Bloomberg President Donald Trump said the US doesn’t know directly whether Alexey Navalny was poisoned, failing to accept the German government’s assessment that the Russian opposition leader was attacked with a nerve agent. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that medical tests showed “unequivocally” that Navalny had been poisoned by a military-grade novichok nerve agent. Asked about the German conclusion at ...

Bloomberg Defense ministers from India and China agreed to defuse tensions after the latest clash on their Himalayan border revived a conflict that had been largely dormant since June. India’s Rajnath Singh and his Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe held “frank and in-depth discussions” in Moscow about developments on the border and on bilateral relations, according to a statement from India’s ...

Bloomberg Sudan declared a three-month national state of emergency following floods that killed dozens of people and damaged or destroyed more than 100,000 homes, state-owned news agency Suna reported. The floods have affected over 500,000 people this year, killing 99 and injuring 46 others, Suna cited Labor and Social Development Minister Lena Al-Sheikh as saying. The rate of floods and ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump said that Serbia and Kosovo had agreed to “economic normalisation,” in what he said was a step towards ending a two-decade old conflict. But the deal fell short of Belgrade recognising its neighbour as an independent nation. “My administration proposed a new way of bridging the divide by focussing on job creation and economic growth,” Trump ...

Bloomberg Italian PM Giuseppe Conte said that coronavirus outbreaks this autumn may prompt local restrictions but not a nationwide lockdown. “I am confident,” Conte said at an event organised by Il Fatto Quotidiano newspaper. “We won’t find ourselves in a situation to order a general lockdown; at worst we’ll have to intervene in a targeted way, with restrictive measures for narrowly ...

Bloomberg Spain’s CaixaBank SA and Bankia SA are exploring a merger to form the largest lender in the country and kickstart consolidation in one of the hardest-hit European economies during the pandemic. The firms are examining an all-share transaction, CaixaBank said in a statement overnight, in a deal that would create a lender with a combined market value of about ...

Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG has dropped its pursuit of Wirecard AG’s banking unit and related assets after balking at the price sought by the payments company’s insolvency administrator. Wirecard’s insolvency administrator, Michael Jaffe, had been seeking at least $119 million to proceed with a sale of the assets rather than a liquidation. Deutsche Bank had submitted a bid for some ...

Bloomberg Asia’s wealthy are readying cash to take advantage of opportunities in financial markets and private equity once the impact of the coronavirus pandemic subsides, according to the head of private banking at Southeast Asia’s largest lender. Clients have increased cash holdings to about 40% of their portfolios in recent months, up from about 30% before the pandemic, Joseph Poon, ...

Bloomberg The Bank of Japan (BOJ) is likely to consider upgrading its economic assessment amid signs of a rebound from the economy’s worst contraction on record last quarter, people familiar with the matter said. Any changes would acknowledge that Japan’s slump has bottomed, rather than indicate optimism about the outlook, according to the people. BOJ officials continue to see Japan’s ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank’s (ECB) emergency stimulus program is endangering the region’s climate-change objectives by “feeding a natural gas frenzy,” according to environmental campaigners. The central bank is buying bonds from fossil-fuel project developers including Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Total SE and Engie SA, Paris-based Reclaim Finance said in a statement. The Bank of France Governor Francois Villeroy de ...