Politics

Bloomberg Turkey said Sweden and Finland should hurry on fulfilling promises for their accession to Nato, ahead of Turkish elections due to take place in less than six months. The Turkish parliament may announce a recess six weeks before parliamentary and presidential elections, leading to the need to rush to get it ratified, said presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin. Yet Sweden ...

  Bloomberg A retired general who has pledged unwavering support for Ukraine won the first round of the Czech presidential election, advancing to the run-off against a billionaire ex-premier known for spats with the European Union. Petr Pavel, the former top general in Nato, won by a razor-thin margin with 35.4% of the vote, according to results by the Statistics ...

  Bloomberg Brazilian authorities are increasing the pressure on Jair Bolsonaro with a probe into the former president’s role in riots that upended the nation’s capital on Jan. 8 and the arrest of his Justice Minister Anderson Torres by federal police. Torres was arrested on Saturday after arriving in Brasilia following a vacation in the US. The former minister, whose ...

  Bloomberg Russia claimed Moscow’s troops had taken Soledar, a small town in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, in one of their first victories in months. Kyiv rejected the claim. A salt mining town with a population of 10,000 before Russia launched its invasion in February 2022, Soledar has limited strategic value but has been the site of weeks of ...

Bloomberg Turkey summoned Sweden’s ambassador after supporters of the Kurdish militant group PKK and its affiliates hanged an effigy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a protest in Stockholm. Sweden must crack down on terrorism if it wants to join Nato, Turkey said, after the puppet was hung by the feet outside the city hall in the Swedish capital ...

Bloomberg Allies of Pakistan’s former premier Imran Khan are moving to dissolve two of the four provincial assemblies in a bid to force Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to call for national elections well before November. The assemblies of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces will be dissolved on Saturday to make way for local polls, said party officials from Khan’s Pakistan ...

Bloomberg Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will seek public support for his robust new security strategy from US President Joe Biden at their upcoming summit, after criticism from China. Kishida arrived Thursday in Washington on the last leg of a whirlwind tour that has taken him to most of the Group of Seven countries before Japan hosts the body’s summit ...

  Bloomberg Congressional Democrats added to pressure on President Joe Biden to kick Jair Bolsonaro out of the country, even as US officials stick to a wait-and-see approach in hopes that the former Brazilian president will make good on a promise to return home on his own. In a letter dated Thursday, 46 congressional Democrats urged Biden to remove Bolsonaro ...

Bloomberg The European Union and the UK are preparing to enter an intense phase of negotiations starting next week aimed at overcoming the dispute over the post-Brexit trading relationship well ahead of the anniversary of Northern Ireland’s peace agreement in April, according to people familiar with the matter. The aim is to move into a negotiating “tunnel” after UK foreign ...

  Bloomberg The US hasn’t changed its policy on sending Navy vessels through the Taiwan Strait, the Pentagon said, describing a decline in the number of transits last year as nothing out of the ordinary. “Many factors affect the planning and execution of these operations including ship and aircraft availability, other military operations and exercises both in the Indo-Pacific and ...