North Korea’s Ambassador to the United Nations Kim Song held a press conference at U.N. headquarters on Tuesday in which he demanded the return of the Wise Honest, a cargo vessel seized by the United States for shipping coal in violation of U.S. and U.N. sanctions.
Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said on Tuesday his country is prepared to face U.S. sanctions for proceeding with its controversial purchase of Russian S-400 surface-to-air missiles while continuing to argue Turkey is not threatening American or NATO security by acquiring the Russian weapons.
Iranian officials responded with anger and derision to President Donald Trump’s Sunday warning on Twitter that “if Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran.”
China’s latest effort to rally the public for a protracted trade war with the United States is a “viral” song spread by the authoritarian government on social media, entitled simply “Trade War.”
Every reporter working for the political section of Russia’s Kommersant daily business newspaper resigned on Monday to show their solidarity with two veteran journalists forced out of their jobs by political pressure. Over 200 Kommersant employees signed an open letter the same day, denouncing the “obvious clampdown on free speech in Russia.”
Incumbent Indonesian president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo was officially declared on Tuesday the winner of the election held April 17. His opponent Prabowo Subianto refused to accept the results, alleging “structural, systemic, and massive” voter fraud was responsible for Widodo’s victory.
Nicaraguan-American dual national Eddy Montes Praslin was one of 18 imprisoned anti-government protesters killed or wounded on Thursday in a disturbance at the La Modelo prison near the Nicaraguan capital city of Managua. Montes was reportedly shot dead by prison guards in what U.S. Ambassador Kevin Sullivan called an “unjustifiable use of lethal force against an unarmed political prisoner.”
Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping visited a rare earth minerals mine in Jiangxi province on Monday, his first domestic trip of the month.
Suspected jihadists detonated a roadside bomb on Sunday near the Giza Pyramids in Egypt, damaging a tour bus and injuring over a dozen tourists, many of them hailing from South Africa. Egyptian security forces responded with raids that killed 12 suspected Islamist militants.
U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad is making a rare visit to Tibet this week, the first visit paid by an American envoy since 2015.
Russia’s media regulation agency Roskomnadzor announced Wednesday that it will create a public database of “fake news,” using new authority granted to the agency by President Vladimir Putin with a controversial Internet law signed at the beginning of the month.
Prosecutors have reportedly uncovered almost $1.6 billion rubles ($24.6 million) lost to corruption in the Russian space program over the past five years. “There’s no end in sight, billions are stolen,” chief investigator Alexander Bastrykin ruefully declared on Wednesday.
Pundit Ibrahim Karagul of Turkey’s Yeni Safak, whose column titles are often longer than entire editorials penned by more sedate writers, delivered a lively presentation of the Turkish ruling party’s view of the Iran crisis with his Friday broadside: “U.S. Won’t Attack Iran, It Will Start a New Arab-Persian War. Two Crown Princes, Two Countries: They Became Hitmen of the Crusaders. But the Big Trap Is Set Against Saudi Arabia.”
Chinese officials and state-run media condemned President Donald Trump’s executive order effectively blocking Chinese telecom giant Huawei from U.S. markets, deriding it as an example of Trump’s “Cold War mentality” and vowing to protect Chinese business interests by any means necessary.
A new book called Defining India:Through Their Eyes by Sonia Singh includes a conversation with the Dalai Lama in which he said India prevented him from meeting with Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping in 2014, an excerpt published Wednesday revealed.
A tanker allegedly filled with 130,000 tons of Iranian oil docked near the Chinese city of Zhoushan last week, concluding a four-month journey that may violate U.S. sanctions against Iran, depending on what happened to the cargo.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) suspended air travel with Venezuela, citing conditions that “threaten the safety and security of passengers, aircraft, and crew.”
Reuters on Wednesday quoted two Iraqi security sources who revealed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued warnings about Iran-backed Shiite militia threatening U.S. bases in Iraq with missiles when he paid a surprise visit to Baghdad on May 7.
Early word has been mixed on the meeting between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Sochi, Russia, on Tuesday, but the Russians took a moment to thank Pompeo for trying to restore relations between the two countries and mocked his predecessor Hillary Clinton.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had a telephone conversation with Venezuelan President Juan Guaidó on Tuesday. Trudeau’s office said Guaidó “conveyed his commitment to holding free and fair elections as soon as possible, in line with the Venezuelan constitution.”
Police in China on Monday arrested a man and detained him for ten days for the “crime” of “picking quarrels and making trouble” by mocking public officials with the names he gave his dogs.
President Donald Trump reportedly will sign an executive order this week banning U.S. telecom companies from using equipment that has been deemed risky to national security. The order will not specify individual companies or countries of origin, but it will clearly have the most profound impact on Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.
The government of Zambia held a groundbreaking ceremony on Monday for a memorial to the dozens of Chinese workers who died building the Tanzania-Zambia Railway (TAZARA) in the 1970s.
A three-year-old girl in China’s Jiangsu province died after receiving a rabies vaccination last month, an ominous development in light of persistent scandals over low-quality and improperly-handled vaccines.
The battle in Hong Kong over a bill that would make it easier to extradite people to other countries, notably including China, became quite literal over the weekend as representatives pummeled each other in the legislature, sending one lawmaker to the hospital.
Saudi Arabia said on Tuesday that drones laden with explosives, evidently launched from Yemen by the Iran-backed Houthi insurgency, attacked two of its oil pumping stations.
The Chinese government detained three non-governmental organization (NGO) employees in different cities last week in what appears to be a coordinated police crackdown on groups that provide training and support for migrant workers. Police questioned staffers at each office and seized documents and computers.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo postponed a trip to Moscow and went to Brussels instead on Monday, determined to “discuss recent threatening actions and statements by the Islamic Republic of Iran” with foreign ministers of the European Union at their regular meeting.
Rodrigo Duterte, the perpetually controversial president of the Philippines, appears on track to increase his legislative influence in the midterm elections. Duterte’s critics hoped the election would be a negative referendum on his administration halfway through his six-year term, but his approval ratings are approaching all-time highs and candidates aligned with him are doing well in the polls.
Saudi Arabia announced on Monday that two of its oil tankers suffered “significant damage” from sabotage attacks off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) near the Strait of Hormuz. The attacks reportedly also damaged two ships from other nations, one of them registered to Norway.
Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, said on Monday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily that China has lost all legitimacy as a nation-state by forming a cult of personality around President Xi Jinping, who intends to rule for life but may be suffering from health issues concealed by his authoritarian government.
China reluctantly began allowing select foreign journalists to visit the massive re-education camps of Xinjiang province last month, staging performances to reinforce the Communist Party line that the hundreds of thousands of Muslims consigned to the camps for reprogramming are actually the happy voluntary residents of “vocational schools.”
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday warned Iran that it will face a “swift and decisive U.S. response” if it attacks American interests or directs its proxy forces to do so.
Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA) – the U.N.-recognized government currently under siege in Tripoli by one of the other major factions vying for control of the shattered country – on Thursday revoked the licenses of about 40 foreign oil and gas firms, including French giant Total.
A source in the Persian Gulf region “familiar with Saudi plans” told Bloomberg News on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia has received “moderate requests from customers for shipments next month, including from former buyers of Iran’s oil.”
Internet giant Google expressed concerns on Thursday that Singapore’s new censorship law, the “Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act,” could stifle innovation by threatening online media platforms with huge fines for carrying content the government decides is “fake news.”
The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday announced the seizure of a North Korean ship called Wise Honest, which was allegedly engaged in selling North Korean coal in violation of international sanctions.
Fifty-nine-year-old Canadian Supreme Court Justice Clement Gascon mysteriously disappeared on Wednesday evening, prompting Ottawa police to ask for public assistance in locating him. On Thursday, the police announced Gascon “has been located safe and sound.”
North Korea launched at least one “projectile” from the vicinity of a missile base on Thursday, apparently a drill or test launch that ended with the weapon crashing into the Sea of Japan.
Reuters on Tuesday took a close look at the adventures of the Chinese state-run CAMC engineering company, which somehow managed to pocket over a billion dollars from the socialist government of Venezuela for an agriculture project that never produced any food, even as the people of Venezuela descend into abject poverty and starvation.
