Politics

Bloomberg Eritrea says it will cut the size of its army as part of changes to a system of mandatory national service that the United Nations blames for propelling tens of thousands of people to flee to Europe and neighbouring countries. The official end to a two-decade war with neighbouring Ethiopia means the country that sits on a key shipping ...

Bloomberg Brazil’s imprisoned ex-leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is meeting with his aides on Monday to map out his party’s next moves after the country’s top electoral court banned him from running for president in October. Former Sao Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad, Lula’s running mate and likely successor in the race, is in the southern city of Curitiba, where ...

Bloomberg Both Prime Minister Theresa May and opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn found themselves under fire as British lawmakers prepared to return to work this week. For May the issue was Brexit. Her proposed agreement was attacked by European Union negotiator Michel Barnier, who said he “strictly” opposed it. It was derided by her former Brexit Secretary David Davis, ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit strategy has come under fresh fire, this time from a senior lawmaker in her own party who opposes a hard departure from the European Union. Most of the criticism of May’s cabinet-backed “Chequers Plan” has come from Conservatives linked to the European Research Group, which seeks maximum distance from the EU and is pushing ...

Bloomberg Senate Democrats criticised the withholding of documents ahead of Tuesday’s start of confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, even as a top Republican predicted he would be approved by a healthy margin. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said in a tweet that the decision to hold back more than 100,000 pages ...

Bloomberg Former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama led a final, public farewell to John McCain, praising the Arizona senator as the embodiment of America at its best—yet it was powerful comments by McCain’s daughter that may be most remembered. “So much of our politics, our public life, our public discourse, can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking ...

Bloomberg Across the continent, from Finland to Portugal, Emmanuel Macron is leading the charge against Europe’s nationalists. He might want to look closer to home. In western France, Marion Marechal has ambitions to train the next generation of anti-establishment, anti-European French leaders. From September, Marechal is starting her own graduate school, where she’ll seek to shape the politicians of the ...

Bloomberg South Korean President Moon Jae-in will send both his national security adviser and top spy as special envoys on a one-day mission to Pyongyang on Wednesday ahead of a possible inter-Korean summit this month. President Moon named a five-member delegation to North Korea on Sunday, led by National Security Office chief Chung Eui-yong, Yonhap News Agency cited Blue House ...

Bloomberg Nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children won another ruling preserving their protection from deportation, though the Texas judge who sided with them cast serious doubt on the legality of the so-called Dreamer programme. US District Judge Andrew Hanen in the border town of Brownsville ruled that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton waited too long to ...

Bloomberg George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and one of the first people charged in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, doesn’t deserve to go to jail, his lawyers said. Defense lawyers told the judge who will sentence Papadopoulos that “his motives for lying to the FBI were wrong-headed ...