SEOUL (Reuters) - Oil prices kicked off the new year higher on Thursday as warming trade relations between the United States and China eased demand concerns, while rising tensions in the Middle East fueled worries about supply.

Both benchmarks ended higher in 2019, posting their biggest annual gains since 2016, buoyed at the end of the year by a thaw in the prolonged trade dispute between the United States and China - the world’s two largest economies - and a deeper output cut pledged by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies.

A fall in U.S. crude inventories last week also supported prices. U.S. crude stocks fell 7.8 million barrels in the week ended Dec. 27, compared with analysts’ expectations for a decrease of 3.2 million barrels, according to data from the American Petroleum Institute (API) released on Tuesday. [API/S]

Over the last decade, migration has become an urgent political issue. The 2010s have been marked not only by the global movement of people across national borders but also attempts by governments to erect walls and fences in their path. We’ve seen nationalism winning votes and the worldview of the far right mainstreamed.

But the 2010s has seen a higher number of people from the south moving towards the north. In particular, Europe has seen hundreds of thousands of people from Africa, the Middle East and south Asia, fleeing chronic poverty, political instability, wars, and the climate crisis in countries often laid to ruin by western-backed institutions.

Throughout this time, when tens of thousands died at sea trying to reach Europe, Europe has imagined itself to be the victim of a migrant or refugee “crisis”

Every year, 8m tons of plastic enters the ocean. Images of common household waste swirling in vast garbage patches in the open sea, or tangled up with whales and seabirds, have turned plastic pollution into one of the most popular environmental issues in the world

What we commonly see accumulating at the sea surface is “less than the tip of the iceberg, maybe a half of 1% of the total,” says Erik Van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Her team found that at a depth of 200m, there were nearly 15 bits of plastic in every liter of water, similar to the amount found at the surface of the so-called garbage patches. The remote samplers were still finding plastic at their maximum depth of 1km.

the tall barricades of corrugated metal and concrete erected during the sectarian conflict, known as the Troubles, that began in 1968 and ravaged Northern Ireland for three decades. The walls were built to divide Protestant and Catholic enclaves and to prevent people from killing one another as the spiraling cycle of attacks took hold.

“We’re not ready for it,” he said. “I’m sure you’re probably fed up with hearing about Brexit,” he said. “But people are worried about a bad deal, the wrong deal or no deal.” If things went badly, he added, “I think we’re going to need these walls more than ever.”

Few of the hard-line politicians who advocated Brexit seemed to consider the consequences their push to “take back control” would have on the delicate peace in Northern Ireland or, for that matter, on the cohesion of the United Kingdom itself. In the more than three years since the referendum, the matter of Northern Ireland has presented a unique and treacherous stumbling block to any agreement between the British government and the European Union on the terms of withdrawal.

In his new year message, the prime minister said he hoped the country would "move forward united" after it leaves the EU on 31 January.He vowed to govern "for everyone", not just those who backed him at the polls.

The Conservatives' resounding election victory on 12 December had "driven an electoral bulldozer" through the deadlock in Parliament, he said, and offered a way out of the "division, rancour and uncertainty" surrounding the Brexit debate since the 2016 referendum vote.

Ahead of what is traditionally the most difficult time of the year for the health service, Mr Johnson insisted it was his "top priority" and his ambition was to provide "state of the art" healthcare which remained free at the point of use."The loudest message I heard during the election campaign is that people expect us - expect me - to protect and improve the NHS."

Three researchers with the University of Potsdam report that thousands of natural lakes in the Himalayas are at risk of bursting their moraines due to global warming and causing flooding downriver.

As climate change continues unabated, scientists are trying to predict what might happen around the world. The region of the Himalayas has already seen some dramatic changes—as glaciers melt, natural lakes have formed—85 of them in the Sikkim Himalaya between 2003 and 2010.

To see what might happen as higher temperatures melt Himalaya glaciers, the researchers carried out 5.4 billion simulations based on lake models developed with topographic and satellite data. After running the simulations, they report that they found approximately 5,000 lakes in the Himalayas are likely unstable due to moraine weaknesses.

Teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg said on Monday that talking to U.S. President Donald Trump at a United Nations summit on global warming would have been a waste of time since he would not have paid any attention.

Thunberg also said she regarded personal attacks on her as funny and that she hoped to go back to having a normal life.

Thunberg said: "Honestly, I don't think I would have said anything because obviously he's not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me?"

Spurred on by Swedish wunderkind Greta Thunberg - virtually unknown outside of her homeland a year ago but now a global star nominated for a Nobel prize - millions of young people took part in weekly demonstrations demanding climate action.

Although scientists have warned for decades about the risk to humanity and Earth posed by unfettered burning of fossil fuels, in 2019 - set to be the second hottest year in history - their message seems to have finally hit home.

A total of 66 nations now have plans to be carbon-neutral by 2050. The cities of London and Paris declared official ecological and climate emergencies.Yet there are fears meagre progress could be undermined as developing economies appear no closer to ditching fossil fuels and the United States - the largest historic emitter - looks poised to complete its Paris pullout.

As this hottest-on-record, godforsaken decade draws to a close, it’s clear that global warming is no longer a problem for future generations but one that’s already displacing communities, costing billions, and driving mass extinctions. And it’s worth asking: Where did the past 10 years get us?

And unless we find some way to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, the Keeling curve will not dip below 400 parts per million again in your lifetime, your children’s lifetime, or their children’s lifetime, because carbon dioxide can hang around in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

Among scientists, that score was settled a long time ago. But for some reason, the average Joe has taken a lot longer to come around to the idea … some reason that probably has a lot to do with the billions of dollars spent by fossil fuel companies to seed skepticism about the science of climate change and then muddy the waters around what we should do about it. There will always be skeptics and conspiracy theorists, but this decade, we’ve seen more and more Americans come to accept the basics of climate science, which could translate into more political will to take action in the 2020s.

President Trump suggested that some e-cigarette flavors could be taken off the market in order to combat underage vaping.

Users of tank-based vaping systems will also still be allowed to custom mix flavors because those kinds of vapes aren’t as popular among teens, according to The Journal.

Starting in May, the FDA will review all e-cigarettes and only those with demonstrated benefits to U.S. public health will be allowed to stay on the market.

President Trump entered the new year facing flare-ups of long-burning crises with two old adversaries — Iran and North Korea — which are directly challenging his claim to have reasserted American power around the world

The timing of these new challenges is critical: Both the Iranians and the North Koreans seem to sense the vulnerability of a president under impeachment and facing re-election, even if they are often clumsy as they try to play those events to their advantage.

“After three years of no international crises,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on Tuesday, Mr. Trump is “facing one with Iran because he has rejected diplomacy and another with North Korea because he has asked too much of diplomacy.

WASHINGTON — As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. prepares to preside over the impeachment trial of President Trump, he issued pointed remarks on Tuesday in his year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary that seemed to be addressed, at least in part, to the president himself.

“We should reflect on our duty to judge without fear or favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity and dispatch,” he wrote in the report. “As the new year begins, and we turn to the tasks before us, we should each resolve to do our best to maintain the public’s trust that we are faithfully discharging our solemn obligation to equal justice under law.”

“ultimately succeeded in convincing the public of the virtues of the principles embodied in the Constitution.”“Those principles leave no place for mob violence,” the chief justice wrote.

China on Thursday demanded President Donald Trump veto legislation aimed at supporting human rights in Hong Kong and renewed a threat to take “strong countermeasures” if the bills become law.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi joined in the criticism, telling visiting former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen that the legislation constituted an act of interference in China’s internal affairs and ignored violent acts committed by protesters.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the bills Wednesday, a day after the Senate passed them on voice votes. The bills now go to the White House for Trump’s signature, and the White House signaled that he would sign the measure.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted Thursday on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in a set of long-running corruption cases, throwing his political future into doubt and heightening the uncertainty and chaos surrounding Israel’s fitful, yearlong struggle to choose its next leader.

“The public interest requires that we live in a country where no one is above the law,” Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit said in a televised evening news conference.

“Law enforcement is not a choice,” he added. “This is not a matter of left or right. This is not a matter of politics.”

China is heavily exposed to the U.S. dollar, but now, with the risk of “decoupling,” Beijing is silently diversifying its reserves to reduce its dependence on the world’s largest reserve currency, analysts say.

Beijing will therefore manage its risk by diversifying its foreign exchange reserves into other currencies, ANZ predicted, as well as build up its “shadow reserves.”

“Diversifying its currency holdings, in a way is very much in line with the recent political moves of the Xi administration to focus on China’s trade relationships beyond just the United States. China and, more broadly, the Asian region is still highly exposed to movements in the US dollar,” Hsiao said.

Questions about the British government’s failure to release a report on Russia’s interference in the country’s politics continued to dog Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Sunday as critics said leaks from the document raised concerns about the security of next month’s election.

“Boris Johnson therefore needs to clear up the confusion, spin and speculation around this (intelligence committee) report by publishing it in full at the earliest opportunity,’’ she told the Times. “If not, people will rightly continue to ask: what is he trying to hide from the British public and why?”

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 U.S. presidential election found that Russia interfered in the vote in a “sweeping and systemic” fashion. While President Donald Trump dismissed the findings, the U.S. investigation put Russia at the center of worries about the integrity of elections worldwide.

Washington — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refuted Republicans' claims that President Trump has not had the opportunity for due process in the impeachment inquiry, saying that the president has "every opportunity to present his case."

"But it's really a sad thing. I mean, what the president did was so much worse than even what Richard Nixon did, that at some point Richard Nixon cared about the country enough to recognize that this could not continue," Pelosi said. Mr. Nixon resigned before the House could vote on impeachment.

Mr. Trump and Republicans have argued that the president should be allowed to confront the whistleblower who wrote the complaint about the call."I will make sure he does not intimidate the whistleblower," Pelosi countered.

But to have reacted with surprise at this much-telegraphed decision reveals a staggering level of naivety. Worse still, their failure to anticipate the behavior of America's mercurial President reveals both cowardice and stupidity -- not among the tiny number of special forces from the United Kingdom, France, Denmark and elsewhere, who were sent to help with the defeat of ISIS, of course. But certainly among the leaders of wealthy western nations that have the greatest strategic interest in what happens in the Middle East

Having seen Trump nearly abandon Syria in December, surely it would have made sense if the UK, France, Germany, Italy et al reinforced the international coalition effort inside Syria.

On top of that, there's the gigantic matter of refugees. Turkey is hosting some 3.5 million Syrians. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly threatened to open the country's borders and allow another flood of humanity to engulf the European continent

The new missile systems China displayed in its national day parade last month will add to “global anxiety” about its rising military power and Beijing needs to explain itself to the world, Japan’s defence minister has warned

His comments highlight Tokyo’s delicate position as it seeks to maintain its security against China’s growing military might, while avoiding becoming a proxy for a US confrontation with Beijing.

The hardware was unveiled amid rising tensions in the region, from ballistic missile tests by North Korea to the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. The treaty banned land-based missiles with ranges of between 500km and 5,500km and the US is now keen to deploy such missiles in Asia. Some experts fear that could spark an arms race with China, which was not party to the INF treaty.

Turkish-backed militias, armed by Ankara, have killed civilians in areas abandoned by the U.S., four U.S. military and intelligence officials tell TIME. The officials say they fear that the militias committing those potential war crimes may be using weapons that the U.S. sold to Turkey.

Turkey and its allies may be preparing to clear civilian populations from the area, which has largely been controlled by the Kurds, Ankara’s long-time enemies in the region. Turkish President Recep Erdogan told the United Nations on Sept. 24 that he planned to establish a safe zone across the border in Syria, and to resettle some of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees currently sheltered in Turkey.

This intelligence is emerging as the U.S. struggles to manage the fallout from its precipitous retreat from Syria, which was announced Oct. 13, after Erdogan told Trump that Turkey was about to attack territory in northern Syria where U.S. troops were deployed. Trump gave the Pentagon and State Department no warning of his decision to pull the U.S. out of the area, and no time to plan an organized retreat or to negotiate a handover of territory. That has left U.S. military officials and diplomats scrambling to deal with the situation.