Politics

Bloomberg Hello, Pyongyang. This is Seoul calling. For the first time since the division of the peninsula, the two Koreas set up and tested a direct phone line for their leaders, South Korea said. The first call between South Korea President Moon Jae-in and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was expected take place sometime before their historic April 27 meeting, ...

Bloomberg The Democratic National Committee (DNC) ued Russia, the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks claiming widespread interference in the 2016 election as part of a “brazen attack on American democracy”. The civil lawsuit could force President Donald Trump’s 2016 staffers to answer questions under oath about campaign activities. Evidence gathered by the DNC could be made public in court filings and ...

Bloomberg With Paraguay’s economy booming, this Sunday’s elections are less about policies and more about the candidates and their parties. In terms of growth, this landlocked country — roughly the size of California — is one of the few bright spots in Latin America in recent years. Barring an upset, Mario Abdo Benitez, a 46-year old former senator whose father ...

Bloomberg Angela Merkel has enjoyed a relatively painless start to her fourth term in office. That could be about to change with the German leader’s Social Democrat coalition partners poised to elect a combative one-time party rebel as their leader. Andrea Nahles, who made her mark as a rabble-rousing opponent of former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s labour reforms, is slated ...

Bloomberg John McDonnell, self-proclaimed enemy of capitalism and the man who would be chancellor of the exchequer, took pride in sowing dissent. He’s such a serial rebel that he used to produce his own version of the Budget as a rank-and-file lawmaker when the Labour Party was in power. In opposition, he and now-leader Jeremy Corbyn, undermined their bosses by ...

Bloomberg After US sanctions crippled an entire Russian industry and air strikes in Syria threatened the first direct clash between nuclear superpowers since the Cold War, Vladimir Putin is seeking to dial down the tension. Russia’s leader wants to give President Donald Trump another chance to make good on pledges to improve ties and avoid escalation, according to four people ...

Bloomberg British PM Theresa May’s plans for Brexit face another potential legal hurdle as the country’s highest court rules on whether some powers from the European Union that are due to return to the UK should go to the administrations in Scotland and Wales. Months of wrangling with the semi-autonomous governments about whether policies ranging from environmental protection to agriculture ...

Bloomberg CIA Director Mike Pompeo travelled to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong Un in advance of a possible summit on denuclearisation, President Donald Trump said. “Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed,” Trump said in a Twitter posting Wednesday morning. “Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearisation will be a great thing for ...

Bloomberg Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s former prime minister, left for London ahead of a looming verdict on corruption charges he and his daughter Maryam face amid mounting signs of a military-led clamp down on the media. Maryam said they will visit her mother who is undergoing cancer treatment in the UK capital, posting pictures on Twitter of her father sitting in ...

Bloomberg African troops battling an al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia for the past decade stand little chance of withdrawing by their deadline in two years as the government remains fragile and a spike in militant violence has drawn in US forces. The longest-running African Union peacekeeping mission, known as Amisom, operates in a shattered country whose lawlessness has bred regional violence ...