Bloomberg President Donald Trump will push Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, to pressure the Taliban into signing a permanent ceasefire in Afghanistan, an administration official said. Trump will demand that Pakistan’s government free Shakil Afridi, a physician imprisoned after helping the US government locate and kill Osama bin Laden, the official said. The Trump administration will judge Pakistan in part ...

Bloomberg The US government said an overwhelming crush by immigrants crossing the southern border justifies a new rule restricting asylum applications from Central Americans who haven’t sought protection from persecution or torture in another country through which they passed. The Justice Department filed its response to a request by immigrant rights’ groups for an emergency court order to halt enforcement ...

Bloomberg Pressured by his closest advisers to force a snap election, Matteo Salvini is hesitating. The usually hyper-active deputy premier is keeping the country waiting as he considers whether to take his biggest political gamble yet and pull out of Italy’s fractious populist coalition. The leader of the rightist League is looking to capitalise on his victory in May’s European ...

Bloomberg The European Union is preparing to offer the next British PM a Brexit extension beyond October 31 to provide yet another attempt to reach an agreement, The Guardian reported, citing unidentified EU officials. The extra period of membership, while allowing for an agreement to be reached, could be billed to members of the Conservative Party as an opportunity to ...

Thirty months after setting the goal of sending a mission 239,000 miles to the moon, and returning safely, President John Kennedy cited a story the Irish author Frank O’Connor told about his boyhood. Facing the challenge of a high wall, O’Connor and his playmates tossed their caps over it. Said Kennedy, “They had no choice but to follow them. This ...

At last, India’s in-court bankruptcies will show some urgency and common sense. The government said it would amend the 2016 insolvency law, a signature reform of Prime Minister NarendraModi’s first term. Investors will cheer. The legislation was getting mired in frustrating legal delays and bizarre judgments, threatening to scare off global investors from a $200-billion-plus bad-debt cleanup. The last straw ...

Asia’s most stubborn central bank just reversed course. With the Federal Reserve all but certain to renew its easing cycle at the end of the month, the Bank of Korea preemptively cut its benchmark interest rate to 1.5 percent from 1.75 percent, in a decision that surprised roughly half of the economists polled by Bloomberg. The central bank aimed to ...

Ursula von der Leyen has clinched the presidency of the European Commission with a razor-thin margin of nine votes. It’s a win for the national governments that backed her, a loss for the European Parliament that dreamed of putting forward one of its own — and a sign of some very tough tussles ahead for the 28-member bloc. When pulling ...

Heading into this earnings cycle for the biggest US banks, analysts were already plenty worried about net interest income, which is how much the firms make from customers’ loan payments compared with what they pay on deposits. After all, long-term interest rates have plummeted since the end of last year amid signs of slowing global growth and the Federal Reserve ...

It was similar to the maligned film director who says, “My movie isn’t bad, the audience just isn’t smart enough to understand it.” Except this time it was the chief executive of a $30 billion telecoms equipment firm talking about his quarterly earnings. Ericsson AB’s adjusted operating profit hit 3.9 billion kronor ($415 million) in the three months to June, ...