Politics

Bloomberg The US charged a Russian woman with conspiring to interfere in both the 2016 and 2018 elections, marking the first criminal charges related to next month’s congressional midterm vote. Elena Alekseevna Khusy-aynova of St. Petersburg, allegedly served as the chief accountant for an operation known as “Project Lakhta,” the Justice Department said in a statement. The department identified the ...

Bloomberg Defense chiefs from the US and China agreed in principle to guidelines on encounters between warplanes, in the latest bid by Pacific nations to keep increased military activity from escalating into conflict. US Secretary of Defense James Mattis and seven other regional military chiefs, including China’s General Wei Fenghe, gave broad endorsement to the rules in Singapore on Saturday, ...

Bloomberg Afghans are voting on Saturday in long-delayed parliamentary elections that have been marred by a spate of high-profile Taliban attacks and intimidation. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani kicked off elections at 7 a.m local time by casting his ballot even as polling in some other booths in the country’s capital, Kabul, was delayed by hours due to malfunctioning biometric devices ...

Bloomberg President Tsai Ing-wen is coming under increased pressure from her allies at home to push harder for Taiwan’s formal independence even as China keeps up its unrelenting campaign to bring the island under its control. Thousands of people gathered outside the headquarters of Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party in Taipei on Saturday. Unhappy with the president’s moderate stance on Taiwan’s ...

Bloomberg Italian Deputy Premiers Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio are trying to preserve a five-month-old alliance after their first serious dispute, criticism of their budget from the European Union and a downgrade by Moody’s Investors Service brought tensions to a boiling point. “The government will keep going despite the rating agencies, European commissioners and some internal misunderstandings,” Salvini said ...

Bloomberg Italian Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini visited Moscow on Wednesday to drive home one of his favorite points: that European Union sanctions on Russia hurt Italy and should be repealed. “The Russian sanctions are a social, cultural and economic absurdity,” Salvini told the annual meeting of the Russian branch of Italy’s main business lobby Confindustria, repeating the same lines he’s ...

Bloomberg An attack that killed at least 19 people at a Crimean trade school on Wednesday was the work of a student, not terrorism as earlier suspected, officials said. The Investigative Committee said it had re-qualified the charge to mass murder based on its preliminary findings. It identified the attacker as 18-year-old Vladislav Roslyakov, a fourth-year student, who killed himself ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump plans to withdraw the US from a 192-nation treaty that gives Chinese companies discounted shipping rates for small packages sent to American consumers, another escalation of his economic confrontation of Beijing. US officials said the administration sought to revise the treaty in September and was rebuffed by other nations, prompting the decision to withdraw. The State ...

Bloomberg French President Emmanuel Macron said Europe must work to counter the “troubled times” ahead as it faces a new wave of extremism. “The world is fracturing, new disorders are appearing and Europe is tipping almost everywhere toward extremes and again is giving way to nationalism,” Macron said in a television announcement on Tuesday evening, only his second since he ...

Bloomberg Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara’s ruling alliance won a majority in local elections that were contested by its former coalition partner as political divisions in the world’s biggest cocoa grower widen ahead of a 2020 presidential vote. Ouattara’s Rally of Houphouetists for Democracy and Peace took 92 municipalities in the October 13 election, the electoral commission said in a ...