WASHINGTON / Reuters A senior US general accused Russia of playing a destabilising role in Syria and acting as “both arsonist and firefighter,” as a brief truce unilaterally declared by Moscow in the eastern Ghouta region collapsed. The United States and Russia have been on different sides of the seven-year-old war, with Moscow heavily backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad whose ...

Bloomberg Among the enduring curiosities of Donald Trump’s presidential run was his announcement that campaign chairman Paul Manafort was an unpaid volunteer. Why would a longtime political fixer do that? That question has grown more persistent thanks to successive indictments of Manafort by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller, each documenting in finer detail Manafort’s allegedly fraudulent scramble for cash just ...

Bloomberg Afghan President Ashraf Ghani presented his most comprehensive peace plan to the Taliban in a bid to bring them to the negotiating table and end the nation’s near 17-year war. Ghani said he would recognize the Taliban as a political group and would initiate talks if they agreed to a cease-fire, he told delegates at a peace conference in ...