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Xi Jinping, China’s President, Unexpectedly Meets With North Korean Envoy

what appeared to be a slight thaw in a bilateral relationship that has been strained by Beijing’s concerns about the North’s nuclear weapons program.

Mr. Ri, a former foreign minister and a confidant of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, told Chinese Communist Party officials on Tuesday that his country would continue to expand its nuclear arsenal and had no intention of giving up the weapon

Sergey Kislyak, Russian Envoy, Cultivated Powerful Network in U.S.

Sergey I. Kislyak, the longtime Russian ambassador to the United States, hosted a dazzling dinner in his three-story, Beaux-Arts mansion four blocks north of the White House to toast Michael A. McFaul just weeks before he took up his post as the American envoy to Russia.

Mr. Kislyak’s networking success has landed him at the center of a sprawling controversy and made him the most prominent, if politically radioactive, ambassador in Washington. Two advisers to President Trump have run into trouble for not being more candid about contacts with Mr. Kislyak: Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser, and now Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who admitted two previously undisclosed conversations. Mr. Kislyak also met during the transition with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner.

Envoys urge Israel, Palestinians to back peace

More than 70 countries have called on Israel and the Palestinians to restate their commitment to a peace settlement and to refrain from unilateral actions.

Trump's campaign platform made no mention of Palestinian independence — the solution favored by the international community.

Whether leading efforts to isolate North Korea or hailing cuts to the United Nations budget, the US ambassador to the UN's ability to channel Trump's blunt style is prompting fellow UN envoys and foreign policy specialists to wonder whether the 45-year-old former South Carolina governor is laying the groundwork to succeed her boss in the Oval Office.

Speculation about Haley's future kicked back into gear after the American ambassador's speech to the UN General Assembly last month, just before the global body condemned on a 128-9 vote Trump's decision to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel and move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv

"We will no longer let the generosity of the American people be taken advantage of or remain unchecked," Haley said. In future negotiations, she said, "you can be sure we'll continue to look at ways to increase the UN's efficiency while protecting our interests".

President Donald Trump has insisted there was no "quid pro quo" in his dealings with the Ukrainian government, and "no pressure" on Ukraine's president to open an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.But in his remarkable 15-page statement delivered to Congress on Tuesday, Trump's top diplomat to Ukraine painted a picture of both.

"I found a confusing and unusual arrangement for making U.S. policy towards Ukraine. There appeared to be two channels of U.S. policy-making and implementation, one regular and one highly irregular."

The "irregular, informal channel" included then-Special Envoy Kurt Volker, European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

What’s less evident is how far-reaching and consequential the collapse of American-led order has been in the 15 months since Trump took office.

In multiple miserable corners of the world, where U.S. envoys and aid would normally be helping victims, deterring malevolent actors and seeking political solutions, there is a void.

Start with the Western Hemisphere

A former German diplomat who worked in the EU’s institutions is under investigation along with two lobbyists on suspicion of spying for the Chinese government.

It is claimed that two of the individuals shared confidential commercial information with the Chinese ministry for state security. The third indicated a willingness to do so, according to Der Spiegel. The diplomat at the centre of the investigation is reported to have formerly worked in both the EU commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS), the bloc’s foreign affairs wing.

The investigation is notable for it being comparatively rare. Last year the EEAS alerted member states to the presence of about 250 Chinese and 200 Russian spies said to be roaming the embassy-lined streets of Brussels. But there are few cases of spies for Beijing being uncovered.

The UN's Libya envoy Ghassan Salamé has called on foreign powers to stop interfering in Libya's civil war.

On the eve of peace talks in Berlin, Mr Salamé said foreign support of proxy groups in the conflict had created a "vicious cycle" of violence.But Mr Salamé told the BBC that he was optimistic about the negotiations.It comes after nine months of conflict between the powerful General Khalifa Haftar and the UN-backed government in the capital Tripoli.

Mr Salamé called on international powers to stop supporting local proxy groups with mercenaries, arms, financing, and direct military support.He said such actions created "a vicious circle where their proxies call for intervention in their fight, and their own ambitions bring more divisions."

President-elect Joe Biden has named six leaders of his foreign policy and national security teams, showing a continued push for historic firsts in his administration.

He's also set to name former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen as his treasury secretary

Yellen, 74, was the first-ever female Fed chair and would be the first-ever female head of the U.S. Treasury.

President Bashar al-Assad’s government has given Russia the names of officials who would attend international talks intended to end the war in Syria,

leader of the Free Syrian Army, Gen. Salim Idris, to discuss the proposal for a peace conference

Neither side has publicly committed to attend the talks, nor has a date been set, though Mr. Kerry and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said they hoped to convene the conference within a month under the auspices of the United Nations.

North Korea gave a positive spin Saturday to the visit of its special envoy to China but made no mention of China’s push for the North to resume negotiations

Vice Marshal Choe Ryong-hae, was at odds with portrayals in China’s state-run media,

Kim Jong-un, whose belligerent behavior has annoyed China, sent a personal letter to Mr. Xi that referred to the deep friendship between the two allies that “cannot be exchanged for anything.”

In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers

Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”

By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”

The European Union is desperate to keep Syrian refugees from bolting from Turkey for Europe. But the prospects for Syrians in Turkey have been slim. Now the EU is launching its biggest aid program yet – more than $375 million aimed at a million of the neediest Syrians in Turkey.

a debit card that can be used to buy whatever food, medicine or clothing a family needs, or to get cash.

There have been cash-based aid programs before, but not on this scale. Jonny Hogg, spokesmen for the World Food Program, says this is the biggest humanitarian relief contract ever signed by the EU.

Syria conflict: UN suspends all aid after convoy hit

The UN has suspended all aid convoys in Syria after a devastating attack on its lorries near Aleppo on Monday.

Russia and Syria have both insisted that their forces were not involved.

Russian officials said Thursday that the Syrian Army had stopped combat operations in the divided city of Aleppo in order to evacuate civilians, but residents of the rebel-held enclave reported that after a day of intense bombardment, fighting was continuing

150 airstrikes had killed at least 50 people and in which residents said they were unable to flee because of the intense combat

At the United Nations, the agency’s envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told reporters he could not verify whether the fighting had stopped or whether civilians were being allowed to evacuate

The U.S. says it has seen the announcement from Russia, Turkey and Iran on their intent to establish a mechanism to enforce a cease-fire in Syria and welcomes actions that de-escalate violence in the country.

U.S. calls on the three countries to press the Syrian government and its allies, as well as opposition forces, to abide by the cease-fire in order to create an environment more conductive to political discussions between Syrians.

The Russian military says its bombers have struck Islamic State positions in eastern Syria in the third such raid in four days.

Europe has a history of bloody conflict stretching back many centuries. The only period of continental peace came when the nations of Europe combined in a community and then a union. Even to risk the future of that union is to risk the return of war in Europe.

Both these shifts would be damaging enough, but the combination is a true menace. It’s not just that Trump’s proposed EU envoy actively looks forward to the unravelling of the EU, hoping it goes the way of the Soviet Union. It’s that Trump sees multilateral cooperation as a limp-wristed strategy for losers, preferring to make bilateral deals that work for him. That triggers a Darwinian scramble, in which every nation looks out only for itself – and damn the arrangements that previously held the world together.

And of course all this has an effect on those actors outside the west, as they respond to these shifts. With a swooning admirer in the White House, Vladimir Putin now feels free to flex his muscles: witness this week’s offensive in eastern Ukraine. China is girding itself for a trade war, or worse, with Trump’s America. Meanwhile global jihadism rubs its hands as Trump, with his refugee ban, all but vindicates their warped vision – signalling to the world’s Muslims that, yes, Islamic State is right and there is no place for you in the west.