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Bloomberg Pro-government forces pounded the rebel-held district of eastern Ghouta outside the Syrian capital Damascus, in a surge of violence that a war monitor said had killed at least 250 people since Sunday night. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it was the highest 48-hour death toll in the Syria conflict since a 2013 chemical attack on eastern ...

Bloomberg US Vice President Mike Pence was willing to meet with Kim Jong Un’s envoys earlier this month during the Winter Olympics in South Korea, but the North Koreans backed out, the Trump administration said. “North Korea dangled a meeting in hopes of the vice president softening his message, which would have ceded the world stage for their propaganda during ...

Bloomberg Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called President Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem a “dangerous” development in a speech before the United Nations, then walked out before US envoy Nikki Haley retorted that “we will not chase after you.” The encounter before the Security Council reflected the tensions in US-Palestinian relations since Trump’s declaration ...

Bloomberg Venezuela’s main opposition parties say they will shun this year’s presidential elections, claiming the vote has been rigged to guarantee a victory for President Nicolas Maduro. Justice First, the country’s largest opposition party, announced that it would not be participating in April 22 elections. “We won’t help out a dictatorship that only cares about maintaining power on the backs ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump ordered a ban on gun accessories known as “bump stocks” that allow semiautomatic rifles to be fired more rapidly, taking the administration’s first concrete measures in response to a Florida school shooting last week. Trump said that he had signed a memorandum directing the Justice Department to come up with rules prohibiting “all devices that turn ...

Perhaps the most baffling aspect of the European Commission’s ruling against Google last year, which included a 2.42 billion euro ($3 billion) fine, is that the remedial action Google was allowed to take didn’t make the market in question, shopping searches, any fairer or any more accessible to smaller players than it was before the ruling. Now there’s a reason ...

Look at two important numbers in Walmart Inc.’s earnings report on Tuesday, and you could draw different conclusions about the retailer’s momentum. Its closely watched US comparable sales rose 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier — strong growth after a third quarter that saw the best growth on this measure in eight years. That data point ...

Private-equity firms have many ways of making money, but PAG Holdings Ltd. may have found a unique model in its loan to HNA Group Co. The cash-strapped Chinese conglomerate has pledged most of its stake in a Hong Kong-listed unit in exchange for funds. The size of the advance wasn’t disclosed, but the 1.39 billion shares in Hong Kong International ...

President Donald Trump’s latest proposal to eviscerate the State Department’s budget may already be dead on arrival in Congress. It’s nonetheless a reminder of how the administration’s failure to take diplomacy seriously is undermining its own strategic goals. Barely two months after warning in its new National Security Strategy of ‘growing political, economic and military competitions,’ the White House delivered ...

For years, economists and policymakers have hailed the propensity of Chinese to save. Among other things, they’ve pointed to low household debt as reason not to fear a financial crash in the world’s second-biggest economy. Now, though, one of China’s greatest economic strengths is becoming a crucial weakness. Over the past two weeks, as they’ve held their annual work meetings, ...