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Turkey sees risk of Kurds’ independence vote

Bloomberg Turkey sees a real risk that Iraqi Kurds will press ahead with an independence referendum, according to an adviser to the president, a move that would defy almost unanimous opposition among neighboring states and surprise the many observers who foresee a deal with Baghdad emerging. The semi-autonomous area in the north of Iraq might create “de facto” sovereignty by ...

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Moon warns N Korea against provocation during drills

Bloomberg South Korean President Moon Jae-in warned North Korea not to use his nation’s latest round of annual military drills with the US as an excuse for any further provocations. The drills “are not aimed at raising military tensions on the Korean peninsula at all,” Moon said in a Cabinet meeting on Monday. “North Korea should never distort our efforts ...

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CEOs are fleeing from Trump because he’s useless to them

One by one, some of the most important people in corporate America lined up to criticize the president of the United States. Though many of them didn’t utter Donald Trump’s name, they didn’t need to. Everyone knew they were talking about Trump’s repugnant “both-sides-are-bad” response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend. “What we saw there was domestic ...

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Protest is legal, intimidation is not

Morally, the only proper reaction to last weekend’s events in Charlottesville, Virginia, is outrage. Legally, the analysis has to be more nuanced. To help prevent further violence while preserving freedom of speech, we need to distinguish three categories, all of which seem to have been in play in Charlottesville: terrorism, peaceful protest and provocative action aimed at producing street violence. ...

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Even EU regulators can’t prevent food scandals

Remember that Chinese pet food, laced with melamine, that caused kidney failure in the family European pooch? The horse meat passed off as beef burgers in Britain? Now tainted Dutch eggs are making diners uneasy. There’s something especially creepy about recurring food scandals, even the ones that don’t pose a huge threat to public health. The latest, involving millions of ...

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Trump’s cabinet must put country above president

The exodus of chief executive officers from two of President Donald Trump’s advisory councils led him to disband the panels. That’s no great loss: The councils mostly served political rather than policy purposes. But for those who serve in the highest ranks of government, the issue is different, and quitting is not the answer. It’s hard to fault anyone for ...

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The dubious demolition policy Israel can’t quit

On April 6, Israeli army Sargent Elchai Taharlev, 20, was standing by a bus stop in the West Bank, when a car driven by a Palestinian purposely veered off the road and killed him. Two months later, Hadas Malka, 23, was standing guard with the border police outside the Old City of Jerusalem when she was killed by three Palestinians ...

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Emmanuel Macron’s first stab at reforming French economy is rolling along

It’s vacation time in France, and the fleets of buses plying the nation’s highways suggest President Emmanuel Macron’s earliest effort to shake up the economy is catching on. Cheaper and less glamorous than France’s celebrated high-speed trains, buses are hauling ever more travellers. That’s after Macron, then the economy minister, pushed through a law two years ago allowing passenger buses ...

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Some US ex-spies don’t buy the Russia story

In 2003, when a number of former intelligence professionals formed a group to protest the way intelligence was bent to accuse Iraq of producing weapons of mass destruction, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a sympathetic column quoting the group’s members. In 2017, you won’t read about this same group’s latest campaign in the big US newspapers. The Veteran ...

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