Bloomberg Latvians go to the polls on Saturday, with an establishment-bashing upstart injecting drama into the country’s usually dull elections. The tiny Baltic nation is getting a taste of the populism that’s upended politics from London to Rome as a brash new party threatens to rip up the regular script. Its rise challenges the center-right coalitions that routinely prevail in ...

Bloomberg Beneath President Vladimir Putin’s angry denials that Russian spies were involved in attempted murder and hacking operations abroad, there’s palpable unease at the catalogue of sometimes laughable mishaps by his now-infamous GRU military-intelligence service. Accusations by the Netherlands, the UK and the US that four GRU agents were caught attempting to hack into a United Nations body investigating a ...

Bloomberg Former Army Captain Jair Bolsonaro widened his lead in a poll published a day before voters cast their ballots in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election. Bolsonaro would garner 36.7 percent of first-round votes, followed by Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad with 24 percent, according to the MDA/CNT poll. Bolsonaro had 28.2 percent in a previous MDA/CNT poll ...

Bloomberg China’s leading role in financing a wave of new coal plants across Asia is drawing fresh scrutiny as the world’s top climate scientists weigh calling for much deeper cuts in emissions. China, India, Japan and the Philippines rank among the biggest investors in the 1,380 coal plants under construction or development worldwide, according to a study by the German ...

Bloomberg Even though Beijing hasn’t sanctioned American oil imports yet, Chinese buyers aren’t taking any chances. The world’s second largest economy halted purchases of US crude in August for the first time since September 2016, according to US Census Bureau data. In July, Chinese buyers received nearly 12 million barrels of crude from the US. Beijing, once an enthusiastic buyer ...

Bloomberg Electrify America, created by Volkswagen AG as part of a settlement from the automaker’s emissions-cheating scandal, filed plans with California regulators to invest a second $200 million in electric car charging infrastructure. The investments will include deploying fast-charging stations in cities including Santa Cruz, Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to a statement Wednesday. Part of the money will ...

Bloomberg The European Union is set to offer the UK a free-trade deal deeper than any agreement that’s gone before, but will reject Prime Minister Theresa May’s demand for “frictionless trade,” according to EU diplomats. The EU’s vision for future ties with Britain will contain “about 30-40 percent” of May’s pitch for a wide-ranging trade and security deal, according to ...

Bloomberg Ford Motor Co. has told its 70,000 salaried employees that they will face unspecified job cuts as part of the automaker’s $11 billion restructuring, a bid to reverse its fading fortunes and cope with competitive pressures more nimbly. Morgan Stanley has speculated that Ford may pare more than 20,000 jobs from its global workforce of 202,000, but the automaker ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. has become the first big test case for the European Union’s beefed up privacy rules as Ireland’s data watchdog opened a probe into a security breach announced last week that affected as many as 50 million accounts. Ireland’s data protection authority said it has started investigating whether Facebook had “appropriate technical and organizational measures” in place to ...

Bloomberg HP Inc gave an upbeat profit forecast for fiscal 2019, signaling that the world’s largest maker of personal computers will continue to see robust demand for its growing product lineup. Profit, excluding certain items, will be $2.12 a share to $2.22 a share in the year that ends next October, the Palo Alto, California-based company said in a statement. ...