US foreign secretary Antony Blinken flies to Beijing in effort to sensibly manage tenuous US-PRC relations
In its readout of the Blinken-Qin phone call, China’s foreign ministry said Qin urged the United States to respect “China’s core concerns” such as the issue of Taiwan’s self-rule, “stop interfering in China’s internal affairs, and stop harming China’s sovereignty, security and development interests in the name of competition.”
Conservationists in Kenya shift focus on pastoralist women in to curb human-wildlife conflicts
The 60 women from the Maasai community graduated this week after their first year of vocational training. They will now learn how to establish a business over 12 months and complete the programme with a year of mentorship.
Killer sanctions: How US during Trump regime shrank Iran’s accessible foreign reserves from $122.5b to $4b
The problem created by sanctions, according to the company, is less an unwillingness to do business with Iran over legal fears than an inability of Iranian officials to access their own foreign currency reserves to make payments. The sanctions, while not eliminating Iran’s foreign reserves, have frozen Iran’s access to them, sending the country’s accessible reserves from $122.5 billion down to a mere $4 billion between 2018 and 2020, according to International Monetary Fund figures.
Punitive sanctions slapped on Tehran by US are killing Iranian children in numbers as banks, drug makers keep off the Gulf nation
While the US has given assurances that humanitarian trade with Iran will be exempted from sanctions, the lawsuit, which is currently pending appeal after being dismissed, alleges that the large-scale sanctioning of Iran’s banking sector has created a situation in which foreign companies are either unwilling or unable to do any trade with Iran at all.
Probe into US President Biden and son Hunter’s criminal bribery schemes in Ukraine has energised Trump to hem in his successor
The secrecy the FBI says is necessary to protect sources can also obscure the credibility of the source. Still, top Republicans are now citing exactly the kind of evidence – a confidential human source relaying the unverified allegations of a Ukrainian business executive – that they dismissed as unreliable when it came to Trump and the dossier.
Now FBI turns searchlight on US President Biden and son Hunter’s alleged criminal bribery scheme in Ukraine
The idea that the charge has been proven is preposterous, but readers looking for details on the case have little place to turn outside of the conservative news outlets that have been making such claims. Yet if the FBI is telling Congress that it hasn’t disproved the allegation, it does raise serious questions: What exactly are the Bidens accused of doing? What is this document? And what has the FBI done to test the veracity of that evidence?
Eight Kenyan security officers killed by Somali terror group that’s resumed cross border attacks
Kenya first sent troops into Somalia in 2011 to combat the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militants and is now a major contributor of troops to an African Union military operation against the group. But it has suffered a string of retaliatory assaults, including a bloody siege at the Westgate mall in Nairobi in 2013 that cost 67 lives and an attack on Garissa University in 2015 that killed 148 people
Republicans now allege ‘weaponisation’ of justice system to lock Trump out of US presidential race
The mounting legal jeopardy Trump finds himself in has quickly become a political rallying cry for the Republicans, many of whom acknowledged they had not fully read the 49-page federal indictment but are rushing to stand by the indicted former president, adopting his grievances against the federal justice system as their own.
Privileges committee finds former British PM Boris Johnson guilty of lying, bans him from parliamentary premises
The Privileges Committee consequently recommended a 90-day suspension, which would have paved the way for a by-election for the former prime minister if he had not quit the Commons in anticipation. However, his resignation means he will escape that punishment, the committee recommended that he should not receive the pass granting access to Parliament which is normally given to former MPs.
Sunset in Uganda: Museveni’s ‘forever’ cult that made him the omni-god Ugandans revere and revile is coming to an end
Collectively, Uganda is endangered by a possible absence of the president from the politico-military stage, over which he has had a firm grip for decades. It is worrying many Ugandans are mired in worship attachment to the President. They need liberation, but who will liberate them.
