Why all the fuss about face masks? Why won’t people just wear them? “Masking has become controversial. It shouldn’t be,” former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on “Face the Nation.” To health experts, masks seem like a simple, apolitical precaution. In medical jargon, they’re personal protective equipment, or PPE, like surgeons’ gowns, gloves and face screens. Nobody ...

There were two obvious losers in France’s runoff round of local elections, held after a three-month delay caused by the Covid-19 epidemic. One was democracy. Only about 40% of eligible voters bothered to turn up, a record low. The other was President Emmanuel Macron, whose core urban fan base went Green. The eco-friendly EELV party snatched control of several big ...

Boris Johnson wants Britons to lift their eyes to the horizon, forget Covid for a while and dream again. No longer cast as a Churchill at war, the British prime minister seems more inclined now to conjure up the healing figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the US president whose New Deal sought to pull America out of the Great ...

Bloomberg India banned ByteDance Ltd’s viral short-video service TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps, citing threats to its sovereignty and security as relations between the world’s two largest populations worsened. The unprecedented moratorium, announced days after border tensions in the Himalayas left 20 Indian soldiers dead, deals a blow to the most prominent names in Chinese technology. The banned services ...

Bloomberg Singapore’s government has issued a correction notice to a Facebook post by a page called ‘State News Singapore,’ which is often critical of the ruling party and its leaders, contesting its description of a recent call between PM Lee Hsien Loong and Malaysia Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin over easing travel restrictions. The post in question says Singapore’s Lee personally ...

Bloomberg Vietnam’s economy unexpectedly grew in the second quarter, though at the slowest pace in at least a decade, as exports slumped because of the coronavirus pandemic. Gross domestic product rose 0.36% from a year earlier, compared with a revised 3.68% in the first quarter, the General Statistics Office said on Monday in Hanoi. The median estimate in a Bloomberg ...

Bloomberg Japan’s industrial production dropped again in May even as a nationwide state of emergency was lifted, showing the severity of the pandemic’s impact on the export-reliant manufacturing sector. Factory output fell 8.4% from April, the economy ministry reported on Tuesday. Production slid from the prior month for a fourth time in a row, something that hasn’t happened since 2012. ...

Bloomberg A fresh swarm of desert locusts has entered Uttar Pradesh, India’s biggest sugarcane grower, via capital city Delhi and the northern state of Haryana, according to the federal farm ministry. Operations to control the grasshoppers are in full swing in the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Gujarat, Punjab and Maharashtra, the ministry said in a statement. ...

Bloomberg Thailand plans to allow foreign business travellers into the country for the first time since closing its borders to most international flights in March. Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Japan passport holders, along with people from some Chinese provinces, may be allowed to travel to Thailand as part of proposed “business-travel bubbles” from July. The initiative seeks to ...

Bloomberg Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has appointed a longtime veteran to replace Pierre Poignant as Lazada Group CEO, the latest top-level reshuffle at the Chinese e-commerce titan’s Southeast Asian operation. Chun Li, who currently runs Lazada’s Indonesian business, will take the reins from July, Lazada said in a statement. Li served as chief technology officer for Alibaba’s business-to-business division between ...