Politics

Bloomberg Georgia’s final election for president was too close to call and a runoff appeared likely, according to an independent exit poll on Rustavi 2 television. The poll by Edison Research showed Grigol Vashadze of the Strength in Unity grouping of opposition parties and Salome Zurabishvili, backed by the ruling Georgian Dream party, each with 40 percent. Davit Bakradze of ...

Bloomberg The first summit on Syria to bring together the leaders from Germany, Russia, Turkey and France ended with a new appeal for a political solution to the country’s seven-year war but sidestepped more contentious issues including the future of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. A joint communique after talks in Istanbul called for a committee to be established and convened in ...

Bloomberg The UK government would need new tax and spending plans and may have to extend austerity policies if it fails to secure a deal with the European Union, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond said. With analysis last week showing a no-deal Brexit would drag the economy to a near standstill next year, Hammond said “frankly, we’d need to ...

Bloomberg Thailand’s main opposition Pheu Thai Party picked acting head Viroj Pao-in as its leader ahead of a general election expected in 2019 after more than four years of military rule. Viroj, a police lieutenant general, was the only name on the leadership ballot, the party said in a briefing on Sunday. The party added it will decide later if ...

Bloomberg Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena suspended parliament, deepening a power struggle that has led to the return of former strong-man president Mahinda Rajapaksa and could herald closer ties with China. On Friday evening, Sirisena unexpectedly dismissed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and appointed Rajapaksa—who ruled between 2005 and 2015—as his replacement. Wickremesinghe is contesting his removal and is likely to ...

Bloomberg In Washington, Vice President Mike Pence’s October 4 speech ripping China was largely lost amid the uproar over the midterms and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation. In Beijing, however, Pence’s address is still reverberating. Some in China’s foreign policy community continue to study it, comparing the rhetoric with Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946, and trying to ...

Bloomberg Donald Trump vowed to end political violence in the US after the arrest of a suspect in a string of bombing attempts aimed at the president’s critics, then used the moment to complain about hostility directed at him. “We must never allow political violence to take root in America,” Trump said at the White House, shortly after the arrest. ...

Bloomberg A German state election is putting Angela Merkel’s chancellorship on the line on Sunday as rarely before. Voters in Hesse, a state that includes the nation’s financial center of Frankfurt, are going to the polls amid public antipathy to the bickering coalition government in Berlin. It’s the last electoral test of Merkel’s standing before a Christian Democratic Union convention ...

Bloomberg Super Typhoon Yutu could rip into eastern Luzon in the Philippines on Tuesday, extending the toll of destruction it left in the US Northern Mariana Islands earlier this week. Yutu was about 731 miles east of Luzon with winds of about 155 miles per hour, equivalent to a Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, early Saturday US ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump conceded there’s no evidence for his claim that Middle Eastern terrorists are among thousands of migrants travelling from Honduras towards the US border, but blamed Venezuela and unidentified “leftists” for encouraging the so-called caravan. Trump is trying to make immigration central to the midterm elections next month that will determine whether Republicans maintain control of Congress. ...