Bloomberg As many as 69 active fires are burning throughout Queensland state in Eastern Australia, authorities said. “We know at this stage we have 17 homes lost,” Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said at a press conference in Brisbane. The main area of concern is around the Stanthorpe, and particularly Applethorpe in the Granite Belt. Bruce Gunn, the state’s manager for the ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump said that he cancelled secret meetings with major Taliban leaders and the president of Afghanistan, set for Sunday at Camp David, and discontinued peace negotiations after a US soldier was killed. The sudden demise of the talks may doom direct US negotiations with the Taliban that held out the prospect of ending 18 years of combat ...

Bloomberg France’s foreign and defense ministers will meet their Russian counterparts on Monday in Moscow, a further step in President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to refresh relations with Russia. It’s the first such visit since 2014, and follows Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to Macron’s summer residence, just before the Biarritz G-7 meeting. “We’re not going to Moscow to lift the ...