Politics

  Bloomberg Japan won’t send any government representatives to the Beijing Winter Olympics, effectively throwing its support behind the US-led diplomatic boycott of the games that start in February. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno announced that Japan would dispatch three top members of the teams that helped organize this year’s Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. He added the government had reached ...

  Bloomberg Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said China has been “playing” Western states against each other and that democracies should present a “united front” in response. “There’s been a bit of competition amongst friends because we’re capitalist democracies trying to do well, especially given the extraordinary economic opportunity of the rise in the Chinese middle class,” Trudeau said in ...

  Bloomberg Britain’s Labour Party has an eight-point lead over Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, according to a poll commissioned by the Sunday Times. The survey of almost 25,000 people, with a breakdown of each constituency, found Labour with enough support to win a general election with 338 seats to the Conservatives’ 237, enough for a 26-seat Labour majority, the ...

  Bloomberg German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s foreign policy adviser Jens Ploetner and Russia’s Ukraine negotiator Dmitry Kozak agreed to meet next month to try to reduce tensions over Ukraine, Reuters reported, citing an unidentified German government source. Germany wants to quickly revive the “Normandy format,” referring to multilateral talks involving Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany, the person told Reuters. The ...

  Bloomberg President Joe Biden signed into law a bill banning goods from China’s Xinjiang region unless companies can prove they aren’t made with forced labor, a move that will add to tensions over Beijing’s treatment of the nation’s Uyghur minority. The bill passed with unanimous backing in both the House and Senate earlier this month, showcasing how Republicans and ...

  Bloomberg The Russian Defense Ministry said more than 10,000 troops would return to their permanent bases in the Southern Military District after over a month of training in the region, including in areas near the Ukrainian border. The exercises took place throughout the district, including in the Crimea and Rostov regions that border Ukraine, according to a statement posted ...

  Bloomberg Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing said there are plans to hold a fresh general election on August 2023, sticking to the military government’s timeline and defying pressure from the US to hold polls earlier. “Depending on state stability and peace, we are making our utmost effort to hold a multi-party general election on August 2023,” the junta ...

  Bloomberg An Indian court has urged the federal election commission and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to postpone state polls due early next year and ban large political gatherings to avoid a possible surge of omicron-fueled infections. The Allahabad High Court, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, asked the Election Commission of India to defer elections by as much ...

  Bloomberg South Korea’s government will grant a special pardon to former President Park Geun-hye, releasing her from prison after she spent nearly five years behind bars of a 22-year sentence for corruption. Park, a conservative and a prominent rival of the current leader, will be released on December 31, the Justice Ministry said. “From the perspective of the national ...

  Bloomberg Poland’s government rejected fresh allegations that it illegally hacked the mobile phone of a senior opposition lawmaker during the 2019 parliamentary election campaign, the latest spying scandal hitting the country’s nationalist leaders. The Associated Press reported that Senator Krzysztof Brejza’s mobile phone was hacked with sophisticated spyware when he was running the main opposition party’s campaign, citing internet ...