Politics

BLOOMBERG Thailand’s main opposition party remains the top choice of voters ahead of a general election next month, with Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha and his party falling further behind in their bid to retain power, according to an opinion poll. Pheu Thai, linked to former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, was backed by 47% of the participants in the April 3-7 survey ...

BLOOMBERG Deadly battles between Sudan’s army and a rival paramilitary group spread across the country during a second day of violence, with fatalities rising to at least 56 amid fears of a full-blown civil war. Intense fighting took place at the military’s headquarters in the capital Khartoum, causing parts of the building to catch fire, the army said in a ...

BLOOMBERG German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition will quickly approve a Polish request for permission to re-export MiG 29 fighter jets from former East German military stocks to Ukraine, according to a person familiar with the issue. The coalition will grant the demand to further support Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invading forces, said the person who asked not ...

BLOOMBERG  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to punish breakers of construction-safety regulations in the wake of February’s deadly earthquakes, a move to distance himself from the devastation brought by tens of thousands of building collapses. “We will squeeze them into a corner,” Erdogan said in an interview with with CNN-Turk television. “It will be included in crimes that can’t ...

BLOOMBERG President Joe Biden said the US was close to concluding investigations into the leak of sensitive documents that exposed American spying practices and assessments of Russia’s war in Ukraine, even as he sought to downplay the impact of the disclosures. “There’s a full-blown investigation going on right now, as you know, with the intelligence community and the Justice Department,” ...

BLOOMBERG A veteran Chinese diplomat warned that unless the US fundamentally changes its attitude towards the nation, there’s no point in talks on ways to safeguard the relationship. “China-US relations are very much strained,” said Xu Bu, head of the China Institute of International Studies, a think tank affiliated with the country’s foreign ministry. “One of the most important causes ...

BLOOMBERG Russian security services have stepped up attempts to recruit Ukrainian refugees traveling to Estonia, the Baltic nation’s counterintelligence agency said in an annual report. The EU country bordering Russia provided refugee status to 45,000 Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion. It’s one of the biggest influxes seen by any country on a per-capita basis, with many of the displaced Ukrainians arriving ...

BLOOMBERG Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva arrives in China as President Xi Jinping seeks to build momentum for talks to halt fighting in Ukraine more than a year after Russia’s invasion. Lula’s trip to Shanghai and Beijing comes as Xi embarks on a round of diplomacy in the weeks after visiting Moscow, where he strengthened political ties with ...

BLOOMBERG Emmanuel Macron urged Europe to develop more strategic autonomy as a way to avoid the risk of turning the European Union (EU) countries into “vassals” in the event of a global crisis such as a US-China confrontation. “Strategic autonomy must be the battle of Europe,” the French president told the business daily Les Echos during his visit to China. ...

BLOOMBERG North Korea appears to be purposefully cutting a communication link with South Korea as it ratchets up tensions by testing new weapons and denouncing its neighbour as a “puppet traitor” for holding military drills with the US. South Korea’s Unification Ministry said that North Korea failed to respond for a fourth straight day to regularly held calls on an ...