Bloomberg Global speculation about Kim Jong-un’s health intensified over the weekend, with a flurry of tantalising — and unverified — reports about a visit by a Chinese medical team and movements of the North Korean leader’s armoured train. China sent a team including doctors and senior diplomats to advise its neighbour and longtime ally, Reuters reported, citing three people familiar ...

Bloomberg Boris Johnson was expected to return to work on Monday and take charge of the UK’s handling of the pandemic, a month after he was struck down by the coronavirus. The government has been without a leader since the prime minister was admitted to the hospital on April 5. Since being released he’s been slowly easing his way back, ...

Bloomberg As Japan nears three weeks under a state of emergency to tackle the spread of the coronavirus, reports indicate that the government is weighing the need to extend the emergency beyond early May. There is a growing view within the government that it may not be possible to fully lift the emergency as planned on May 6, national broadcaster ...

Bloomberg Spain reported the smallest increase in coronavirus deaths in more than a month as the government prepares more steps to ease one of the world’s strictest lockdowns. Fatalities increased by 288, holding below 400 for the third day, and lower than the 378 recorded on April 25, according to data published by the Health Ministry. The daily death count ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump has been determined to talk his way through the coronavirus crisis, but frequent misstatements at his daily news conferences have caused a litany of public health and political headaches for the White House. Trump sought to clean up his briefing room riff from the day before about the possibility of fighting coronavirus infection in patients with ...

Among the many political shortcomings that the pandemic has laid bare is that the US suffers from constitutional and statutory gaps that make its democracy, and even its basic governing ability, vulnerable in an emergency. The good news? The hard thinking about this problem has mostly already been done. The bad news? No one who can do anything about it ...

When a congressional back-bencher with fringe right-wing ideas took office last year, many Brazilians held their breath. Some hoped and prayed that Jair Bolsonaro might rise to the occasion, moderate his rhetoric and compensate for his lack of executive experience by delegating to a first-rate cabinet. Leave it to the adults in the room — Economy Minister Paulo Guedes, Vice ...

The economic contraction wrought by efforts to contain the coronavirus is shredding inflation. Now deflation, a prolonged period of falling prices, is stalking the globe. The collapsing oil market is both a symptom of weaker demand and cause for a deepening slump. Huge levels of stimulus are likely to be required long after the pandemic subsides. Yet concerns about prices ...

As the calendar turns to May, we’re likely to see a slow return of growth for some types of economic activity that were wiped out by the coronavirus shutdowns in March and April. That’s the good news. The bad news is, as we’ve seen in the oil industry, much of the economy remains tremendously oversupplied for likely levels of demand ...

The UK’s House of Commons, often called the “mother of parliaments” (although that’s not the original meaning of the term), took a flying leap into the Zoom era this week with its first virtual Prime Minister’s Questions meeting. It was a different look from the usually raucous, crowded chamber of standing speeches, jeers, interruptions, eye-rolls and the suspense-filled votes that ...