A top fundraiser for President Donald Trump received millions of dollars from a political adviser to the United Arab Emirates last April, just weeks before he began handing out a series of large political donations to US lawmakers considering legislation targeting Qatar, the UAE’s chief rival in the Persian Gulf, an Associated Press investigation has found. George Nader, an adviser to the UAE who is now a witness in the US special counsel investigation into foreign meddling in American politics, wired Dollar 2.5 million to the Trump fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, through a company in Canada, ... Read More

China is willing to hold talks with the United States to resolve their differences over trade, China’s foreign ministry said on Monday, as alarm grows over a possible trade war between the world’s two largest economies. Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the comments at a regular briefing in Beijing. China and the United States have been closely linked trading partners since the Asian giant joined the global system nearly 20 years ago. But Washington accuses Beijing of a host of unfair trade practices, including the theft US technology. In his latest strike against the trad ... Read More

Russias Emergency Situations Ministry said on Monday that at least 64 people had been killed in a fire in a shopping mall in the Siberian city of Kemerovo. Images on Russian television showed thick black smoke pouring out of the Winter Cherry shopping centre in the city of Kemerovo, which also boasts a sauna, a multiplex cinema and a bowling alley that was packed with people on a Sunday afternoon. Investigators had initially reported five people dead including a child and another 30 people injured and taken to hospital. As the new death toll was announced, a source in the local rescue ... Read More

The People's Liberation Army (PLA) will take complete and direct control over managing China's land borders including with India, after Beijing announced a sweeping reform that will demobilise its frontier defence police force. A wide-ranging reform of Party and State institutions was unveiled late on Wednesday, a day after the annual National People's Congress or parliament session closed. Many of the reforms are aimed at strengthening the direct control of Communist Party institutions, which had in recent years ceded authority to State or government institutions to implement policies. ... Read More

former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has offered to give evidence against Nicolas Sarkozy, the ex-French president who on Wednesday was slapped with charges of receiving millions of dollars from the strongman's regime. Seif al-Islam Gadhafi alleged that he witnessed part of the funds being delivered to Sarkozy's chief of staff in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. I can confirm that I still possess solid proof about Sarkozy, he said in a series of WhatsApp messages to Africanews, the sister channel of NBC News partner Euronews. I saw with my own eyes the delivery of the first sum of money to ... Read More

President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign mined supporters’ personal data from Facebook to benefit its voter turnout program. But former campaign officials said Wednesday they accessed and used the information in vastly different ways than Cambridge Analytica, the firm connected to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign accused of improperly lifting data on 50 million Facebook users. Former Obama advisers said they collected the data with their own app complied with the social media platform’s terms of service and received permission from supporters. An estimated 1 million ... Read More