Bloomberg Ousted Catalan president Carles Puigdemont was released after less than a day in custody as a court in Brussels considers how to respond to a Spanish demand for his arrest. Puigdemont and four former members of his government are barred from leaving Belgium without the court’s consent and must comply with all summons made by judicial or police authorities, ...

BEIRUT / Reuters Lebanon’s president stressed that stability is “a red line” after the prime minister’s shock resignation, Justice Minister Salim Jreissati said on Monday after meeting the president. Saudi King Salman received Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri in Riyadh on Monday, two days after he quit, Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television reported. In a televised speech, Hariri had said he feared ...

Bloomberg Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe signaled a worsening split in his ruling party ahead of elections next year by announcing he’s prepared to fire his deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Mugabe issued the threat at a rally in the southern African nation’s second biggest city, Bulawayo, a day before his wife Grace announced she’s prepared to succeed the president, who’s ruled Zimbabwe ...

Bloomberg The Democratic Republic of Congo will hold delayed presidential elections on December 23, 2018, the electoral commission said, a year later than opponents of President Joseph Kabila have demanded. National and provincial parliamentary polls will take place on the same date, Independent Electoral Commission Rapporteur Jean-Pierre Kalamba told reporters in the capital, Kinshasa. A series of other votes including ...

Has there ever been a covert action that backfired as disastrously as Russia’s attempt to meddle in the 2016 US presidential campaign? Granted, we know all the reasons Moscow is gloating: Donald Trump is president; America is divided and confused; Russia’s propagandization of ‘fake news’ is now repeated by people around the world as evidence that nothing is believable and ...

For more than a year now, a sort of phony war has been going on in the financial-services industry. Respected seers such as Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer John Cryan and Citigroup Inc.’s former chief Vikram Pandit have been prophesying a digital revolution that will see routine banking jobs replaced by automation, algorithms and artificial intelligence. To date, as ...

Well, that didn’t take long. Broadcom Ltd. is exploring a $100 billion-plus takeover of chipmaker Qualcomm Inc., Bloomberg News reported. This is the same Broadcom that announced its decision to move its legal headquarters to the US in an Oval Office presentation that carried the usual bravado of President Donald Trump’s administration. We wondered then if this sudden bout of ...

Donald Trump has a cautious side after all. In naming Jerome Powell as next chairman of the Federal Reserve, the president has chosen a loyal ally of the outgoing chair, Janet Yellen. At first sight, the appointment signals business as usual in monetary policy, rather than the unconventionality that some of the other candidates stood for. On the whole, this ...

A ‘New Era’ in President Xi Jinping’s China risks setting off alarm bells in the US and Europe. The ruling Communist Party committed to the more assertive policy during a twice-a-decade reshuffle that ended last week, contrasting with a relatively restrained approach over the past three decades. Xi said that China was ‘approaching the center of the world stage’ as ...

It took Equifax just 35 days to determine that four of its executives did nothing wrong when they sold stock, saving themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars, just days after the company learned that it might have had a security breach. That was four days faster than it took the credit-reporting agency to tell the public about the hack. The ...