Bloomberg US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Monday, meeting with the nation’s leaders leaders as the Trump administration pursues a new strategy pledging an open-ended troop commitment after more than 15 years of war. Tillerson met at Bagram Air Base with President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah before returning to Doha ...

Bloomberg A day after a landslide election victory, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged to seek a broad consensus on revising Japan’s 70-year-old pacifist constitution and reiterated there was no fixed schedule for change. Abe, 63, saw his ruling coalition retain its two-thirds majority in the 465-member lower house on Sunday, bolstering his chances of staying in office through 2021. While ...

Bloomberg Longtime Ankara Mayor Melih Gokcek is resisting pressure to resign, fashioning himself into an unlikely rebel as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan turns a sweeping purge of Turkish society against his own party. Gokcek, who’s been elected to the post in five consecutive elections since 1994, has been under pressure to step down since early this month, when Turkish media ...

Bloomberg Catalan separatists are mobilizing a human shield to block efforts by the Spanish authorities to take control of the breakaway region as both sides prepare to escalate the political conflict. Groups will concentrate their activists around the regional government’s headquarters in Barcelona’s Gothic quarter and the nearby parliament building, according to two people familiar with the plans, asking not ...

Bloomberg Twenty-eight years after Poland led eastern Europe’s break with communism and its embrace of western-style democracy, the country’s human rights commissioner is sounding the alarm with a warning that the European Union’s largest eastern nation is on a road that leads back to authoritarian rule. The latest plan by President Andrzej Duda and the ruling party to revamp the ...

SINGAPORE / Reuters Global liquefied natural gas (LNG) markets will remain oversupplied into the 2020s due to a surge in production, although soaring demand especially from China may tighten the market earlier than expected, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Monday. “We will see massive amounts of new LNG capacity coming to the market … so we will probably ...

Bloomberg Saudi Arabia is working on a plan to allow non-resident foreign investors to own strategic stakes in listed companies as the kingdom overhauls its economy. The Capital Market Authority and the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority signed a memorandum to set up a framework to allow foreigners to own 10 percent or more of publicly traded companies and to ...

SINGAPORE / Reuters US liquefied natural gas (LNG) project developer Tellurian Inc is offering billions of dollars in equity in its Driftwood project in Louisiana to make it more attractive for buyers, a senior company official said on Monday. Tellurian is offering 60 percent to 75 percent equity interest in Driftwood Holdings, which comprises Tellurian’s upstream company, its pipeline and ...

Bloomberg Oil extended gains as OPEC and its allies reiterated that all options are open to re-balance the market. December futures increased as much as 0.8 percent in New York. OPEC and its partners including Russia achieved a record-high level of compliance to output cuts during September, according to a statement from the committee responsible for monitoring the agreement. In ...

Bloomberg The crude market may be underestimating China’s oil demand. Storage data gathered by satellite implies the amount of crude China is putting into storage is below what can be extrapolated from the nation’s customs and production data, Barclays Plc analysts wrote in a note. That means it may be consuming more oil than official data indicate and that the ...