Global stocks sank Wednesday after US President Donald Trump said he was not satisfied with talks that are aimed at averting a trade war with China. Equities were also dented by poor eurozone economic data, and as Trump cast doubt on a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “Trump (is) continuing to drive uncertainty over global trade,” said analyst Joshua Mahony at trading firm IG. “European markets are following their Asian counterparts lower, as a pessimistic tone from Trump is compounded by downbeat economic data,” he added. Markets had surged Monday after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said they had agreed to pull back from imposing threatened tariffs on billions of dollars of goods, and continue talks on a variety of trade issues. However, Trump has declared that he was “not satisfied” with the status of the talks, fuelling worries that the world’s top two economies could still slug out an economically pain
Air strikes on one of the last villages still held by the Islamic State group in eastern Syria killed 12 civilians, including four children, a monitor said Monday. The strikes were carried out late Sunday on the village of Susa in Deir Ezzor province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. “Twelve civilians from a same family, including four children, were killed,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. The Britain-based monitoring organisation, which has a broad network of sources on the ground, said the strikes were likely conducted by the US-led coalition that launched air raids against IS in Syria and Iraq in 2014. There was no immediate comment from the coalition. The Islamic State group has lost nearly all the territory it once held in Iraq and Syria and is clinging to a scattering of small villages and pockets of land in the border area. The coalition admitted on Thursday to “uni