Politics

Bloomberg Australia joined the US in rejecting China’s expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea, calling them “inconsistent” with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. “There is no legal basis for China to draw straight baselines connecting the outermost points of maritime features or ‘island groups’ in the South China Sea,” Australia’s mission to ...

Bloomberg US officials said they now have custody of a Chinese researcher who had taken shelter at the country’s consulate in San Francisco after she was charged with trying to hide her military background. Officials briefing reporters declined to discuss the circumstances of the arrest of Juan Tang, a researcher at the University of California at Davis who was accused ...

Bloomberg At least seven potential pro-democracy candidates for Hong Kong’s Legislative Council elections in September have received questionnaires from the government asking them to show they haven’t violated the city’s mini constitution or recently imposed security law. Alvin Yeung and Cheng Tat-hung of the Civic Party, Kenneth Leung who plans to represent the accountancy sector, and four other opposition figures ...

Bloomberg Somalia lawmakers removed Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire and his cabinet in a no-confidence vote that’s likely to delay elections due this year and risk further instability in the Horn of Africa nation. The vote was backed by 170 lawmakers, with only eight others rejecting the motion, according to Parliament speaker Mohamed Mursal Abdirahman. President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, also ...

Bloomberg A Singaporean man pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal agent for Chinese intelligence in the US, according to a statement posted on the US Department of Justice website. Jun Wei Yeo, also known as Dickson Yeo, admitted that he provided valuable information to Chinese intelligence and knowingly recruited others in the US to do the same, a FBI ...

Bloomberg China vowed retaliation after the US forced the closure of its Houston consulate, prompting stocks to fall in one of the biggest blows to diplomatic ties between the two countries in decades. The US government gave China three days to close its consulate in America’s fourth-most populous city in an “unprecedented escalation,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged opponents of Britain’s departure from the European Union to “move on,” saying a Parliamentary report published found no evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 referendum. “What we have here is the rage and fury of the remainder elite finding that there is in fact nothing in this report, no smoking gun whatever,” Johnson ...

Bloomberg France renewed its criticism of China over the treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang on Wednesday, calling for human rights observers to be allowed into the region and demanding that internment camps be closed. Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said witness accounts indicated human rights abuses that cannot be ignored, such as detention camps, people disappearing, forced labour, the ...

Bloomberg Cracks may be emerging in the so-called ironclad military alliance between South Korea and the US, stoking worries in Seoul that the Trump administration is looking at withdrawing troops from the peninsula. Defense Secretary Mark Esper isn’t ruling out reductions to US Forces in Korea, telling a forum that, while no order has been given, the administration was looking ...

Bloomberg Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike told residents to avoid unnecessary trips outdoors as much as possible during a forthcoming four-day weekend as the city’s running total topped 10,000 and new cases nationwide were reported to hit a new daily record. Japan’s capital had another 238 cases on Wednesday, as the country heads into a long weekend that was originally scheduled ...