Bhinneka News Online: Friday Morning Briefing: Turkish police expand search in Khashoggi case

Friday, 19 October 2018

Friday Morning Briefing: Turkish police expand search in Khashoggi case

Highlights

President Donald Trump said he presumes missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is dead and that the U.S. response to Saudi Arabia will likely be “very severe” but that he still wanted to get to the bottom of what exactly happened.

Turkish police are searching a forest on the outskirts of Istanbul and a city near the Sea of Marmara for remains of a Saudi dissident journalist who disappeared two weeks ago after entering the Saudi consulate, two Turkish officials said.

Factbox: The United States and Saudi Arabia have had a mutually dependent relationship for seven decades based on a central bargain: the kingdom would pump oil and the superpower would provide security. See the leverage each side has and the risks of exercising it.

World

Saturday’s parliamentary election in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar will be delayed by a week after the assassination of one of the country’s most powerful security chiefs dealt a stunning blow to the Western-backed government.

President Trump has threatened to deploy the military and close the southern U.S. border if Mexico does not halt a caravan of Central America migrants heading north, raising the risk of huge disruptions to trade.

European Union negotiator Michel Barnier has said that a Brexit deal with the United Kingdom was 90 percent done, although there was still a chance no accord would be reached due to ongoing stumbling blocks over the Irish border.

Unclaimed urns containing ashes of the dead are piling up by the thousands across Japan, creating storage headaches and reflecting fraying family ties and economic pressures in a rapidly aging nation.

Commentary: The European Union needs to embrace its role as a diplomatic powerhouse by becoming involved in negotiations on denuclearizating North Korea, write Yoon Young-kwan, a former South Korean foreign affairs and trade minister, and Ramon Pacheco Pardo, KF-VUB Korea Chair at the Institute for European Studies of Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Reuters Top News

@Reuters

Two @Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, have been imprisoned in Myanmar since Dec. 12, 2017. Follow the case: https://reut.rs/2CRC7qd

10:13 AM - 19 Oct 2018

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