Politics

Bloomberg Polish President Andrzej Duda is hoping to boost his re-election bid by meeting Donald Trump in Washington next week, just four days before the east European nation’s ballot. Duda has long played up what he calls his “special relationship” with Trump, who gave a major foreign-policy speech in Warsaw in 2017. Additional security guarantees from the US at the ...

Bloomberg World War II veterans selected to sit with President Vladimir Putin at next week’s Red Square military parade are being kept in isolation at a health resort as part of measures to protect him from possible exposure to the coronavirus. Nearly 80 veterans were brought to the resort outside Moscow for 14 days before the June 24 parade, when ...

Bloomberg Hungarian PM Viktor Orban lost a court fight with the European Union over controversial curbs on foreign-funded non-governmental organisations and groups linked to financier George Soros. The Hungarian law imposed “discriminatory and unjustified restrictions on foreign donations to civil society organisations,” the EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg said in a final ruling on Thursday. The case follows a ...

Bloomberg Japanese prosecutors arrested a former justice minister and his lawmaker wife on vote-buying allegations on Thursday, in a fresh blow for troubled Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Katsuyuki Kawai resigned from the cabinet in October, less than two months after being appointed, following allegations in a magazine that he was linked to illicit payments made to local politicians and potential ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Narendra Modi has vowed India will defend its sovereignty in his first public statement since deadly clashes along its contested border with China resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian troops and an unknown number of Chinese casualties. “India wants peace,” Modi said in a televised address on Wednesday. “But when provoked India will and is capable ...

Bloomberg South Korea warned North Korea against further provocations, after Kim Jong-un’s regime pledged to dismantle the last remnants of President Moon Jae-in’s legacy of rapprochement and move troops into disarmed border areas. Moon’s office urged North Korea to tread carefully after the country reduced to rubble a $15 million liaison office set up north of the border in 2018 ...

Bloomberg European Union diplomats are furious that President Donald Trump shut them out of talks between Serbia and Kosovo, fearing not only that EU interests will be sidelined but that the two countries’ long-term interests will suffer. Three officials familiar with the behind-the-scenes maneuvering in the Balkans said the transatlantic snub ignores years of EU efforts at reconciliation between the ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong, already grappling with tightened policing to rein in widespread protests that followed last year’s proposed extradition bill, is now bracing for the prospect of stricter digital controls — ones that would curtail free speech, communications and the ability to organise and turn the city of 7 million into a surveillance state that more closely resembles China. In ...

Bloomberg Mexico plans to keep migrant workers from travelling to Canada amid a wave of coronavirus outbreaks on farms, threatening a labour squeeze in the northern nation’s fruit and vegetable industry as harvests start to ramp up. There will be a “temporary pause” on migrant workers travelling to Canada while protocols and sanitary situations are reviewed, Daniel Millan, a spokesman ...

Bloomberg North Korea blew up an inter-Korean liaison office on its side of the border, in an explosive rebuke to Seoul that appeared designed to draw maximum global attention with little immediate risk of war. The move represented North Korea’s most serious provocation in years and follows an escalating series of threats against South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s government. The ...