Politics

Bloomberg Taiwan is set for a more contentious presidential race focused on rising tensions with China, after low turnout in local elections handed China-skeptic President Tsai Ing-wen’s party historic losses. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party won just five of 21 city- and county-level races, its worst showing since its founding in 1986. The opposition Kuomintang, which historically has an advantage ...

  SEOUL / WAM Five people were killed on Sunday in a helicopter crash in the eastern coastal county of Yangyang in South Korea. Yonhap news agency quoted fire officials as saying that the chopper, an S-58T, crashed on a hill around 10:50am local time, while surveying the area against forest fires. The helicopter was smashed into pieces and burst ...

  Bloomberg Malaysia’s Islamic party declined to join newly appointed Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s unity government. Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, or PAS, which won the most seats of any party in the recent general election, will instead act as a “constructive opposition,” Secretary-General Takiyuddin Hassan said in a statement. The decision was made to “respect and trust the mandate of the ...

Bloomberg Pakistan’s former premier Imran Khan said his lawmakers are quitting regional legislative assemblies, ending his months-long protest, to mount further pressure for snap elections days after the appointment of a new army chief. “We won’t be part of this system anymore,” he said at a packed rally in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, an event that he pressed on ...

Bloomberg Indonesian President Joko Widodo urged his supporters to vote for a “fully white-haired” leader, his most upfront show of support yet for a presidential hopeful. “Look at the leader’s hair too, if it’s fully white, that means they are thinking about the people,” Jokowi, as the president is popularly known, said to his almost 150,000 supporters gathered at a ...

  Bloomberg Venezuela’s battling political factions restarted negotiations in Mexico, signing a rare deal to work together on a humanitarian spending plan and setting the stage for the US to ease rules on Chevron to operate in the country. Representatives of the Venezuelan government and the opposition signed a humanitarian agreement that seeks to get access to some of the ...

Bloomberg Rishi Sunak faces another delicate Brexit decision after he was asked by senior civil servants to delay a planned “bonfire” of legislation dating from the UK’s membership of the European Union. The request by officials to shift the current 2023 deadline to remove some 4,000 EU laws from the British statute books by three years is a headache for ...

  Bloomberg Germany’s defense minister dismissed a surprise request from Poland to station surface-to-air Patriot missiles in western Ukraine, saying such a deployment would have to be agreed by Nato. The request, disclosed late on Wednesday in a post on Twitter by Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak, came just days after the countries struck an air-defense deal that would see ...

Bloomberg When Malaysia’s King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah asked the two men vying to be the next prime minister if they would agree to form a unity government after neither had majority, one of them completely rejected the idea. The politicians before him —opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and ex-premier Muhyiddin Yassin— were scrambling to draw support from parties and ...

Bloomberg A maskless President Xi Jinping met Cuban counterpart Miguel Diaz-Canel in Beijing, resuming his flurry of in-person summits even as a record Covid surge fanned lockdown fears in the Chinese capital. Xi expressed a willingness to “deepen trust” between the two nations during the talks, according to a video clip posted by state broadcaster China Central Television on Friday. ...