Politics

Bloomberg Portugal protested the UK requirement that British travellers self-isolate when they return to England from the Iberian nation as “profoundly unfair.” It’s “absurd,” Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva said on RTP3 television station. “When a country that has 28 times more deaths from Covid-19 than Portugal wants to impose quarantine rules to passengers from Portugal, I would say that ...

Bloomberg US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, the Trump administration’s main representative for North Korea, will visit South Korea on Tuesday before heading to Japan, Yonhap reported Saturday, citing unidentified diplomatic sources. Biegun will visit Seoul on July 7, where he is likely to meet South Korean counterpart Lee Do-hoon along with diplomatic officials at the foreign ministry and ...

Bloomberg As Vladimir Putin surveys his resounding victory in this week’s national vote on constitutional changes that would allow him to rule until 2036, one Arctic region spoils the triumphant map. The remote Nenets Autonomous Region, an oil-rich swath of tundra about the size of Missouri that’s home to 42,000, was the only one in the official count to reject ...

Bloomberg A landslide at a jade mining site in Myanmar has left 126 people dead with heavy rains forcing authorities to pause search and rescue efforts. The deceased were mostly small-time miners collecting stones at old mining sites in Hpakant town in northern Kachin state. They were buried by mud after heavy rains led to the collapse of a quarry, ...

Bloomberg Countries including Britain, Germany and Switzerland sought to allay concerns that they won’t have sufficient stocks of Gilead Sciences Inc’s remdesivir, one of two drugs shown to treat Covid-19, after the US forged a deal to snap up almost all the supplies for three months. The UK worked with Gilead in May to secure remdesivir in advance and has ...

Bloomberg China on Thursday warned of strong countermeasures if the US, Australia and the UK continued taking actions in response to Beijing’s tough national security law in Hong Kong, saying foreign pressure would “never succeed.” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said China “deplores and firmly opposes” the US House of Representatives’ unanimous passing of a bill that would level ...

Bloomberg Scotland’s nationalists are reviving their debate over how to push for another independence vote amid growing tension with the government in London over everything from the handling of the coronavirus pandemic to how to pay for the recovery. Two prominent Scottish National Party members of the UK Parliament called on the semi-autonomous administration in Edinburgh to explore how to ...

Bloomberg The world needs more than one vaccine to tackle the new coronavirus, even as pharma companies race to be the first with a pandemic shot, said US infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci. “I’d love to see more than one vaccine get to the goal line, as it were,” Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration’s response to the allegation Russia offered bounties for killing American troops makes the US vulnerable to adversaries regardless of whether it’s true, former US National Security Advisor John Bolton says. “What it tells the Russians is that we are in disarray and ripe for this kind of provocation, not just in Afghanistan but in many, many ...

Bloomberg Russian President Vladimir Putin is on course to secure a resounding endorsement of his bid to extend his two-decade-long rule potentially up to 2036, as the Kremlin faces criticism for its heavy-handed efforts to marshal support. Putin, a former KGB colonel who came to power in 2000, is already the longest-serving Russian leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The ...