Bloomberg Europe struggled to find a unified response to the new coronavirus as Italy became the first democratic country since World War II to announce a nationwide lockdown. As countries across the region put in place their own piecemeal measures to slow the spread of the highly infectious virus, Austria said it will block travellers from Italy unless they can ...

Bloomberg The Afghan capital hosted rival presidential inaugurations after US efforts failed to broker a rapprochement between its two would-be presidents. Ashraf Ghani, the former president, took the oath of office on March 9, after he was declared the winner of the country’s contested presidential election. Abdullah Abdullah, the former chief executive who’s also declared himself the winner of the ...

Bloomberg Democratic Republic of Congo President Felix Tshisekedi initiated an independent investigation into the death of the country’s head of military intelligence and said preliminary results suggested he’d died by hanging. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the central African nation is assisting with the probe, which is expected to conclude soon, according to minutes from a meeting Tshisekedi had ...

Bloomberg The weeks-long ordeal of more than 1,000 Taiwanese stuck at the centre of China’s coronavirus outbreak shows how the global crisis has evolved into another battleground between Beijing and Taipei. Taiwan on Tuesday was set to airlift almost 500 of its residents from Wuhan, the original epicentre of an outbreak that has since spread across the globe and shaken ...

Former vice president Joe Biden’s astonishing political success over the past week has felt like a bandwagon for sensible politics. But to keep it rolling towards the general election in November, Biden will have to do something his rival President Trump would never consider: admit that he and his son made mistakes. Trump’s allies are already aiming their next artillery ...

The banging comes first, followed by the screaming. I could try to blot out the noise and carry on, but proximity to family is supposed to be one of the benefits of working from home. My one-year-old son knows there’s a computer keyboard on the other side of the door that needs a merry bashing with his tiny fists. I ...

There is perhaps no greater success story in the world over the last three decades than Colombia. To see this, just stand in the middle of the Plaza de Bolivar in the centre of Bogota. In 1988, there was a gaping hole along one entire side of the square. That was where the Palace of Justice had been, before guerrillas ...

There was a time when Bitcoin earned its stripes as a safe asset in times of crisis or uncertainty. Now, it seems that a global disease outbreak has proven too much for the premier cryptocurrency, with prices plunging over the past month. Bloomberg Opinion first stumbled across the notion that Bitcoin was a sanctuary four years ago during Brexit fever, ...

Italy has adopted seemingly draconian measures to stop the outbreak of Covid-19 that has killed 500 people in the country so far and [the number of virus cases soared by 25% to 9,172 on March 09]. [Italy imposed national restrictions on its 60 million people to control the coronavirus on Tuesday.] Initially, the government had announced the lockdown of northern ...

Bungling the rescue of a bank that has more than $20 billion in deposits is probably the costliest own goal India has scored since its foolish November 2016 ban on most currency notes. Arm-twisting government-controlled State Bank of India to inject capital into failing Yes Bank Ltd was the only option left for New Delhi. But the halfhearted bailout just ...