Bloomberg South Korea retaliated against Japan for what it called an “irrational and excessive” request for its citizens to voluntarily quarantine themselves, as Tokyo’s outbreak-control measures renewed tensions between the neighbours. South Korea is raising its advisory for all of Japan to Level 2, or “refrain from travel,” first deputy foreign minister Cho Se-young said in a statement. It also ...

Bloomberg Support for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bloc dropped to its weakest on record, with her party embroiled in a leadership contest and Europe’s largest economy flirting with recession. If a general election were held this Sunday, Merkel’s CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, would together garner 26%, down one percentage point from a month earlier, according to a ...

Bloomberg Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy defended a cabinet reshuffle that unnerved investors and dismayed voters who’d backed him to clean up the country’s notoriously murky post-Soviet politics. The revamp swapped young newcomers picked to sever ties with the past for experienced hands whose task is to revive stuttering reforms. The problem is that, in one of Europe’s most corrupt nations, ...