Bloomberg Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte pledged in his maiden speech that his government will push through populist measures ranging from a “citizen’s income” for the poor to tax cuts and curbs on immigration, as he called for a stronger, fairer Europe “to prevent its decline.” Speaking in the Senate before a confidence vote, the 53-year-old lawyer with no political ...

Bloomberg Germany is ready to challenge any attempt by Italy’s populist government to flout European Union regulations or seek special treatment from the bloc. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was among the first to congratulate her Italian counterpart, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, but if necessary she is prepared to make clear to the new government in Rome that it must stick ...

Bloomberg Sweden’s nationalists are cementing their support at near 20 percent as the country heads for an election in September that is all but certain to end in gridlock. The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD) were backed by 18.5 percent of potential voters, up 5.6 percentage points from the election in 2014, a watched biannual poll from the country’s statistics office ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany ignited a fresh political furor after telling news website Breitbart he wants to “empower” conservative forces across Europe, compounding already tense trans-Atlantic relations. Germany’s Foreign Ministry said it will seek a clarification over the comments by US Ambassador Richard Grenell when he meets a deputy foreign minister on Wednesday. Grenell said in an ...

Bloomberg Special Counsel Robert Mueller accused Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, of attempting to tamper with witnesses in the federal case charging him with money laundering and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Ukraine. Manafort and a longtime associate tried to contact two witnesses to secure false testimony about work that a group ...

Bloomberg Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is looking to defend himself against claims he’ll be too generous to Catalan separatists with his first appointments. Foreign Minister-Designate Josep Borrell was one of the most high-profile defenders of Spanish unity during last year’s crisis and as a Catalan has particular authority to tackle the separatists’ arguments. The 71-year-old will also be in ...

China and the United States are presenting themselves as exemplars of opposite models of political governance. China has laid out its vision for a rejuvenated nation: a socialist planned economy, built on data and analytics, that will displace market economies. The US is taking the opposite route: withdrawing government from the marketplace, deregulating the economy through executive orders, starving regulators ...

Ironically, the city that should have been first to be swept up by China’s fintech revolution is still a picture of old-world conservatism. Not for long, though. Hong Kong, whose last big innovation in retail payments is as old as the former British colony’s 1997 handover to China, is on the cusp of big change. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s ...

Venture capital investor and longtime technology observer Mary Meeker has published her annual Internet Trends presentation — 294 slides this year, including a section on transportation. There’s a useful finding on slide 128: What Americans spend on purchasing vehicles has dropped since the 1970s, while spending on “other transportation,” including public transport and ride hailing, has nearly doubled. Bloomberg New ...

American farmers have been complaining of labor shortages for several years now. Given a multi-year decline in illegal immigration, and a similarly sustained pickup in the US job market, the complaints are unlikely to stop without an overhaul of immigration rules for farm workers. Efforts to create a more straightforward agricultural-workers visa that would enable foreign workers to stay longer ...