Politics

Bloomberg Support for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bloc dropped to its weakest on record, with her party embroiled in a leadership contest and Europe’s largest economy flirting with recession. If a general election were held this Sunday, Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, would together garner 26%, down one percentage point from a month earlier, according to a ...

Bloomberg Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy defended a cabinet reshuffle that unnerved investors and dismayed voters who’d backed him to clean up the country’s notoriously murky post-Soviet politics. The revamp swapped young newcomers picked to sever ties with the past for experienced hands whose task is to revive stuttering reforms. The problem is that, in one of Europe’s most corrupt nations, ...

Bloomberg Iraq will halt border trade with Iran and Kuwait between March 8 and 15 to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the country’s health minister Jaafar Sadiq Allawi said in a televised press conference. Sea- and air-borne trade will continue as long as personnel and goods involved have the necessary paperwork from their originating countries to show that they ...

Bloomberg Hours after Donald Trump spoke by phone with a top leader of the Taliban about peace in Afghanistan, the US conducted an airstrike against the militant group while it was attacking Afghan forces in Helmand province. US military spokesman Sonny Leggett confirmed the airstrikes on Twitter, calling on the Taliban to stop “needless” attacks. “To be clear — we ...

Bloomberg Malaysia has delayed its parliament sitting by more than two months, forcing former leader Mahathir Mohamad to wait until May for a confidence vote against the new premier. Parliament will be in session from May 18 to June 23, from March 9 initially, with this year’s second and third sitting also delayed to July 27 and September 28, respectively, ...

Bloomberg Democrats have waited three years for a winner to call their own and take on President Donald Trump. On Super Tuesday, Joe Biden laid his claim to becoming their champion. He won across the Deep South, showing his appeal with black voters at the heart of the party, and claimed victory in Minnesota, a predominantly white Rust Belt state ...

Bloomberg The epidemiologist leading the fight against the spread of the deadly coronavirus in Africa’s most-populous nation is doing so from the most unlikely of places: his home. Since returning from a mission to China last week to learn about the new virus, the head of the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control, Doctor Chikwe Ihekweazu, has been working in self-isolation. ...

Bloomberg The trade war may be on hold, but the US and China’s slide towards a new Cold War is only accelerating. The Trump administration’s decision to effectively expel much of China’s state-run media staff is the clearest sign yet of a fundamental shift in how Washington manages its relationship with Beijing. Starting from March 13, four Chinese media companies ...

Bloomberg Russia’s military conducted “indiscriminate” bombardments against civilians in Syria last year, and human rights violations in the nine-year-old conflict continue to multiply, according to a United Nations panel investigating the conflict. In one attack last year, Russian airstrikes targeted a compound of displaced civilians in a rural area that was surrounded by agricultural fields in southern Idlib, according to ...

Bloomberg Malaysia’s new Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has pledged to fight corruption and strengthen governance, saying he is no traitor but stepped in to save the country from political turmoil. “I know there are those who are angry with me,” he said in his first televised address to the nation as prime minister. “As expected, there are parties who called ...