Politics

Bloomberg Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s narrow win in a key parliamentary vote on Monday showed that the prospect of snap elections still remains a risk for the country. Just 111 of 221 lawmakers present voted in favour of the premier’s motion to remove speaker Mohamad Ariff Md Yusof, who was appointed by the previous administration, while 109 voted against. ...

Bloomberg Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is set to push for revoking highway concessions held by Autostrade per l’Italia SpA, rejecting a final offer from the Benetton-owned toll-road manager in a dispute that has split his coalition. Shares of the company’s owner, Atlantia SpA, slumped. “I’m not satisfied at all with the offer, which is embarrassing,” Conte told newspaper Il ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump uses Facebook like a Swiss Army knife — to raise money, amplify his message, and mobilise voters. His rival, Joe Biden, uses the increasingly controversial social platform primarily to stick his hand out for donations. As he did in 2016, Trump is taking advantage of the social media giant’s granular knowledge of its users’ interests to ...

Bloomberg Google, Microsoft and the US Chamber of Commerce backed a lawsuit by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over the Trump administration’s order banning foreign students from the country if their universities are not offering in-person instruction. The court filing by the companies and business group backs a lawsuit challenging the July 6 directive as “invalid” due ...

Bloomberg Hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents defied concerns about social-distancing and a new security law to vote in two-day primaries held by pro-democracy opposition parties. More than 318,100 people voted electronically and at least 10,000 had used paper ballots as of 1 pm on Sunday, Andrew Chiu, convenor of organiser Power for Democracy, said at a press conference ...

Bloomberg An outspoken critic of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party was allowed to go home after being detained by Beijing police about a week ago, the New York Times reported. Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University, was released on Sunday, the newspaper cited two people familiar with him as saying. He was taken away by ...

Bloomberg The Philippines will adhere without compromise to a 2016 court victory that nullified China’s claims in most of the South China Sea, its top diplomat said. “The award is non-negotiable,” Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin said in a statement on Sunday. He was commemorating the fourth anniversary of a Permanent Court of Arbitration’s decision which ruled China had ...

Bloomberg Poland is voting in a high-stakes presidential election as the coronavirus pandemic tests the populists’ grip on power and threatens one of the biggest nationalist makeovers in the heart of Europe. In what may be the closest ballot in Poland’s post-communist history, incumbent Andrzej Duda is battling Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski for the presidency in a runoff ballot on ...

Bloomberg Senators Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey became the first major Republican elected officials to criticise President Donald Trump‘s decision to commute the prison sentence of Roger Stone. “Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,” Utah senator Romney said. The tweet trended on the ...

Bloomberg The number of coronavirus cases in Indonesia exceeded 75,000 as infections in the two largest hotspots continued to accelerate after the government eased physical-distancing curbs more than a month ago. There were 1,681 new cases in the 24 hours to midday on Sunday, bringing the total to 75,699, authorities said, adding that 71 people succumbed to the virus. The ...