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Bloomberg Category 2 Hurricane Ophelia is threatening everything from farms to a golf course owned by the family of US President Donald Trump as it heads for Ireland. Ophelia’s top winds were 155 kilometres an hour by 3.40 pm London time, reaching the second level of the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. The storm, about 545 miles southwest of the Azores, is ...

Bloomberg Bitcoin’s seemingly unstoppable surge to record highs isn’t deterring competitors. Former Silicon Valley developers are working on at least two new versions of the digital currency. Basecoin is seeking to solve bitcoin’s volatility with a team of former Google Inc. coders that are building what they hope will be a more stable version of the cryptocurrency. Cypherium has former ...

WASHINGTON / Reuters The strategy that President Donald Trump has laid out to confront Iran and renegotiate a 2015 nuclear agreement requires a string of big bets to pay off in short order. The risk of failure is enormous. A hostile Congress must agree to pass legislation to toughen the terms of the accord. European allies with little appetite to ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump says those challenging the latest version of his travel ban in court can’t see a report explaining why he targeted immigrants from seven nations because it’s secret. The government on Friday told a Hawaii federal judge who demanded disclosure of the report that it’s classified and should remain off-limits as evidence in the court battle. That ...

BAGHDAD / Reuters Tension flared on Saturday in the ethnically mixed Iraqi town of Tuz Khurmatu after a clash between Kurdish and Shi’ite Turkmen political parties divided over the independence of the Kurdistan region, security sources said on Saturday. A dozen Kurdish families were displaced from the predominantly Turkmen district of Askari to Kurdish neighbourhoods of the town, after the ...

Bloomberg A key critic of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says he may be barred from travelling to Russia, where he’ll seek to build relations with one of the ailing regime’s few foreign backers. National Assembly President Julio Borges plans to leave Venezuela over the weekend to attend an international parliamentary forum in St. Petersburg and meet with Russian lawmakers. “In ...

Bloomberg Secessionist allies piled pressure on Catalan President Carles Puigdemont to formally declare independence from Spain as a deadline looms for him to clarify his stance or face being stripped of his powers by the central government in Madrid. CUP, a radical party that’s part of Puigdemont’s pro-independence coalition in the Catalan parliament, published a letter saying that the only ...

It’s time to build the wall—and, in doing so, prevent an estimated 690,000 DACA ‘dreamers’ from being deported from the United States. It’s a fair deal that could be scuttled only by intense and self-serving partisanship from the White House and the Republican and Democratic congressional leadership. As almost everyone knows by now, DACA stands for ‘Deferred Action for Childhood ...

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy showed that he doesn’t merely hold a better poker hand than Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont; he’s also the better player. Unfortunately, the Catalan separatism problem won’t be resolved by this particular game. At some point, Spain will need to offer Catalans an arrangement with which they can live. An example of a potentially acceptable arrangement ...

The general perception is that global bond yields are historically low because monetary policy has been aggressively eased. This leads to expectations that yields will rise—possibly sharply—once the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank start the process they call “balance sheet normalization.” After all, when he was Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke spent a lot of time and effort ...