Politics

Bloomberg Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte won parliamentary backing for a contested nighttime curfew to contain the coronavirus, capping a roller-coaster week that tested his popularity less than a month before a general election. The legislation passed by the Senate in The Hague means the nighttime curfew, which began on January 23 and triggered riots in Dutch cities, can stay ...

Bloomberg President Joe Biden said the racial strife that’s gripped the US since George Floyd’s death is an opportunity to make significant strides toward addressing inequity, likening the era to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. “We have a chance now, a chance now, to make significant change in racial disparities,” Biden said at a CNN town hall event ...

Bloomberg The first court hearing of ousted Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi since the February 1 coup began earlier than scheduled and without her lawyer present, further signalling the military’s intention to end her political career. Speaking by phone on Wednesday, her lawyer Khin Maung Zaw said that Suu Kyi appeared in front of the court via video link ...

Bloomberg Taiwan’s attempts to purchase five million doses of BioNTech SE’s Covid-19 vaccine fell apart at the last minute, Taiwan’s health minister said on Wednesday, voicing concern that political pressure from Beijing may have scuppered the deal. Taiwan’s government was making final preparations to sign a deal with Germany-based BioNTech in January but then “things changed,” minister Chen Shih-chung said ...

Bloomberg Gunmen kidnapped students and staff from a school in Nigeria, the second attack of its kind in recent months, a presidential spokesman said. The criminals abducted a “yet to be ascertained” number of people from a boys’ school in Kagara in Nigeria’s central Niger state, President Muhammadu Buhari’s spokesman, Garba Shehu, said in an emailed statement. Hundreds of students ...

Bloomberg The wife of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made her first public appearance in a year, ending an unusual absence that stoked speculation about her condition. Ri Sol Ju joined her husband at a musical performance for the anniversary of the birth of former leader Kim Jong Il, which is known as the Day of the Shining Star ...

Bloomberg World Trade Organisation (WTO) Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala urged the European Union and all other WTO members to end export restrictions on vaccines and other medical goods needed to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. “This is the only way we can get a freer flow of goods and get them to countries that don’t have access,” Okonjo-Iweala told Bloomberg in a ...

Bloomberg Myanmar’s junta again defended its move to oust civilian government in the face of nationwide protests, dismissing the impact of US sanctions while showing no signs of a compromise with demonstrators. Brigadier-General Zaw Min Tun, the lead spokesman for the State Administration Council, said on Tuesday the military’s actions were in line with the 2008 constitution and “not a ...

Bloomberg House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call for an independent commission to investigate last month’s Capitol insurrection has some bipartisan support, yet the effort risks getting tangled in the bitter aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s impeachment over the deadly assault. Pelosi said the commission would be modelled on the widely praised panel that probed the origins of the September 11, ...

Bloomberg Japan’s top government spokesman said it was “unacceptable” that Chinese coastguard vessels had approached Japanese trawlers near disputed islands for two straight days this week, in a sign of rising tension between the neighbours. Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told a news conference that Japan had protested incidents that took place in what the country sees as its territorial ...