Politics

Bloomberg Kim Jong-un oversaw a live-fire military exercise that potentially included North Korea’s first ballistic missile launch since 2017 — challenging US President Donald Trump’s bottom line in nuclear talks. Kim watched as “large-calibre, long-range multiple-rocket launchers and tactical guided weapons” were fired off North Korea’s eastern coast, according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). The state media’s ...

Bloomberg Siyabonga Matlala is unequivocal about who he’ll support in South Africa’s May 8 election: the same party he’s backed since apartheid ended a quarter century ago. “I will always vote African National Congress,” the 49-year-old farm labourer said in Fisantekraal, a shantytown on Cape Town’s outskirts. The unwavering loyalty of voters like Matlala has underpinned the ANC’s grip on ...

Bloomberg Santu Adhikari scavenges with scarred hands through the rubble of a Tata Motors factory where he once hoped to work. But the plant was torn down before it was finished, and the 28-year-old now spends his days among its ruins in this field outside Kolkata, hunting for scrap iron to sell. Adhikari blames his grim predicament on one of ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump brushed off news of a possible weapons test by North Korea, vowing that leader Kim Jong-un “will do nothing to interfere” and that a denuclearisation deal with the US “will happen.” Saturday’s tweet, posted while Trump was in a motorcade to the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, was the president’s first response to news that ...

Bloomberg Almost 150 rockets were fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip on Saturday, with Israel returning the strikes, its military said. The flare-up marked the latest escalation between the two sides. Gaza’s barrage followed the killing of four Palestinians by Israel. Two of those who died were Hamas extremists killed in an airstrike and two were demonstrators taking part ...

Bloomberg Donald Trump said that Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t seeking to “get involved” in the crisis in Venezuela, despite assertions by the American president’s top national security advisers that the Kremlin is offering critical support to Nicolas Maduro’s regime. “He is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela other than he’d like to see something positive happen ...

Bloomberg Cyclone Fani barreled through the eastern parts of India on May 3, unleashing heavy rain and prompting authorities in the country and neighbouring Bangladesh to evacuate a total of more than 3.5 million people to shelters. At least 12 people were killed as the storm swamped towns and villages, the Press Trust of India reported, citing government officials it ...

Bloomberg Voters in England punished both Theresa May’s Conservatives and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour opposition in local elections, piling pressure on the two party leaders to resolve the Brexit crisis paralysing British politics. Britain’s major parties interpreted their poor results as an angry demand from a frustrated population to deal with Brexit, which has locked Parliament in a stalemate for months. ...

Bloomberg The referee, it seems, has taken sides. After spending much of the last 10 months acting as a mediator between the feuding deputy premiers who hold the real power in Italy’s government, PM Giuseppe Conte appears to have sided with one of them: the Five Star Movement’s Luigi Di Maio. When Conte called for the resignation of a cabinet ...

Bloomberg It was a ploy that from its outset felt like a long shot. Before dawn, Juan Guaido, flanked by his political mentor Leopoldo Lopez and a handful of soldiers who had broken ranks, issued a message to Venezuela and the world: The time to topple Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian regime was right now. By dusk, with Maduro still firmly in ...