Politics

Bloomberg Both North Korea and left-leaning supporters of South Korean President Moon Jae-in want him to restore economic ties broken by security tensions. But pleasing them would mean angering US President Donald Trump. North Korea said it was closing down communication links set up two years ago between Moon and Kim Jong-un, jeopardising the South Korean leader’s 2017 campaign promise ...

Bloomberg The reverberations from Donald Trump’s latest broadside against Germany have reached all the way to Moscow. The president’s decision to withdraw more than a quarter of the US troops stationed in her country leaves Chancellor Angela Merkel exposed at a moment when she’s facing growing pressure to get tough with Vladimir Putin and was welcomed in the Russian capital. ...

Bloomberg Joe Biden is working to show he’s an ally for black voters in their fight against police brutality, yet the likely Democratic nominee is only willing to go so far. In the wake of George Floyd’s death while in Minneapolis police custody, Biden has taken a tough stance against police misconduct, urging additional training for law enforcement and an ...

Bloomberg More than 142 people are missing and 57 feared killed after troops in Mali and Niger scaled up counter-terrorism operations in recent months, Amnesty International said. The human-rights group documented 199 cases of abuses, arbitrary arrests and forced disappearances by troops in the two countries, as well as neighbouring Burkina Faso, in February and March. The security forces were ...

Bloomberg Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza, whose 15-year rule was marked by political violence and upheaval that earned his country international pariah status, has died. He was 55. Nkurunziza suffered a heart attack on June 8, two days after playing a volleyball match, the government said. He was due to step down in August, after an election last month won by ...

Bloomberg The US and Russia will send senior officials to Vienna on June 22 for a new round of arms-control talks, a State Department official said, as the Trump administration tries to enlist Moscow’s help bringing China into broader negotiations to limit all three countries’ nuclear weapons stockpiles. The official didn’t rule out that the US may be willing to ...

Bloomberg North Korea said it was shutting a liaison office it shares with South Korea from Tuesday and severing communication over a leaders’ hot line, putting pressure on Seoul to break with Washington’s effort to isolate the country. North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the state was taking the move because South Korean authorities had “connived” to ...

Bloomberg The acting US ambassador to Japan denounced an animated video from public broadcaster NHK aimed at explaining the Black Lives Matter protests, adding to widespread criticism that it perpetuated racist stereotypes. “The caricatures used are offensive and insensitive,” Joe Young, the Charge d’Affaires ad interim, said on Twitter on Tuesday of the animation. It didn’t mention the death of ...

Bloomberg Greece and Italy signed an agreement on Tuesday that marks the maritime boundary in the Ionian Sea between the exclusive economic zones of the two European Union members. The deal is “an important development” and shows Greece’s constant goal is to delimit maritime zones with all its neighbours, with valid agreements that adhere to international law — unlike Turkey’s ...

Bloomberg Transmission of the novel coronavirus by people who don’t develop symptoms is “very rare,” the World Health Organization (WHO) said, playing down concerns that these so-called silent spreaders might serve as a major conduit for the disease. “It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” Maria Van Kerkhove, head of ...