Bloomberg Strikes protesting Ethiopia’s state of emergency spread across the restive Oromia region ahead of US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s arrival for talks with the Horn of Africa nation’s embattled government. The closing of shops and roads by members of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group is the latest sign of discontent in Oromia state, where unrest has prompted the country’s ...

Bloomberg Voters in Sierra Leone are going to the polls to elect a successor for President Ernest Bai Koroma in a campaign where an unprecedented number of political parties is making the outcome too close to call. As Koroma nears the end of his second five-year term, 16 parties are competing in the elections in the West African nation. His ...

BEIRUT / Reuters Syrian government forces pounded a town in the eastern Ghouta with air strikes on Wednesday in an effort to slice the rebel enclave in two as they intensified a campaign to deal the opposition its biggest defeat since 2016. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group says 800 civilians have been killed by government bombing and ...

Bloomberg Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing to extend a sweeping government overhaul that would give the Communist Party greater control over everything from financial services to manufacturing to entertainment in the world’s second-largest economy, two people familiar with the matter said. The changes are part of a proposed “CPC leadership system” approved by the party on February 28, the ...

Is it too much to ask that the government not insult our intelligence while it is lightening our wallets? As an overture to his predictable announcement of steel and aluminum tariffs, the president, that human sponge ever eager to soak up information, held a “listening session,” at which he listened to executives of steel and aluminum companies urge him to ...

My father’s words still ring loud a couple of decades later. “No one wins a war.” We were talking about military conflicts, yet those same five words are just as true for a trade war. US President Donald Trump clearly has other ideas. “Easy to win,” he says! One has to wonder how the US will prevail in a trade ...

As if a brewing trade war wasn’t enough to worry about, investors also need to be alert to the threat of a major currency conflict. Norihiro Takahashi, president of Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, dismissed Donald Trump’s tariffs plan as a “performance” for his supporters, and said US assets are no longer expensive, in an interview with The Wall Street ...

This past weekend was not only an important date for two large European countries, but also for markets. In Germany, the Social Democrat Party said its members decided to join a coalition government led by Christian Democrat Chancellor Angela Merkel, enabling Merkel to form a new pro-Europe government. In Italy, voters decided not to give any political party a majority ...

There’s a standard playbook for reviving cities by turning them into technology clusters. But not every town can become the next Silicon Valley, or Robot City, or biotech mecca. Minneapolis has shown that there is another way. Cities such as Raleigh, San Diego and Pittsburgh have all followed a similar model: Build around a top-ranked research university; bring together elites ...

Corporations warned last week that if the Trump administration imposed tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum, consumers would pay the price. That’s wishful thinking in the C-suite. Toyota said tariffs “would substantially raise costs and therefore prices of cars and trucks sold in America.” Higher costs are undebatable. But can Toyota actually raise prices? That gets to the challenge ...