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Bloomberg Iceland’s hope of finding oil offshore its coast is fading after China and Norway decided to back out of the island nation’s only remaining exploration license. Cnooc Ltd., China’s state-controlled producer, and Petoro AS, Norway’s state-owned oil company, decided to relinquish their interest in the license, Iceland’s National Energy Authority said in a statement. Their junior partner, Eykon Energy ...

Bloomberg Japan’s thermal coal imports rose to a record last year and liquefied natural gas (LNG) purchases climbed for the first time in three years, as the fuels filled the gap in power generation left by the country’s slow restart of its nuclear power plants. The figures underscore the country’s continued reliance on imported fossil fuels for power generation, as ...

Bloomberg Russia should stop blocking United Nations efforts to investigate alleged violations of a 2013 accord to remove chemical weapons from Syria, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said. As the party ultimately responsible for chemical weapons use by the Syrian regime, Russia should at least abstain during UN Security Council votes, Tillerson said in Paris at the end of ...

Bloomberg Twin car-bombings killed at least 26 people outside a mosque in the Libyan city of Benghazi, calling into question the ability to stabilise a divided nation struggling to make peace. The attack is the deadliest to hit Libya’s second-largest city in almost two years and undercuts militia leader Khalifa Haftar’s claim to have vanquished militant groups in the nation’s ...

Bloomberg Britain will stay closely aligned to the European Union’s regulatory regime after it leaves the bloc but wants the freedom to go its own way if it chooses in future, Brexit Secretary David Davis has said. During negotiations with the EU, the UK will aim to secure the power to diverge from the bloc’s rules on financial services and ...

Bloomberg The ground-based system of interceptors that the US would use to defend the mainland and Hawaii against a threatened North Korean attack is improving after past setbacks, the Pentagon’s testing office said in a new report. The $36 billion system “demonstrated the capability to defend the US homeland from a small number” of intermediate range or intercontinental ballistic missiles ...

Bloomberg Venezuela appears set to hold presidential elections before the end of April, a plan abruptly announced after the European Union blacklisted seven key allies of President Nicolas Maduro. Diosdado Cabello, second-in-command of the ruling socialist party and among those sanctioned, announced the vote in the South America nation’s all-powerful constituent assembly. The short time before the vote will wrong-foot ...

Bloomberg Kenyan Attorney General Githu Muigai filed a High Court petition seeking to block the opposition from swearing in Raila Odinga as the so-called people’s president. Muigai asked the court to rule as illegal motions that were passed by 15 county assemblies backing the creation of constituent assemblies, which plan to declare Odinga as the nati-on’s leader on January 30, ...

It seems like only yesterday that journalism faced existential challenges from technology platforms that helped anyone publish whatever they wanted, took over the distribution of news, and usurped the advertising market with promises of precise targeting. It turns out that the news profession can be quite successful at repelling those challenges. The enemy is in retreat; the news business just ...

OK, the shutdown is over. But no one should be fooled into thinking that this settles the big questions facing the country. Even if (a big ‘if’) the immigration laws are overhauled and the nearly 700,000 ‘Dreamers’ stay in the United States, at least three large issues remain that neither party has yet had the courage to confront. Here they ...