Politics

Bloomberg US sanctions against Venezuela are making successful talks with the opposition impossible, said a key ally of President Nicolas Maduro, demanding that President Donald Trump immediately act to drop them. “The stone in the way of any negotiation is sanctions,” Tarek William Saab, Venezuela’s public prosecutor, said in a rare interview at the Public Prosecutor headquarters office in downtown ...

Bloomberg A Tunisian media mogul who’s running for the presidency in next month’s elections was detained, after authorities ordered his arrest for alleged tax evasion and money laundering. Nabil Karoui, the owner of Nessma TV, was stopped by security services while traveling outside the capital and is currently in prison in Tunis, the nterior Ministry said in a statement. The ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong’s beleaguered Chief Executive Carrie Lam called on protesters to break the deadlock gripping the city, after she held a meeting with former officials and other prominent people to find a way out of the impasse. About 30 people were invited to the gathering at Government House on Saturday, including ex-transport chief Anthony Cheung and Cardinal John Tong, ...

Bloomberg Italy’s next government — whoever winds up leading it — will have a lengthy list of problems needing immediate attention. Thorny issues include getting a budget that complies with European Union deficit rules through parliament by the end of December, finding a solution to the environmental pollution charges threatening thousands of jobs at Europe’s largest steel plant and working ...

Bloomberg Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci has set up a political action committee in a bid to prevent Donald Trump’s re-election, saying in a Financial Times editorial that he broke with the US president to “save the liberal world order.” Scaramucci expressed regret over his past support of Trump, explaining a reversal of his position earlier this year ...

Bloomberg China vowed retaliation against a proposed $8 billion US sale of advanced fighter jets to Taiwan, threatening to impose sanctions on American firms participating in such a deal. “China will take all necessary measures to defend its own interests, including imposing sanctions on the US companies involved in the arm sales,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at ...

Bloomberg Venezuelan officials have been holding “secret meetings” with “high-ranking” US counterparts for months, president Nicolas Maduro said. “There have been contacts with high-ranking US government officials in the Trump administration and my government under my express authorisation to try resolving the conflict,” Maduro said in a speech broadcast on state television. Maduro said he was ready to speak directly ...

Bloomberg China confirmed it has detained a UK consulate worker from Hong Kong, underscoring security fears of people traveling between the Asian financial hub and the mainland as Beijing struggles to contain weeks of unrest. China’s foreign ministry said that the consulate worker, Simon Cheng, 28, was being held under in administrative detention in the adjacent city of Shenzhen on ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump cancelled a state visit to Denmark after his offer to buy Greenland was met first with bemusement, then flat refusal. Anger followed, and even Queen Margrethe II was drawn into the fray. Trump had been due to make his first visit to Denmark, a founding member of NATO and a US ally in the Iraq war, ...

Bloomberg The shroud of mystery surrounding Russia’s latest deadly nuclear accident will become increasingly difficult to maintain once the data starts to roll in. That’s the lesson of a team of scientists who showed last month — days before the explosion that killed five Russians — that “a sizeable, yet undeclared nuclear accident” had occurred two years earlier in Russia, ...