Politics

Bloomberg US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dangled the prospect of a far brighter future for North Korea if leader Kim Jong-un abandons his nation’s nuclear weapons programme after a summit with President Donald Trump in Singapore next month. Speaking alongside South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-Wha at the State Department, Pompeo said he thinks the US and North Korea ...

Bloomberg Italian populist leaders Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini pushed their head-to-head bargaining for a new government into the weekend, leaving the choice of premier unresolved as a court lifted a ban on Silvio Berlusconi running for public office. Di Maio of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and Salvini of the anti-immigrant League expected to meet again on Saturday, ...

Bloomberg Vote counting is underway in Malaysia’s election in a contest that will determine whether Prime Minister Najib Razak’s ruling coalition can extend its 61-year run in power. Poll closed at 5 pm in Kuala Lumpur, and a winner may not be known until late in the evening. Turnout reached 69 percent as of 3 pm local time, according to ...

Bloomberg Republicans wrapped up three crucial US Senate primaries in West Virginia, Indiana and Ohio by nominating candidates who embraced President Donald Trump, while Democratic voters rejected insurgents from the left to stick with the party’s mainstream. In West Virginia, the GOP establishment dodged a bullet as controversial former coal executive Don Blankenship, who drew Trump’s opposition, placed third in ...

Bloomberg North Korea released three US citizens who had been detained for as long as two years, a goodwill gesture ahead of a planned summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un that’s expected in the coming weeks. The Korean-American men, who all have the common surname of Kim but are not related, immediately boarded a plane with Secretary of ...

Bloomberg Italy’s populists made a last-ditch effort to form a government together, asking President Sergio Mattarella to delay by 24 hours his plan to appoint a non-partisan premier. Luigi Di Maio of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini of the euroskeptic League met on Wednesday at the Rome parliament, according to two lawmakers who declined to be named ...

Bloomberg Lying facedown, a rebel fighter jabbing a rifle barrel into the back of his head, the aid worker was sure his bid to save his fellow South Sudanese from famine was about to end in his own death. The driver’s ordeal in the country’s north cost him his money, watch and mobile phone, but he was left alive, asking ...

Bloomberg Italy is heading for a snap election that may boost the chances of a populist government taking power. Luigi Di Maio, head of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, and Matteo Salvini, who leads a center-right alliance and the anti-immigrant League, are pressing for an election in July after efforts to form a government broke down. The populist rivals met ...

Bloomberg Indonesian President Joko Widodo may find himself without a challenger in the next election. While Prabowo Subianto — leader of the main opposition party and runner up in the 2014 election — has accepted his party’s endorsement, it’s uncertain if he can assemble a viable coalition to be nominated by an August deadline. Widodo is leading in opinion polls ...

Bloomberg Chinese President Xi Jinping met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the port city of Dalian over the past two days, the second meeting between top officials of the allies in less than two months. The summit came after Kim’s surprise two-day visit to Beijing in late March, his first known trip abroad since taking power in 2011. ...