Politics

Bloomberg A populist surge wasn’t enough to dislodge the pro-Western centrist parties that have ruled Latvia for more than 25 years. While the governing coalition lost ground at elections on Saturday, Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis said newly formed parties with similar ideologies can join to represent a majority in parliament. That would once again lock out the Russia-leaning Harmony, which ...

Bloomberg US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo reported progress on Sunday after meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang amid high expectations that he can resolve details over a second summit with President Donald Trump. Pompeo returned to Seoul and was meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, with a written statement possible, according to the Blue House. ...

Bloomberg Theresa May is taking her message direct to the opposition. Days after she danced on stage and promised better times ahead for her Conservative Party members, the UK prime minister took the rare step of writing in the Observer newspaper to entice wavering Labour supporters over to her camp. John McDonnell, who would lead economic policy if Labour came ...

Bloomberg Nigeria’s main opposition party nominated former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as its candidate to challenge President Muhammadu Buhari in February’s elections in Africa’s biggest oil producer. Abubakar, 71, won the People’s Democratic Party’s primaries with 1,532 votes, Ifeanyi Okowa, chairman of the nomination convention committee and governor of Delta state, said on Sunday in the oil hub of Port ...

Bloomberg Secretary of State Michael Pompeo arrived on Saturday in Japan on a trip that will take him to North Korea, as US disarmament demands are increasingly undermined by calls for sanctions relief and President Donald Trump’s eagerness for a second summit with Kim Jong-un. Pompeo will spend less than a day on the ground in Pyongyang on Sunday meeting ...

Bloomberg The chances of getting a Brexit deal have increased over the past few days, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told Austrian newspapers in an interview released on Saturday. “I assume that we’ll find an agreement about the terms of the exit treaty,” Juncker in the interview with daily newspapers Der Standard and Kurier, and weekly Falter. “We also need ...

Bloomberg Interpol asked China to clarify the status of the law enforcement group’s president, amid press reports that he’s been arrested in his home country. “Interpol has requested through official law enforcement channels clarification from China’s authorities on the status of Interpol President Meng Hongwei,” Juergen Stock, secretary general of the organisation based in Lyon, France, said in a statement. ...

Bloomberg Latvians go to the polls on Saturday, with an establishment-bashing upstart injecting drama into the country’s usually dull elections. The tiny Baltic nation is getting a taste of the populism that’s upended politics from London to Rome as a brash new party threatens to rip up the regular script. Its rise challenges the center-right coalitions that routinely prevail in ...

Bloomberg Beneath President Vladimir Putin’s angry denials that Russian spies were involved in attempted murder and hacking operations abroad, there’s palpable unease at the catalogue of sometimes laughable mishaps by his now-infamous GRU military-intelligence service. Accusations by the Netherlands, the UK and the US that four GRU agents were caught attempting to hack into a United Nations body investigating a ...

Bloomberg Former Army Captain Jair Bolsonaro widened his lead in a poll published a day before voters cast their ballots in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election. Bolsonaro would garner 36.7 percent of first-round votes, followed by Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad with 24 percent, according to the MDA/CNT poll. Bolsonaro had 28.2 percent in a previous MDA/CNT poll ...