Politics

BLOOMBERG China said its defense spending would grow by 7.2% this year — the fastest pace since 2019 amid increasing tensions with the US on a range of issues, including Taiwan. Military expenditure is expected to rise to 1.55 trillion yuan ($225 billion) in 2023, according to the Ministry of Finance’s annual report released on Sunday at the start of ...

BLOOMBERG Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government plans new laws to prevent people who enter the UK on small boats from claiming asylum, as it looks for ways to halt a record influx of migrants crossing the English Channel. Discussing legislation expected to be introduced this week, Chris Heaton-Harris, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, said more options could be provided ...

BLOOMBERG It’s been more than three decades since the Philippines ordered US troops to withdraw from their sprawling military bases in the country, ending an era that hearkened back to America’s colonial days. Now the man overseeing the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority — once home to the US’s biggest naval base in Asia — wants them back. A recently revived ...

BLOOMBERG US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Quad nation counterparts seemed to use a public appearance to reassure China the grouping was not a security union seeking to force countries in Asia to choose between them and Beijing. “This is not a military grouping, it’s not that kind of alliance,” Blinken said on Friday at a panel discussion ...

BLOOMBERG Turkey’s opposition is in crisis over a failure to agree on a joint candidate to contest President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, hampering a rare chance to unseat the country’s longest-serving leader at elections in less than three months. The infighting burst into the open on Friday when the opposition bloc’s second largest party Iyi slammed the rest of the group ...

BLOOMBERG A billionaire and “close” partner of oligarch Roman Abramovich has become the first person to challenge the UK’s Russian sanctions regime in a London court. Lawyers for Eugene Shvidler, who has long been associated with Abramovich, filed the claim last month, saying that the UK made “significant errors” in its assessment of Shvidler’s relationship with the former owner of ...

BLOOMBERG Germany has asked Switzerland if it can buy back some of the nation’s decommissioned Leopard 2 battle tanks as part of an effort to replace depleted stocks among Nato allies. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and Economy Minister Robert Habeck made the request in a February 23 letter to Swiss Defense Minister Viola Amherd, a German defense ministry spokesman ...

BLOOMBERG China sent the most warplanes near Taiwan in nearly two months, a move that comes as the US approved the sale of $619 million worth of arms to the democratically run island. Some 17 J-10 and four J-16 fighter jets were detected in the southwestern part of the island’s air-defense identification zone in the 24 hours to early Thursday, ...

BLOOMBERG Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a brief encounter with his Russian counterpart on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in India, their first in-person meeting since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago. The top US diplomat pressed Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to move towards a peace deal with Ukraine and advocated for US citizens detained ...

BLOOMBERG Vladimir Putin called an attack in a village near the border with Ukraine “a terrorist act,” hours after scrapping plans to travel to southern Russia on Thursday over the episode. “They crossed into the border zone and opened fire on civilians” who were in a vehicle, Putin said in comments at the start of a televised video conference with ...