A judge in China’s top court has labeled Donald Trump an enemy “of the rule of law” over his insults directed at a US judge who temporarily blocked the president’s travel ban, saying Trump had set a poor example as head of the world’s leading democracy. Supreme People’s Court Judge He Fan’s blog post came after ...

  VILNIUS / AP Lithuania’s president says that large numbers of NATO forces being stationed in the Baltics sends a clear signal that the alliance stands “strong and united.” Dalia Grybauskaite says that Lithuania has “never before” seen “forces of such size and integrity” deployed in one of NATO’s easternmost countries close to key Russian exclave Kaliningrad. Grybauskaite spoke Tuesday ...

  BEIRUT / AP Airstrikes on a rebel-held city in Syria early Tuesday killed at least 15 people, wounded dozens more and demolished several buildings, in one of the deadliest attacks since a cease-fire went into effect last year, Syrian activists and medics said. The airstrikes hit the city of Idlib, the capital of a northwestern province of the same ...

  WARSAW / AP German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits Warsaw on Tuesday for talks with Poland’s top leaders, taking efforts to save the European Union to a country that is keen to keep as much national power as possible and fears being marginalized in a “two-speed Europe.” Her trip is “one of the most important visits in Polish-German relations since ...

  BUCHAREST / AP Romania’s government is on a high-risk mission: devise a legal and politically acceptable way to remove penalties for some types of official corruption. First, the government tried to effect the change by imposing an emergency decree without public debate. The move backfired badly, sparking massive demonstrations in the capital of Bucharest and other major cities that ...

  JAKARTA / AP Asylum seekers who have been in Indonesia for years rallied in the capital on Monday urging the UN refugee agency to speed up the process of resettling them in third countries. Dozens of people from war-torn nations including Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and Somalia called on the UNHCR to accelerate their resettlement, expressing concerns that they could ...