Bloomberg Pressure is mounting on Germany’s Social Democrats to join Chancellor Angela Merkel in a revived alliance and end the impasse threatening political stability in Europe’s largest economy. While Merkel has publicly stated she’s open to another election, her backers are betting that the SPD will abandon its aversion to a rerun of the “grand coalition,” according to people familiar ...

Bloomberg US President Donald Trump’s designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism is a severe provocation that reminds the country it should keep hold of its “precious nuclear sword,” the nation’s foreign ministry said through its official Korean Central News Agency. In the Korean language statement on Wednesday, Pyongyang said it opposed any form of support for ...

Bloomberg At least 50 people were killed in a suicide blast in a northeastern Nigerian town, the deadliest mosque bombing in three years by suspected Boko Haram militants. The teenage male assailant entered a mosque in the town of Mubi strapped with improvised explosives and detonated them as people gathered at dawn for prayers, Adam-awa state police spokesman Othman Abubakar ...

Bloomberg The Congress of South African Trade Unions is seeking to alter the balance of power in its alliance with the ruling African National Congress and wants the party to change its constitution to limit the president’s power to reshuffle the nation’s cabinet. “The ANC constitution must be amended to tell the president of the ANC what he can do,” ...

Bloomberg Zimbabwe is turning its weary eyes to Emmerson Mnangagwa, the man known as the crocodile who was Robert Mugabe’s right-hand man for much of his 37-year rule. The former spy chief, who’s due to be inaugurated as interim president, has signalled he’d move to woo investors from Asia and the west to help rebuild a shattered economy. But he ...

Chinese President Xi Jinping recently laid out a bold vision for transforming his country into a fully developed economy by 2050, with a particular emphasis on spurring innovation and technology. Given China’s current level of human capital — and some looming changes in the world economy — that may be harder than he expects. A widely held view in the ...

Facebook and China’s Tencent are entrenched among the global technology elite, and they are more alike than at first glance. Yes, the two companies are quite different businesses. Facebook Inc. makes nearly all of its $36 billion in annual revenue from selling advertising to companies eager to reach the 2 billion people who use its internet hangouts each month. Tencent ...

Are you ready for another thrilling fight over network neutrality? It’s coming. Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, plans to dismantle rules put in place in 2015 that require internet service providers to treat all content travelling through their pipes equally. The rules prohibit the ISPs from blocking or “throttling” certain web traffic, and from offering “fast ...

Pity Philip Hammond, the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer. His budget announcement yesterday has to contend not just with the long-term fiscal implications of sluggish growth in productivity — a nagging issue for the British economy — but also with the government’s lack of a parliamentary majority and the enormous uncertainty surrounding Brexit. These conditions demand an exacting balance of ...

There was widespread excitement last week on the news that Norway’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund has announced an intention to sell off its oil and gas holdings. This amounts to about 6 percent of the fund’s stockholdings, about $37 billion. Environmental activists, in particular, are delighted and expect this to trigger a broader sell-off in fossil fuels. Bill McKibben, ...