Politics

Bloomberg Special Counsel Robert Mueller accused Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, of attempting to tamper with witnesses in the federal case charging him with money laundering and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Ukraine. Manafort and a longtime associate tried to contact two witnesses to secure false testimony about work that a group ...

Bloomberg Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is looking to defend himself against claims he’ll be too generous to Catalan separatists with his first appointments. Foreign Minister-Designate Josep Borrell was one of the most high-profile defenders of Spanish unity during last year’s crisis and as a Catalan has particular authority to tackle the separatists’ arguments. The 71-year-old will also be in ...

Bloomberg Three days after being sworn in, Italy’s new populist government is preparing for one final hurdle before it sets about trying to overhaul European Union rules and the established order: a confidence vote in both houses of parliament. Parliamentary approval will be sought this week for the 18-member cabinet of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, a 53-year-old law professor with ...

Bloomberg Donald Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller may be headed towards a Supreme Court battle that could test once and for all how much a president is above the law. Trump’s legal team and Mueller’s prosecutors have been jockeying over a presidential subpoena after months of negotiations have yet to bring them to an agreement over terms of an ...

Bloomberg A populist former prime minister won Slovenia’s elections, yet rivals who united against his anti-refugee rhetoric vowed to block him from government. Janez Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party, whose campaign echoed the one that lifted nationalists to power in neighboring Italy, won a quarter of the vote, the State Election Commission said. In second place was the List of Marjan ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Theresa May’s government is preparing to publish its plan to keep the UK under European Union customs rules for longer as it seeks to break the Brexit deadlock, people familiar with the matter said. British negotiators expect to send the EU a document this week setting out how May imagines a time-limited extension to existing customs arrangements ...

Bloomberg French President Emmanuel Macron’s chief of staff Alexis Kohler is under investigation for his dealings with MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co. when he was working for the previous government before being head-hunted to became the Geneva-based firm’s chief financial officer in 2016. France’s financial prosecutor, known as the Parquet National Financier, said it opened the probe following news reports alleging ...

Bloomberg North Korea will get relief from international sanctions only when it has shown irreversible moves toward denuclearisation, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis said ahead of a summit next week between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Speaking on Sunday in Singapore at the start of a meeting with the defense ministers of South Korea and ...

Bloomberg French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has a message for the German government on reform in the euro area: “It is now or never — jetzt oder nie.” After more than eight hours of tough talks with his counterparts from the Group of Seven that focused mostly on a trade dispute with the US, Le Maire found some time ...

Bloomberg Singapore Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen criticised both the US and China for taking “unilateral actions,” lumping the two rivals together as nations challenging the current global order. In a speech to the annual IISS Shangri-La Dialogue security forum in Singapore, Ng said the world’s two-biggest economies were similarly using security considerations to justify their behavior — the US ...