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UK Prime Minister Liz Truss and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng attend the annual Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, Britain

Hannah McKay via Reuters

What We’re Watching: UK PM's budget U-turn, OPEC mulls production cut, Yemen truce expires

Truss’s tax U-turn

Will it be enough? New British PM Liz Truss’s government has reversed course on its economic agenda. Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng told the Conservative Party conference on Monday that a proposal to scrap the UK’s 45% tax rate for high-income earners would be axed. He cited the recent market chaos and vowed that there would be “no more distractions” in pursuing the rest of the government’s proposed tax policies. This caps a dismal couple of weeks for the new Tory leadership during which the Bank of England tried to calm markets after Kwarteng introduced £45 billion ($49 billion) worth of tax cuts despite sky-high inflation. The upheaval also caused the pound to plummet against the greenback (it regained some value on Monday). Truss and Kwarteng said they changed tack after listening to voters struggling amid the cost-of-living crisis. But it had become clear that the plan would have struggled to pass the House of Commons. The top tax rate accounted for just £2 billion of the proposed tax cuts, so this reversal will only go so far in placating opponents and markets. Truss addresses the party conference on Wednesday, and after her rocky start, we’ll be watching to see whether she can win support for her economic plan – and revive her party’s dismal approval rating enough to stay in the top job.

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People tour a Sana'a graveyard for Houthi fighters killed in fighting during a 2016 ceasefire in Yemen's civil war.

REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

Is Yemen on the road to peace?

A powerful country invades its neighbor. The conflict quickly becomes a brutal proxy war. A horrific humanitarian crisis ensues. While much of the world’s attention has been on Ukraine for the past few months, the civil war in Yemen is now in its eighth year. But in recent weeks signs of hope for peace have emerged, if faintly. What is the latest in a grinding conflict that has provoked what the UN calls "the world's worst humanitarian crisis"?

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Models of oil barrels and a pump jack are seen in front of EU and Russia flag colors.

REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

What We’re Watching: Drawdown pledge, Europe veers away from Russia, Ethiopian peace hopes dashed, a Gulf non-starter

Fighting continues despite Russia’s drawdown pledge

The Pentagon said it believes the Kremlin was starting to reposition some of its troops away from Kyiv. But Russia continued to pound the Ukrainian capital with airstrikes and artillery while maintaining its ferocious bombardment of the besieged port city of Mariupol. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that bilateral peace talks were making “substantial progress,” but Ukrainian officials immediately disputed his claim that Kyiv had accepted the loss of Crimea and the Donbas as a “resolved question.” President Zelensky late Wednesday released a new video in which he said "we don't believe in fancy rhetorical constructions, we believe in what happens on the battlefield."

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Annie Gugliotta & Jess Frampton

What We’re Watching: China's problems, UAE vs Houthis, Nord Stream 2 split

China's mounting problems. Xi Jinping is not off to a good start in 2022. First, Chinese economic growth slowed down to 4 percent in the last quarter of 2021, almost a percentage point less than the previous period. While annual GDP was up 8.1 percent year-on-year, beating government expectations, the trend is worrying for the world’s second-largest economy. Second, annual population growth fell in 2021 to its lowest rate since 1949, when the ruling Communist Party took over. Although Xi probably saw this one coming, he's running out of ideas to encourage Chinese families to have more children — which the government needs in order to sustain growth and support the elderly over the long term. Third, and most immediate: the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics canceled ticket sales for domestic spectators — foreigners were not invited — as the more transmissible omicron variant has driven up COVID infections in China to the highest level since March 2020. It's only the latest sign that Xi's controversial zero-COVID policy is setting itself up for failure against omicron without mRNA vaccines. What'll it take for China to reverse course?

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The Proxy War (Still) Raging in Yemen | GZERO World

The proxy war (still) raging in Yemen

For seven years, regional powers Iran and Saudi Arabia have fought each other... in Yemen. As usual, civilians are paying the price.

The Iranians back the Houthi rebels, who control Sanaa, while a Saudi-led coalition supports the internationally recognized government in Aden.

Unfortunately, neither side seems willing to back down, as recent fighting in Marib suggests. There's no road to peace.

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A Pakistani ranger stands near Indian and Pakistani flags during a fair in Chamliyal in the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.

REUTERS/Amit Gupta

What We're Watching: India-Pakistan talk water, Saudis float Yemen ceasefire, Polish writer in peril

India and Pakistan break bread over... water? Representatives from India and Pakistan are meeting this week to discuss water-sharing in the Indus River for the first time since the two countries severed relations following India's suspension of autonomy for Kashmir almost three years ago. It's a big deal — especially for the Pakistanis, whose farmers get 80 percent of the water they need to irrigate their crops from the Indus. Even more importantly, the meeting is also the latest sign of an apparent thaw in Indo-Pakistani ties, starting with last month's ceasefire agreement on Kashmir. A recently released readout of the secret talks that preceded that truce shows unusual impetus by both sides to make progress, and was followed up by rare conciliatory messages between Delhi and Islamabad. Given the long history of animosity between the two nuclear-armed nations -- they have gone to war three times since 1948 -- it's hard to be optimistic, but let's see if these water talks can move things along further.

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