Politics

Bloomberg Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini is facing pressure to force an early election this year from lieutenants frustrated by dealing with an unruly coalition partner. Several senior members of Salvini’s League are urging their chief to capitalize on a growing lead in opinion polls to ditch the anti-establishment Five Star Movement which is hampering their efforts to deliver ...

Bloomberg With the world anxiously waiting to see whether the Venezuelan military throws its weight behind interim leader Juan Guaido, the role of the armed forces in Latin America has been regaining prominence. After decades of democratization, with soldiers largely confined to barracks and borders, Latin American governments are turning to the military to run ministries, oversee state projects and ...

Bloomberg Increased surveillance and government interference with reporting amid a crackdown on Xinjiang’s Muslims fueled a “significant deterioration” in the work environment for correspondents in China last year, the country’s foreign journalists’ organisation said. Reporting grew much harder in the far western region, where the detention and “re-education” of up to 1 million minority Muslim Uighurs has attracted global outcry, ...

Bloomberg NATO approved the accession protocol for soon-to-be renamed North Macedonia, weeks after the former Yugoslav republic and Greece settled a decades-long dispute that hindered its membership. At the center of a tug-of-war for influence between Russia and the West, the Balkan state cleared its biggest hurdle to joining the military alliance last month by agreeing to change its name ...

Bloomberg Nigeria’s Senate asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether President Muhammadu Buhari breached the constitution by suspending Chief Justice Walter Onnoghen, stoking political tensions in the West African nation just weeks before a general election. The case marks a key legal test to Onnoghen’s ouster last week that’s sparked condemnation from the opposition and legal community because the ...

Bloomberg Theresa May faces losing control of Brexit to Parliament on Tuesday in a series of crucial votes that will shape Britain’s split from the European Union. Despite a last minute gamble aimed at buying off rebels in her Conservative Party, the prime minister was expected to face a knife-edge battle to block a proposal that would hand Parliament the ...

Bloomberg Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro may wonder whether President Donald Trump is trying to rattle him. On Monday, White House National Security Adviser John Bolton entered a press briefing on new Venezuela sanctions with a yellow legal pad, accidentally — or not —turned to face gathered reporters and photographers. On the pad appeared a hand-written note: “Afghanistan —welcome the talks. ...

Bloomberg The committee of lawmakers crafting a plan for the southern US border is expected to start meeting this week, even as a defiant President Donald Trump made clear he won’t take no for an answer in his effort to construct a border wall. “Does anybody really think I won’t build the WALL?” Trump said in a tweet that ran ...

Bloomberg The US military’s cybersecurity capabilities aren’t advancing fast enough to stay ahead of the “onslaught of multipronged” attacks envisioned by adversaries, the Pentagon’s combat testing office is warning. Despite some progress in fending off attacks staged by in-house “Red Teams,” the testing office said “we estimate that the rate of these improvements is not outpacing the growing capabilities of ...

Bloomberg Jacob Zuma, who quit as South African president last year after being implicated in a string of scandals, is facing fresh allegations that he took bribes from services company Bosasa to shield it from prosecution and advance its business interests. Angelo Agrizzi, Bosasa’s chief operating officer from 1999 to 2016, told a judicial inquiry that’s probing graft during Zuma’s ...