Politics

Bloomberg Angela Merkel is feeling pressure from her chosen successor to quit as German chancellor after this month’s elections for the European parliament, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. With Merkel’s Christian Democrats expected to lose ground in the May 26 vote, their leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, sent a message to Merkel urging her to resign and called ...

Bloomberg Five years ago, Rahul Gandhi, scion of one of the world’s most famous political dynasties, stood with his mother by his side, trying to explain why his Indian National Congress had suffered the worst defeat in its history. Rival Bharatiya Janata Party had won a landslide and crowned Narendra Modi prime minister. For much of India’s 2014 elections, political ...

Bloomberg Russian President Vladimir Putin and US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo met on the shores of the Black Sea and said they are committed to improving ties between their nations. It won’t be easy. Putin’s 90-minute meeting with Pompeo in the resort city of Sochi represented an initial step towards addressing a wide range of disputes between the two ...

Bloomberg The US drew up a list of associates of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban who could be targeted with sanctions, the Wall Street Journal reported, in what would amount to a fallback option if engagement fails to sway the illiberal leader to meet his NATO commitments. The sanctions threat emerged just a day after President Donald Trump praised Orban ...

Bloomberg Theresa May set a date for her final Brexit showdown, promising to bring her deal back to Parliament at the start of June. Talks with the opposition Labour Party haven’t yielded an agreement, but she’s hoping members of parliament, stung by voter revolts, will back her in order to end the process that’s tearing both main parties apart. “It’s ...

Bloomberg Vietnam denied that it held any “prisoners of conscience,” calling an Amnesty International report that said the Communist government is jailing more of its critics “unfounded.” “Amnesty International has deliberately made repeated nonobjective, unfounded judgments based on wrongful information and false prejudices on Vietnam,” Le Thi Thu Hang, spokeswoman for Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), said. “This is ...

Bloomberg Politics in India is undergoing a quiet revolution, driven by a handful of young candidates standing in the bitterly contested federal election. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high-octane election campaign has occupied much of the media limelight, a band of millennials — reminiscent of the rise of young US Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — is becoming a counter to his ...

Bloomberg Allies of President Rodrigo Duterte are set to dominate the Philippine senate after a midterm election marred by technical glitches including a stalled vote count. Nine of Duterte’s favoured politicians are among leading senatorial candidates, based on ABS-CBN data with 93.6 percent of the votes reporting. The likely winners of the 12 Senate seats include his former aide Bong ...

Bloomberg At least four people were killed and scores of others were injured in a bomb explosion at the Warta-Nabada district headquarters in the Somalia capital, Mogadishu, the Horn of Africa nation’s police said. The car bomb that was set off inside the headquarters also destroyed nearby houses, Abdi Shino, a Somali police officer, said. The al-Shabaab militant group, which ...

Bloomberg Donald Trump says he wants to meet with Vladimir Putin but Russia’s still waiting for an invitation, according to the Kremlin. While the US president announced that he’ll meet the Russian leader at the Group of 20 summit in Japan next month, that’s not Russia’s understanding, said Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. “So far, there are no agreements on starting ...