President Trump checked off a key campaign promise Wednesday with a major drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq and an even greater reduction in Afghanistan coming soon, but skeptics say the moves reflect U.S. political imperatives and not the chaos and violence both countries are likely to face down the road.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday spoke with Oman’s leader, Sultan Haitham bin Tariq al-Said, about ways to enhance regional security and strengthen economic ties between the two countries, the White House said in a statement.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are working toward forming a “strong foundation” for future, high level “cooperation,” the leaders’ respective national media have reported. The Turkish and Iranian media reports followed a video conference the two leaders held on Tuesday, the Jerusalem Post said.
The U.S. military is reducing troops in Afghanistan from 8,600 to about 4,500 by early November, the head of U.S Central Command said Wednesday, hours after he announced the withdrawal of more service members from Iraq this month.
Iran said Tuesday it is building a sophisticated new building near its underground Natanz nuclear site, state TV reported.
The authorities in Sudan are trying to protect the country’s ancient pyramids from flooding as heavy rains have caused the nearby River Nile to reach record-breaking levels.
President Trump will announce a further drawdown of U.S. troops from Iraq on Wednesday, and a withdrawal of more troops from Afghanistan in the coming days, a senior administration official said Tuesday night.
An opposition leader says an increasing number of critical activists opposing Belarusian President Alexander Lukanhesko are detained, kidnapped, and sometimes expelled from the country. The statement by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya comes amid dramatic scenes at the borders of the former Soviet republic.
A tense calm returned to Budapest on Monday after thousands of Hungarians protested against what they view as a nationalist government takeover of public education.
Hungary says it will unveil a statue of late U.S. President George W. Bush in Budapest to mark the 30th anniversary of the collapse of communist dictatorship in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1989, Bush became the first U.S. president to visit Hungary while in office. He died in 2018 at the age of 94.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday raised the idea of separating the U.S. and Chinese economies, also known as decoupling, suggesting the U.S. would not lose money if the two countries no longer did business.
A Chinese aviation company has apparently been test flying its new stealth fighter jet that aims to match America’s F-35s, and which could be a candidate for its next generation of ship-borne warplanes.
European Union leaders have accused Britain of throwing political grenades across the channel by threatening to undermine its divorce deal with the EU. The so-called Brexit Withdrawal Agreement was signed last year to allow Britain’s orderly exit from the bloc.
The NATO military alliance demands that Russia reveals its Novichok nerve agent program to international monitors, after the poisoning of activist Alexei Navalny.
Police have tried to disperse demonstrators in the Belarusian capital where some 100,000 people demanded the resignation of long-time leader Alexander Lukashenko. Sunday’s rallies in Minsk and other cities came as a police crackdown on dissidents and activists intensified.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog said Friday that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium has exceeded the limit set in its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers by more than 10 times.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson talked tough on Sunday ahead of a crucial round of post-Brexit trade talks with the European Union, saying Britain could walk away from the talks within weeks and insisting that a no-deal exit would be a “good outcome for the U.K.”
More than 7 million people were advised to evacuate on Sunday as Typhoon Haishen battered Japan’s southern mainland.
The World Health Organization says a new polio outbreak in Sudan is linked to an ongoing vaccine-sparked epidemic in Chad — a week after the U.N. health agency declared the African continent free of the wild polio virus.
Leading journalism groups have condemned a court in Slovakia for acquitting main suspects in the 2018 slayings of an investigative journalist and his fiancée.