Politics

Bloomberg US President Donald Trump’s apparently impromptu decision to begin setting up talks contrasts with Kim’s situation — North Korea has prepared deliberately for decades for a meeting with the sitting US president as a major step towards gaining international legitimacy. Leaving the White House for a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump told reporters that “We’re doing something very special. We ...

Bloomberg Romania’s de facto leader strengthened his grip on power by helping elevate an ally to a pivotal post within the ruling party. Social Democrat boss Liviu Dragnea’s proposal to make Prime Minister Viorica Dancila executive president was approved by the party’s congress, which is usually convened every four years, after two other candidates withdrew before the vote. The move ...

Bloomberg Presidential elections in Sierra Leone will probably go to a second round as the two main political parties remain neck-and-neck with half the votes counted. The count of 50 percent of the ballots showed that the ruling All People’s Congress got 566,113 votes, while the main opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party obtained 564,687 votes, according to the National Electoral ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump will need to adopt an unfamiliar set of traits — patience, persistence, clear goals and conditions — and be prepared to walk away when he meets North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, people who have negotiated with Kim’s regime say. Trump’s apparently impromptu decision to begin setting up talks contrasts with Kim’s situation — North Korea ...

Bloomberg Slovakia’s ruling parties prepared to respond after tens of thousands of people took to the streets in the biggest protests since the fall of the Iron curtain, calling on PM Robert Fico’s government to step down over a failure to fight corruption. The biggest crisis faced by the three-time premier’s government, triggered by the murder of an investigative journalist ...

Reuters Britain and Saudi Arabia want to strengthen a United Nations inspection regime for ships headed to Yemen, the Britishforeign minister said after meeting his Saudi counterpart in London. “Today we have agreed to strengthen the UN inspection of shipping in order to ensure that all Yemeni ports remain open to the humanitarian and commercial supplies that Yemen’s people so ...

Bloomberg House and Senate negotiators aim to introduce a $1.2 trillion spending bill by Wednesday to avoid potentially messy battles that forced partial government shutdowns in January and February, according to members and aides involved in the talks. Three major obstacles remain: funds for the $12.9 billion Gateway commuter railroad tunnel under the Hudson River between New Jersey and New ...

Bloomberg The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee criticised the Trump administration’s response to questions about its vetting and security clearance process following a series of controversies about staff with access to the country’s most classified information. Representative Trey Gowdy’s spokeswoman on the committee, Amanda Gonzalez, said that a five-paragraph letter sent to the committee by White House Director ...

Bloomberg South Korean President Moon Jae-in tried to tamp down expectations for his planned summit with Kim Jong Un, as he prepared to send envoys to Washington to discuss their meeting with the North Korean leader. “This is just a start, and we can’t be optimistic just yet,” Moon told leaders of five South Korean political parties in Seoul on ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump said Russia had “no impact on our votes” in the last presidential election and vowed to prevent any interference in the upcoming congressional elections. “We’ve actually been working very hard on the ‘18 election,” Trump said during a press conference at the White House with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven. He added that the US would ...