Bloomberg Mystery surrounded Kim Jong-un’s health after US and South Korean officials gave differing accounts of the North Korean leader’s condition following his unusual absence from recent holiday celebrations. Kim was in critical condition after undergoing cardiovascular surgery last week and the Trump administration wasn’t sure of his current health, said US officials, who asked not to be identified. One ...

Bloomberg Italy will present a plan this week to ease its rigid lockdown, joining Germany, France and Austria in pursuing a gradual return to normality as coronavirus infection rates fall and pressure mounts to reopen businesses. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte aims to roll out a detailed restart program beginning on May 4, indicating that the process will take time to ...

Bloomberg President Donald Trump said he’ll sign an executive order temporarily suspending immigration into the US as the country tries to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Trump made the announcement by tweet, and did not offer specifics, such as the time frame or the scope of who would be affected. The White House did not immediately respond to a ...

Bloomberg The threat of social and political unrest around the world is rising as the coronavirus crisis fuels discontent amid food shortages, job losses and lockdowns. That may particularly impact nations that are already battling food crises, according to a report from 16 organisations including United Nations agencies and the European Union. The number of people facing acute food insecurity ...

Bloomberg As many as 15,000 people in Mumbai, including many in Dharavi, Asia’s most crowded slum, will be given an anti-malarial drug as a preventive therapy to ward off the deadly coronavirus. The first-of-its-kind mass experiment of using hydroxychloroquine as a prophylaxis is being undertaken in the state of Maharashtra — home to India’s financial centre that’s racing to curb ...

Even before President Donald Trump announced that he intends to temporarily suspend immigration to the US because of Covid-19, it was becoming clear that the effect of the virus on migration would be powerful, long-lasting and unfortunate. Many countries besides the US have already shuttered or severely limited entry from foreigners — and many of those restrictions will not be ...

What exactly are we to make of the protests against the current shutdown to fight the coronavirus pandemic? For one thing, they’re small and unrepresentative: The vast majority of US citizens say they support the shutdown policy, and that support is if anything growing. Political scientist John Sides has the data. “Cancel all meetings or gatherings of more than 10 ...

In his absence, Boris Johnson’s British government has mainly followed the lockdown strategy that was determined before the prime minister was infected with Covid-19. Many are hoping that he will soon return to work and change course; that he’ll celebrate signs of a flattening infection curve and reopen Britain for business. It’s unlikely to work out that way. It’s true ...

Regulators and central bankers, pressed to keep economies alive through the Covid-19 lockdowns, have whizzed through their crisis playbooks to pump liquidity into the financial system. The mission is noble, and essential: to make sure banks can support companies and individuals until business activity resumes. But the methods need to be scrutinised carefully. There’s plenty that can go wrong when ...

President Donald Trump’s encouragement of protests against states’ stay-in-place orders is un-presidential in the colloquial sense: it’s unbecoming of a president. But Trump’s latest gambit is un-presidential in a much deeper sense, too. It contradicts the very constitutional justification for why we have a president in the first place. The whole point of the presidency is to have an elected ...