Politics

Bloomberg A UK minister of health, Nadine Dorries, has become the first British member of parliament to test positive for coronavirus. She’s reported to have attended a reception with Prime Minister Boris Johnson the day before she fell ill, and had met hundreds of people in Parliament that week. The Times reported she had fallen ill on March 6 and ...

Bloomberg Vladimir Putin set the stage to stay on as Russia’s president for potentially another 16 years, reversing his past opposition to scrapping term limits so that he — and only he — can continue to rule the country. “I fully recognise my own personal responsibility towards the citizens of this country,” Putin said in an unscheduled speech before the ...

Bloomberg Venezuelan police detained an opposition lawmaker hours after Juan Guaido supporters in Caracas were met with tear gas during a protest against Nicolas Maduro’s regime. Masked FAES officers forcibly removed Renzo Prieto from a hotel in eastern Caracas in the late afternoon, according to Guaido’s press office. Two other lawmakers, Zandra Castillo and Angel Torres, were released after being ...

Bloomberg Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden have cancelled planned rallies in Cleveland, Ohio amid concerns about coronavirus spreading at public events and suggested the campaigns might suspend large gatherings. But President Donald Trump’s campaign took a different tack, announcing that he would attend a ‘Catholics for Trump’ coalition event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on March 19, that “will bring together Catholics ...

Bloomberg Anwar Ibrahim is most likely to lead the country instead of former leader Mahathir Mohamad if the opposition coalition returns to power, according to a top leader in the bloc. “I will have a meeting, and I think most probably it’s going to be Anwar,” former Deputy Prime Minister Wan Azizah Wan Ismail said in a Bloomberg Television interview ...

Bloomberg Europe struggled to find a unified response to the new coronavirus as Italy became the first democratic country since World War II to announce a nationwide lockdown. As countries across the region put in place their own piecemeal measures to slow the spread of the highly infectious virus, Austria said it will block travellers from Italy unless they can ...

Bloomberg The Afghan capital hosted rival presidential inaugurations after US efforts failed to broker a rapprochement between its two would-be presidents. Ashraf Ghani, the former president, took the oath of office on March 9, after he was declared the winner of the country’s contested presidential election. Abdullah Abdullah, the former chief executive who’s also declared himself the winner of the ...

Bloomberg Democratic Republic of Congo President Felix Tshisekedi initiated an independent investigation into the death of the country’s head of military intelligence and said preliminary results suggested he’d died by hanging. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the central African nation is assisting with the probe, which is expected to conclude soon, according to minutes from a meeting Tshisekedi had ...

Bloomberg The weeks-long ordeal of more than 1,000 Taiwanese stuck at the centre of China’s coronavirus outbreak shows how the global crisis has evolved into another battleground between Beijing and Taipei. Taiwan on Tuesday was set to airlift almost 500 of its residents from Wuhan, the original epicentre of an outbreak that has since spread across the globe and shaken ...

Bloomberg Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok said he was “in good shape” after a failed assassination attempt his government branded an attack on the revolution that ousted the North African nation’s long-time dictator last year. Hamdok and his entourage were traveling to work in the capital, Khartoum, when they were targeted in a “terrorist bombing and shooting,” Information Minister Faisal ...