FILE PHOTO: US President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands © Reuters / Damir Sagolj Beijing wants to strike a trade deal with Washington within three months, China’s commerce ministry announced Thursday in its first comment on US-China trade negotiations since presidents Xi and Trump met in Argentina. “We are confident in reaching an agreement (with the US) within the next 90 days,”  China's commerce ministry spokesman Gao Feng  said  in a weekly briefing on Thursday. The official added that both sides have been communicating and cooperating since the two countries’ leaders, US President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping, met at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires. Trump agreed to postpone further tariff hikes during talks between Washington and Beijing as part of the 90-days trade war ceasefire. The commerce ministry said that China will  “immediately implement the consensus reached by the two sides on farm products, cars and energy.”...

© Reuters / Heinz-Peter Bader The US is not in a position to tell OPEC or Saudi Arabia what to do, Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih told journalists when asked about Donald Trump’s reaction to curbing production of crude by the kingdom or the oil cartel. “I don’t need approval from any foreign state when it comes to the issue of energy production,” the top official said as quoted by RIA Novosti. Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), as well as the cartel’s allies, are meeting at OPEC’s headquarters in Vienna on Thursday. The 15-member organization and non-OPEC partners, including Russia, will reportedly negotiate steep output reductions which could start in January. The measure is aimed at controlling global oil prices that have seen a dramatic crash of more than 30 percent over the last two months, placing the budgets of oil-exporting nations under considerable pressure. The Saudi energy minister stressed that he doesn’t supp...

Guided missile destroyer USS McCampbell (file photo)  ©   US Navy / Specialist 3rd Class Jared M. Hill   An American destroyer sailed off the Russian coast, near the Pacific Fleet base in Vladivostok, in a first such stunt since the Cold War. Another US ship is expected in the Black Sea soon, amid tensions between Russia and Ukraine. The USS MCCampbell (DDG-85) went into the vicinity of Peter the Great Bay to “challenge Russia's excessive maritime claims and uphold the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea” enjoyed by the US and others, Lieutenant Rachel McMarr, a spokesperson for the US Pacific Fleet, said in a statement. The US Navy calls such stunts “Freedom of Navigation Operations” (FONOP). The last time a FONOP was conducted in this area was 1987, at the peak of Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union.  “These operations demonstrate the United States will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows,” McMarr said. “That is tru...

Incoming New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is taking aim at that most sacred of American cows, the public-private partnership, criticizing Tesla for accepting government subsidies without giving back to the taxpayer. “When we as a public choose to invest in new technologies, we deserve a return on that investment,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a climate change town hall event on Monday. “It’s about time we get our due because it’s the public that funded and financed a lot of innovative technologies,” she added. While Tesla has certainly benefited from government subsidies, racking up $2.4 billion as of 2016, the company does not receive nearly as much from the taxpayer as other automakers like Ford, which received $4 billion during that same time, or GM, which got $5.8 billion. However, the company has been haunted by several scandals. In October, it was revealed that the FBI had launched a probe into whether the automaker misled investors by stating, and th...

The UK has the power to unilaterally stop the Brexit process, the EU’s top legal advisers have said, contradicting statements from London that Article 50 could only be stopped with agreement of all 27 EU member states. The Advocate General, in a report prepared for the European Court in Strasbourg, stated that the UK could suspend the already triggered two-year Article 50 process, according to a lawyer for the group that brought forward the case. The advice comes just five days before Parliament begins debating Prime Minister Theresa May’s largely unpopular Brexit deal, before voting on it on December 11. READ MORE: ‘UK will be worse off’: British MP Sam Gyimah becomes 7th minister to resign over May's Brexit deal “Advocate General Campos Sanchez-Bordona proposes that the Court of Justice should declare that Article 50... allows the unilateral revocation of the notification of the intention to withdraw from the EU,” the bloc’s top court’s statement read. “T...