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- Kazakhstan's parliament voted to rename the country's capital Astana as Nursultan
- Kazakhstan's parliament voted to rename the country's capital Astana as Nursultan in honour of longtime ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev, a day after he resigned as president.
- The state-owned Kazinform news agency said after a parliamentary vote Astana is now officially renamed Nursultan.
- Kazakhstan's new interim president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev proposed renaming the capital.
- Astana replaced Kazakhstan's largest city Almaty as the capital in 1997
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- A crop-guzzling insect, which has moved from its native Americas to Asia, threatens to cost farmers from India to Thailand billions of dollars in lost production, the UN food agency has warned.
- The Fall Armyworm pest is continuing to sweep across the globe, having moved eastwards from its native Americas onto Africa before arriving in Asia only last summer.
- The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has convened a three-day meeting of international experts in Bangkok and officials from affected countries, who began discussing what to do about stopping the onward march of the crop-guzzling insects, and limiting the devastation they cause.
- "We are here today ? together ? because we share a growing sense of alarm ? but also to learn from each other, particularly from those countries who've already been responding to their own infestations," said Kundhavi Kadiresan, Assistant Director-General and FAO Regional Representative for Asia and the Pacific.
- Kadiresan said nations need to work together because this is a "pest that has no respect for international boundaries, threatens our food security, our economies, domestic and international trade, and of course the smallholder farmer who wakes up one morning to a cash crop under attack".
- Fall armyworm have been moving steadily east since 2016 and caused up to USD 3 billion-worth of damage to crops across Africa, a UN news release said.
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- The United States will continue to impose additional import tariff on Chinese products till the time a trade deal is reached with the country, President Donald Trump has said.
- "We're not talking about removing them. We're talking about leaving them for a substantial period of time, because we have to make sure that if we do the deal with China that China lives by the deal," Trump told reporters on the south lawns of the White House.
- Washington and Beijing are battling over the final shape of an agreement that both sides have said they would like to reach, with American officials demanding profound changes to the Chinese industrial policy.
- Asked about the progress in the trade talks, the US president said, "We're getting along with China very well. President Xi is a friend of mine.
- The deal is coming along nicely. We have our top representatives going there this weekend to further the deal." The world's two largest economies are locked in a trade war since Trump imposed heavy tariffs on imported steel and aluminium items from China in March last year, a move that sparked fears of a global trade war.
- Trump imposed tariff hikes of up to 25 per cent on USD 250 billion of Chinese goods. In response, China, the world's second largest economy after the US, imposed tit-for-tat tariffs on USD 110 billion of American goods "No president has ever done what I've done with China.
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