Politics

Bloomberg Efforts to secure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz are ramping up as the UK said a second warship arrived in the area and South Korea may deploy its own unit as part of a multinational force. Tensions have flared in the strait in recent weeks as Iran pushes back against US sanctions that are crippling its oil ...

Bloomberg Iran doesn’t think the US is seeking talks or an agreement with the Islamic republic, Abbas Mousavi, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Tehran, said days after Secretary of State Michael Pompeo expressed willingness to travel to Tehran to address the Iranian people. This is a “defensive move” by American officials in response to Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad ...

Bloomberg Days after being named chief of Venezuela’s feared SEBIN intelligence agency last fall, General Manuel Ricardo Cristopher Figuera was called in by President Nicolas Maduro and asked where the enemy was. “I don’t understand the question, sir,” Figuera says he responded. “I want a report every two hours of what the political opposition is doing,” Maduro replied, listing some ...

Bloomberg UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson formed a war cabinet of six senior ministers to plan for exiting the European Union by October 31, as a key adviser said leaving without a deal had become a very real prospect, the Sunday Times reported. Johnson’s most senior aide, Dominic Cummings, a key leader in the 2016 Brexit campaign, called advisers to ...

Bloomberg UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said he’s ready for a general election at any time as Prime Minister Boris Johnson prepares to take the country out of the European Union without a deal. “We oppose no deal, and people should have a final say on it,” Corbyn said on Sky News’s Sophy Ridge programme on Sunday. “In the ...

Bloomberg US sanctions on Iran are not only reverberating through the oil world, but also the agricultural market in Latin America. At least two Iranian vessels set to carry Brazilian corn are stranded off the Latin American nation’s coast because they can’t get fuel, according to the port authority at Paranagua, about 450 kilometres south of Sao Paulo. State-controlled oil ...

Bloomberg Taiwan’s election will be an opportunity for voters to choose cross-strait peace or crisis, said Kaohsiung City Mayor Han Kuo-yu, who was nominated as the presidential nominee by the opposition Kuomintang party at the national congress on Sunday. Han, whose campaign slogan is “Taiwan safe, people rich,” was selected to challenge incumbent Tsai Ing-wen in the presidential poll in ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong demonstrators and police clashed for a second straight day as the city’s China-backed government struggles to quell growing discontent and amid violent clashes that have marred the historic movement in recent weeks. Police fired volleys of tear gas at hundreds of black-shirted protesters on Sunday in Sai Ying Pun, a residential and business area where the Chinese ...

Bloomberg The US reached a deal with Guatemala to stop migrants from other parts of Central America from claiming asylum in the US, President Donald Trump said, and will instead force them to file a claim in Guatemala, a nation that one refugee advocacy group said is neither safe nor able to handle the task. Trump told reporters during a ...

Bloomberg Russian authorities detained prominent opposition politician Ilya Yashin overnight and moved him to a Moscow suburb before a planned protest in the capital. Ten masked police officers transported him from his apartment to the city of Troitsk, Yashin said on his Facebook page. The move follows a series of raids on the homes of activists involved in promoting the ...