Politics

Bloomberg US President Donald Trump appeared to praise Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping’s efforts to extend his tenure in a speech to donors, according to a recording released by CNN. “Don’t forget China’s great and Xi is a great gentleman. He’s now president for life,” Trump told Republican backers. The crowd erupted in laughter in response to the remarks made at ...

Bloomberg Italians vote on Sunday in an election that pits several shades of populists against the mainstream and which may only succeed in further clouding the political landscape. The anti-establishment Five Star Movement was on track to be the biggest single party when a polling blackout began on February 17, though only Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right coalition was within reach of ...

Bloomberg Thousands of people took to the streets across Slovakia to protest against corruption after the murder of a journalist who reported on alleged links between organised cri-me gangs and people close to the government. More than 10,000 people marched in freezing temperatures in the capital Bratislava and thousands more gathered in other cities, according to newspaper reports and television ...

Bloomberg Angela Merkel is about to discover if she can begin a fourth term as German chancellor or if she’s headed for another election. With stable government in Europe’s biggest economy at stake, Germany’s Social Democratic Party plans to reveal on Sunday whether its members have voted to extend their coalition with Merkel through 2021. It’s the culmination of more ...

Bloomberg Cameroonian President Paul Biya announced a government change, creating a new ministry and appointing two officials from the nation’s Anglophone regions to top positions in an apparent bid to address a secessionist crisis in the central African nation. Biya, 85, established a Ministry of Decentralization and Local Development and named Paul Atanga Nji, who hails from the restive Northwest ...

Bloomberg Theresa May has started to compromise on the ambitious vision for Brexit that has prevented her fractious government from splitting apart, with a blunt warning that “hard facts” can’t be ignored any longer. For the first time, the British prime minister admitted there are contradictions in her negotiating aims and raised the prospect of diluting her own red lines. ...

Bloomberg As Washington and Seoul try to maintain a unified front against North Korea, the case of two cargo ships shows how Kim Jong Un’s regime keeps finding ways to evade increasingly tough international sanctions aimed at halting its nuclear weapons program. Both vessels have gone through repeated changes of names and owners, part of an international shell game that ...

WASHINGTON / Reuters A senior US general accused Russia of playing a destabilising role in Syria and acting as “both arsonist and firefighter,” as a brief truce unilaterally declared by Moscow in the eastern Ghouta region collapsed. The United States and Russia have been on different sides of the seven-year-old war, with Moscow heavily backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad whose ...

Bloomberg Among the enduring curiosities of Donald Trump’s presidential run was his announcement that campaign chairman Paul Manafort was an unpaid volunteer. Why would a longtime political fixer do that? That question has grown more persistent thanks to successive indictments of Manafort by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller, each documenting in finer detail Manafort’s allegedly fraudulent scramble for cash just ...

Bloomberg Afghan President Ashraf Ghani presented his most comprehensive peace plan to the Taliban in a bid to bring them to the negotiating table and end the nation’s near 17-year war. Ghani said he would recognize the Taliban as a political group and would initiate talks if they agreed to a cease-fire, he told delegates at a peace conference in ...