By Stephen Kalin | MOSUL, Iraq MOSUL, Iraq As Iraqi government forces advanced towards his eastern Mosul neighbourhood in November, a group of Islamic State militants stormed Abu Rami’s home, put a gun to his head and told him and his family to get out immediately. The militants, including a local man whose name he knew, brought with them a bearded comrade clutching a sniper rifle whom […]
By Sinead Carew and Lewis Krauskopf | NEW YORK NEW YORK U.S. bank stocks will stay in favor with investors as long as earnings reports in the coming week show an improving profit outlook while investors wait to see if U.S. President-elect Donald Trump lives up to his campaign promises. Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC.N), JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) and Bank of America (BAC.N) kicked off […]
MOSUL, Iraq Iraqi special forces battled Islamic State militants inside the Mosul University campus on Saturday in a second day of fierce clashes in the complex. “There are still clashes. We entered the university and cleared the technical institute, dentistry and antiquities departments,” Lieutenant General Abdelwahab al-Saadi of the Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) told a Reuters reporter in the complex. “In the coming hours it will be […]
Wells Fargo has laid down plans to close at least 400 branches over the next two years as part of a push to cut costs as the US bank tries to recover from the scandal over sham accounts. The San Francisco-based lender, which operates more than 6,000 branches across the country, is accelerating closures as it aims to reduce about $2bn in expenses by the end of […]
BAGHDAD Residents of the Iraqi city of Mosul said up to 30 civilians died in an air strike on a district held by Islamic State this week. Locals said they saw at least three missiles hit the western Mosul al-Jadida area on Thursday, in a raid that appeared to target the house of senior militant Harbi Abdel Qader. He was not in the building at the time, […]
By Karen Freifeld | NEW YORK NEW YORK Moody’s Corp (MCO.N) has agreed to pay nearly $864 million to settle with U.S. federal and state authorities over its ratings of risky mortgage securities in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Friday. The credit rating agency reached the deal with the Justice Department, 21 states and the District of Columbia, […]
Moody’s has agreed to pay $864m to settle allegations that it inflated the credit ratings of subprime mortgage bonds that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, the Department of Justice said on Friday. The settlement with the rating agency includes a $437.5m federal civil penalty to the US government — the second-largest payment of this type ever by a rating agency — and ends an investigation carried […]
Qatar is regaining its appetite for deals. In the past two months alone, the world’s richest country per capita invested in Turkey’s biggest poultry producer, Russian oil giant Rosneft PJSC, and U.K. gas company National Grid Plc. The investments have been made through the Qatar Investment Authority, created in 2005 to handle the country’s windfall from liquefied natural gas sales, of which it is the world’s biggest exporter. […]
Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon chief, didn’t get where he is by being nice to China. When Beijing tried to force his company to abandon a gas exploration project in the waters off Vietnam in 2008, ExxonMobil showed it the finger. BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and several others caved to Chinese pressure. ExxonMobil is still there, drilling on a Vietnamese license in waters also claimed by China. Is […]
WASHINGTON The United States has not received a formal invitation to Syria peace talks being organised by Russia and Turkey to be held in the Kazakh capital of Astana on Jan. 23, the U.S. State Department said on Friday. “To my knowledge we have not received … a formal invitation to the talks,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said at a daily briefing. (Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati; […]
WASHINGTON Iraqi forces fighting Islamic State in Mosul reached the Nineveh province governance building and raised the Iraqi flag there on Friday, a senior U.S. defense official said. Elissa Slotkin, the acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, also told a Pentagon briefing on the fight against Islamic State that a U.S. liaison team is in talks with Turkey about helping its forces near al-Bab […]
Deir al-Zour, an oil-rich province that borders Iraq, is largely under Islamic State control and has been the focus of American-led airstrikes and other military action. Continue reading the main story Since early 2015, the jihadists have besieged the provincial capital, also called Deir al-Zour, where about 200,000 people live. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, controls roughly half of the city, while the […]
International investigators have said for the first time that they suspect President Bashar al-Assad and his brother are responsible for the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict, according to a document seen by Reuters. A joint inquiry for the United Nations and global watchdog the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had previously identified only military units and did not name any commanders […]
Throughout the presidential campaign and since Donald Trump’s election, former diplomats, retired generals, and foreign-policy analysts have attempted to decipher, explain, and predict his foreign-policy strategy. Will he pursue the big-stick model of Teddy Roosevelt? Embrace a neo-Nixonian “madman” strategy? Is Trump actually a champion of foreign-policy realism, or perhaps no realist at all? But all those questions make the same mistake — they assume the incoming […]
By Jamie McGeever | LONDON LONDON European and U.S. stocks looked to end a sluggish week on a high note on Friday, while the dollar was on track for its biggest weekly fall in two months and U.S. bond yields eyed their longest run of weekly declines since July. Investors largely shrugged off figures that showed Chinese exports fell the most last year since 2009, and will […]
Takata, the Japanese automotive supplier at the centre of a global recall crisis over its exploding airbags, is expected to plead guilty as early as Friday to criminal wrongdoing in the US, as the Obama administration targets the global auto industry with a final burst of fines over environmental and safety issues. Takata is expected to agree to a criminal settlement with the Department of Justice on […]
By David Ingram and Nate Raymond | NEW YORK NEW YORK A scandal that could complicate the South Korean political ambitions of former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon features an unlikely central character: a New York fashion designer whose wedding was broadcast on reality TV and who authorities said falsely touted ties to Middle Eastern royalty. Malcolm Harris, who has dubbed himself on social media the “curator of […]
As SHTFPlan.com’s Mac Slavo notes, we should take notice at the government preparations for disaster, and the possibility of a cataclysmic collision with damaging objects in space. At the same time, we should take notice at what they are preparing for with all the billions of dollars thrown at defense and survival, it comes in secretive infrastructure for a reclusive sect of power, and in top-down plans […]
By Yun Hwan Chae | SEOUL SEOUL Former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon polled second in a survey of South Korean presidential favourites released on Friday, 11 percentage points behind former opposition leader Moon Jae-in, who led the Gallup Korea poll at 31 percent. South Korea has been gripped by a political crisis since lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in December to impeach President Park Geun-hye over an influence-peddling scandal. […]
By Suleiman Al-Khalidi | AMMAN AMMAN Syrian army command said on Friday that Israel fired rockets at a major military airport west of Damascus, the capital, and warned Tel Aviv of repercussions of what it called a “flagrant” attack. Syrian state television quoted the army as saying several rockets were fired from an area near Lake Tiberias in northern Israel just after midnight which landed in the […]
President-elect Donald Trump may be at war with the intelligence community, but on Thursday his pick to head the CIA tried to bridge the rift between the incoming president and his spies, saying he accepts the assessment that Russia meddled in the election to boost the Republican’s candidacy. “It’s pretty clear about what took place here, about Russian involvement in efforts to hack information and to have […]
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani leaves Trump Tower in November. (Image: CBSNews.com) Rudy Giuliani has been tapped to “lend expertise” and to advise the Trump administration on cybersecurity. The former New York mayor “will be sharing his expertise and insight as a trusted friend concerning private sector cybersecurity problems and emerging solutions developing in the private sector,” said a brief statement from the incoming Trump administration. […]
By Nidal al-Mughrabi | GAZA GAZA For weeks, Gazans have been making do with less than half their usual electricity supply – barely a few hours a day – with no sign of the shortages alleviating anytime soon, fuelling distress and frustration among the population. Normally, Gaza’s power alternates on eight-hour cycles, with generators providing electricity to those that can afford it in the down times. But […]
A classic distinction in markets exists between bulls and bears, the snorting herd of enthusiasts and the pessimists who roar at them from caves, waiting for a panicked stampede. Yet a sign of the uncertain outlook, with the consequences of the incoming Trump administration unknown, elections due in Europe and Brexit still to begin, may be how those labels don’t fit quite as easily as before. For […]
