Bloomberg Scandal-hit Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe faces one of the biggest tests of his four and a half years in power, after his ruling party lost to an upstart outfit in an election for Tokyo’s assembly. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as projected to win its lowest number of seats ever in the capital in a poll that can be ...

BEIRUT / DAMASCUS / Reuters Three car bombs exploded in Damascus on Sunday, state media said, killing at least seven people in the first suicide bombings in the Syrian capital since extremists attacked in March. A police officer at the scene of one of the blasts put the death toll there at seven with 13 more people wounded. The Syrian ...

DIYARBAKIR / Reuters Kurdish militants shot and killed two officials from the ruling AK Party in southeast Turkey over the weekend, while the Turkish military killed more than a dozen militants in air strikes, state authorities said on Sunday. Orhan Mercan, the AKP’s deputy head in the Lice district of Diyarbakir province, was shot in front of his home on ...

Reuters President Bashar Al Assad has appeared on the Syrian currency for the first time, his portrait printed on a new 2,000-pound banknote that went into circulation on Sunday. Central bank governor Duraid Durgham said the 2,000-pound note was one of several new notes printed years ago but the decision to put it into circulation was delayed “due to the ...

Bloomberg South African President Jacob Zuma lashed out at critics within his African National Congress, saying they’re threatening the ruling party’s hold on power. “Factionalism is a cancer that must be rooted out,” Zuma, 75, said Friday in his opening address to a six-day ANC conference in Johannesburg that will discuss issues ranging from land reform and ownership of the ...

Two Junes ago, when the Supreme Court upheld, 6-3, a challenged provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, vented: “Congress wrote key parts of the Act behind closed doors. Congress passed much of the Act using a complicated budgetary procedure known as ‘reconciliation,’ which limited opportunities for debate and amendment, and bypassed ...

Financial markets are frothier than a millennial’s 3-D latte. Investors are scrambling to throw money at Argentina, Vice Media and George Clooney’s tequila. Only the crypto-currency craze seems to give us comfort there are worse bubbles out there. The latest warning against digital currencies comes from Aberdeen Asset Management’s top venture capitalist, Peter Denious. He blames a feeding frenzy of ...

The European Commission’s decision to let Italy spend up to 17 billion euros ($19 billion) to clean up the mess left by two failed banks is bad news — and not just for Italy’s taxpayers. It’s also a setback for the euro zone’s putative banking union, and for the European Union’s efforts to supervise anti-competitive state aid. Over the weekend, ...

Malware has yet again disrupted businesses around the world, just weeks after hackers used leaked National Security Administration tools in a global cyberattack called WannaCry. The ultimate target in both cases may be people’s sensitive information — a troubling reality that should finally motivate organizations to get serious about security. The recent attack was more sophisticated than WannaCry, which took ...

Imagine that a European leader invaded England and deposed the legitimate head of state, leaving a Dutchman in charge of the country. If you didn’t know any better, you might think this is an overwrought caricature of what the European Union was supposed to bring to British affairs, at least pre-Brexit; that story sounds far worse than the regulations, taxes ...