Politics

Bloomberg North Korea appears to have fired two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea shared with Japan, hours after leader Kim Jong-un oversaw a military exercise. South Korea said it had detected the projectiles fired from North Pyongan Province near the West Sea and that they travelled 410 kilometers (255 miles). Japan’s coast guard confirmed that the projectiles fell outside ...

Bloomberg New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a coronavirus alert system with escalating restrictions on human contact, travel and business operations as the risk of community transmission grows. In a televised address to the nation on Saturday, Ardern said New Zealand had moved to level two on the four-tier system, signalling the virus is contained but domestic transmission risks ...

Bloomberg UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, US President Donald Trump and other leaders want to ramp up coronavirus testing. There’s just one problem: Providers of the diagnostics can’t make enough kits to keep up with demand. The UK will soon be testing 25,000 people a day for the virus, Johnson said at a press conference, and that could eventually rise ...

Bloomberg China took the unprecedented step of expelling more than a dozen US journalists from three American newspapers, escalating a wider battle with the Trump administration as the coronavirus pandemic threatens to drag the global economy into a recession. China’s foreign ministry said US reporters at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post must hand in their ...

Bloomberg European Union (EU) leaders agreed to restrict most travel into the continent in an unprecedented move aimed at slowing down the spread of a deadly coronavirus and mitigating its effects on the bloc. The restrictions will apply to all non-EU citizens and last for an initial 30 days, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters after a video conference with ...

Bloomberg Vladimir Putin’s surprise move to allow himself to remain as president until 2036 caught even many Kremlin insiders off guard, leaving some feeling deceived by his motivation for changing the constitution. His sudden reversal — approving a plan that he’d long publicly resisted — was a blow to some senior officials’ hopes that he would find a more elegant ...

Bloomberg Joe Biden’s decisive victories in Florida, Illinois and Arizona effectively put the Democratic nomination out of reach for Bernie Sanders. The former vice president won all three states by wide enough margins that he now has a majority of all delegates pledged so far, and more than half of the almost 2,000 he needs to secure the nomination at ...

Bloomberg Remember Brexit? Hundreds of trade negotiators from the UK and European Union were due to meet in London on Wednesday to hammer out a trade deal. With those discussions now delayed because of the coronavirus, it’s increasingly likely Prime Minister Boris Johnson will have to postpone Britain’s final break with the bloc at the end of this year, something ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump for the first time on his Twitter feed used the phrase “Chinese Virus,” stepping up friction between the world’s two biggest economies as each tries to deflect blame for a deadly pandemic. Trump, who has previously called the disease a “foreign virus,” tweeted on Tuesday: “The United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines ...

Bloomberg Malaysia confirmed its first deaths from the new coronavirus after the country reported the highest number of infections in Southeast Asia. A 60-year-old Malaysian man died in Kuching in the eastern state of Sarawak with authorities still identifying the source of his infection, according to a statement from the state government. That was followed by the death of a ...