Bloomberg Italians vote on Sunday in an election that pits several shades of populists against the mainstream and which may only succeed in further clouding the political landscape. The anti-establishment Five Star Movement was on track to be the biggest single party when a polling blackout began on February 17, though only Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right coalition was within reach of ...

Bloomberg Thousands of people took to the streets across Slovakia to protest against corruption after the murder of a journalist who reported on alleged links between organised cri-me gangs and people close to the government. More than 10,000 people marched in freezing temperatures in the capital Bratislava and thousands more gathered in other cities, according to newspaper reports and television ...

Bloomberg Angela Merkel is about to discover if she can begin a fourth term as German chancellor or if she’s headed for another election. With stable government in Europe’s biggest economy at stake, Germany’s Social Democratic Party plans to reveal on Sunday whether its members have voted to extend their coalition with Merkel through 2021. It’s the culmination of more ...

Bloomberg Cameroonian President Paul Biya announced a government change, creating a new ministry and appointing two officials from the nation’s Anglophone regions to top positions in an apparent bid to address a secessionist crisis in the central African nation. Biya, 85, established a Ministry of Decentralization and Local Development and named Paul Atanga Nji, who hails from the restive Northwest ...

Bloomberg Theresa May has started to compromise on the ambitious vision for Brexit that has prevented her fractious government from splitting apart, with a blunt warning that “hard facts” can’t be ignored any longer. For the first time, the British prime minister admitted there are contradictions in her negotiating aims and raised the prospect of diluting her own red lines. ...

Anyone who tells you that dealing with climate change is simply a matter of sweeping away the obstructionism of oil companies is living in a dream world. The real obstacle is us — our vast dependence on fossil fuels and the difficulty of extricating ourselves without crippling the world economy. It’s true that the Trump administration has withdrawn from the ...

Chinese billionaires who want to buy overseas assets without irking Beijing need to keep their eyes on the road. China Energy Reserve & Chemicals Group Co., a unit of state oil behemoth China National Petroleum Corp., has bowed out of the consortium that paid a record $5.2 billion for Hong Kong skyscraper The Center, barely four months after the deal ...

With top Communist Party officials gathering in Beijing to set key government posts, the insurance regulator is looking like the weakest link. China is considering a merger of its banking and insurance watchdogs to streamline the fragmented regulatory system, as Bloomberg News reported in late January. A combination could be announced soon after the National People’s Congress, which starts next ...

It’s always dangerous to say that Donald Trump has set a new low for presidential discourse, because he sets new lows with dreary regularity. Nonetheless, his heedless declaration that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” deserves special recognition. No president should need to be told that trade wars are, in fact, bad and impossible to win. By imposing ...

The Indian economy has been short of good news recently. So the latest GDP growth figures, released on February 28, come as a bit of a relief: The economy grew at 7.2 percent in the last three months of 2017, slightly faster than expected. For the entire financial year — due to end on March 31 — the government’s statisticians ...