SULAIMANIA / BAGHDAD / Reuters A senior Iranian military commander repeatedly warned Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq to withdraw from the oil city of Kirkuk or face an onslaught by Iraqi forces and allied Iranian-backed fighters, Kurdish officials briefed on the meetings said. Major-General Qassem Soleimani, commander of foreign operations for Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, travelled to Iraq’s Kurdistan region ...

Bloomberg Catalan separatists say Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into as he moves to quash their campaign for independence. As the government in Madrid prepares to deploy its most powerful legal weapons, three leading members of the movement in Barcelona said Rajoy isn’t equipped to achieve his goals and risks a damaging entanglement in ...

Bloomberg Austria’s president called on Sebastian Kurz, the 31-year-old likely to be the country’s next leader, to form a government committed to the European Union and human rights as he considers the nationalist Freedom Party as a potential partner. As President Alexander Van der Bellen mandated Kurz and his People’s Party to begin coalition talks, his comments hinted at the ...

It turns out that North Korea isn’t just a nuclear threat. It’s also a cyberthreat, and in some ways, this may be more frightening. Launched largely anonymously, cyberattacks can cripple essential infrastructure — power grids, financial networks, transportation systems — and inflict social disorder and political anarchy. Immediate retaliation is difficult. All this now seems plausible. Until recently, cybersecurity experts ...

The big lesson for emerging markets from the taper crisis of 2013 was this: Don’t go into a US tightening cycle without your exporters bringing home truckloads of dollars. That’s why the most recent trade figures from India are both important and encouraging. Clubbed together with Indonesia, Turkey, Russia and South Africa on Morgan Stanley’s “Fragile Five” list four summers ...

As part of its plan to complete the euro zone’s so-called banking union, the European Commission has presented a new proposal for collectively insuring bank deposits. Such a scheme is badly needed — but the new idea falls short. By leaving too much risk with national governments, it fails to address a critical weakness of the system. The commission is ...

President Donald Trump has been attacking trade for months, but believers in the value of international competition have drawn comfort from his reputation for empty talk and record of non-accomplishment. That record, along with a trade pact that has served the US economy well for decades, may be about to end. Talks on revising the North American Free Trade Agreement ...

What would America’s abortion policy be if the number of months in the gestation of a human infant were a prime number — say, seven or eleven? This thought experiment is germane to why the abortion issue has been politically toxic, and points to a path toward a less bitter debate. The House of Representatives has for a third time ...

So what if there’s a lot of China debt out there, and the pile just keeps getting bigger? Investors, at least, appear not to care. As President Xi Jinping prepares for a second five-year term, he’s already managed to convince markets that China’s deleveraging train has left the station — never mind that there’s no evidence state-owned enterprises have even ...

With Russia and China both embracing the idea of sovereign cryptocurrencies, it’s time to ask a simple question: Why is a technology threatening to decentralize money so attractive to highly centralized, authoritarian regimes? Last weekend, Argumenti i Fakti, a pro-government newspaper, quoted Russian communication minister Nikolai Nikiforov as saying president Vladimir Putin had ordered the swift launching of a “crypto-ruble.” ...