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Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (AFP) by Robbie Corey-Boulet Chinese President Xi Jinping touched down in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday for a visit that is likely to focus on energy ties but also follows months of tensions with the United States. Xi, recently reanointed as leader of the world’s second biggest economy, arrived in the capital Riyadh, Chinese and Saudi state media said, for a three-day visit that will include talks with the Saudi rulers and […]
Brussels, Belgium (AFP) The EU on Wednesday escalated disputes with China to the WTO, requesting panels be assembled to hear cases over trade restrictions on Lithuania and on legal recourses for EU patent holders. “In both cases, the Chinese measures are highly damaging to European businesses” and, in the Lithuania case, “impact the functioning of the EU internal market,” the European Commission said in a statement. China is the European Union’s biggest trading partner, […]
Beijing, China (AFP) China announced Wednesday a nationwide loosening of its hardline Covid restrictions that had hammered the world’s second biggest economy and ignited rare protests against the ruling Communist Party. The new rules are a major relaxation of President Xi Jinping’s signature zero-Covid policy, three years into the pandemic and long after the rest of the world had largely learnt to live with the virus. However, with vaccination rates remaining low among China’s elderly […]
Washington, United States (AFP) by Camille CAMDESSUS US President Joe Biden celebrated the strengthening of his party’s majority in the Senate on Tuesday after Democrat Raphael Warnock was declared the winner of a runoff election in Georgia. The incumbent senator defeated Republican Herschel Walker, a former football star and protege of former president Donald Trump, according to projections by television networks. Warnock’s win confirms the very slim Democratic majority — 51 to 49 — in the […]
by Robbie Corey-Boulet Agence France-Presse RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AFP) — Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday for three days of meetings with regional leaders likely focused on energy. The overseas trip is only Xi’s third since the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, and his first to Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest crude oil exporter, since 2016. It will feature bilateral meetings with Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, […]
by Camille CAMDESSUS Agence France-Presse WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Choosing between a pastor and a former football star, voters in Georgia will decide Tuesday on a seat in the US Senate in an election with high stakes for Joe Biden’s presidency. Democratic senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger Herschel Walker, who is backed by former president Donald Trump, will clash in a hotly contested runoff after neither of the African American candidates earned […]
BEIJING, China (AFP) — Sirens will wail across China as the country comes to a standstill Tuesday during a public memorial service for former leader Jiang Zemin, who died last week at the age of 96. Jiang oversaw a transformational era from the late 1980s into the new millennium, taking power in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and leading China towards its emergence as a powerhouse on the global stage. But […]
Tokyo, Japan (AFP) Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida instructed ministers on Monday to boost the country’s defence budget by 56 percent over the next five years to $318 billion. The government is overhauling its defence and security strategies in response to regional threats from nuclear-armed North Korea and an increasingly assertive China. Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada said Kishida told him that “the size of the medium-term defence programme for the next five years, which is […]
Seoul, South Korea (AFP) South Korea on Saturday arrested a former national security chief on suspicion of covering up events surrounding the 2020 murder of a fisheries official by Pyongyang. President Yoon Suk-yeol is expanding an inquiry into the highly politicised case following accusations that his predecessor mishandled the probe to curry favour with North Korea. Suh Hoon is the first top official from the presidential office of former leader Moon Jae-in to be arrested over […]
Boston, United States (AFP) US President Joe Biden met briefly Friday with Britain’s Prince William in Boston where the two quickly hit on the most British of conversation topics — the bad weather. As the heir to Britain’s throne strode up outside the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum without an overcoat, Biden remarked that it was “freezing.” Prince William chuckled and later could be heard informing the president that “when we got in […]
Washington, United States (AFP) US President Joe Biden signed into law Friday a rare intervention by Congress forcing freight rail unions to accept a salary deal, avoiding a possibly devastating strike — but putting the pro-union Democrat in an awkward political position. Biden signed the law in a brief White House ceremony only a week before unions who had rejected the deal were expected to have gone on strike, threatening crucial supply chains across the […]
Istanbul, Turkey (AFP) by Fulya OZERKAN A new law gives Turkey fresh ammunition to censor the media and silence dissent ahead of elections in which President Recep Tayyip Erdogan plans to prolong his two decades in office, journalists and activists say. Since 2014, when Erdogan became president, tens of thousands of people, from high-school teens to a former Miss Turkey have been prosecuted under a long-standing law that criminalises insulting the president. The law, passed […]
