Bloomberg The first person in the US to die from the novel coronavirus was a man in Washington state, authorities confirmed, after President Donald Trump briefed the nation on his administration’s response and urged people not to panic. Trump, at a press conference at the White House, described the victim was “a medically high-risk patient in her late 50s,” adding ...

Bloomberg Shinzo Abe has overcome countless political perils on the road to becoming Japan’s longest-serving prime minister. He may have met his match with the coronavirus. In a sign of mounting concern, Abe abandoned his relatively mild approach to the epidemic last week with a shock announcement urging schools to shut nationwide from Monday. The move sent millions of parents ...

Bloomberg Slovak anti-corruption parties — propelled by lingering anger at the killing of an investigative reporter two years ago — scored an unexpectedly large majority in elections. Four groups, led by Ordinary People, garnered 45% of votes, which would represent 95 mandates in the 150-seat parliament, results from nearly all election districts showed. They’ve vowed to join forces to dislodge ...

Bloomberg Bernie Sanders is looking to deliver a knock-out blow to his progressive competitor Elizabeth Warren on Super Tuesday by winning the primary on her home turf of Massachusetts. Sanders, the national front-runner, is making an aggressive push in the Bay State in the last few days before the March 3 Democratic ballot. He held a rally there last week ...

Bloomberg Hong Kong police fired tear gas to disperse protesters who returned to the city streets for a rally that turned violent. Protesters gathered outside Mong Kok police station in Kowloon and paralysed traffic, the Hong Kong government said in a statement. The demonstrators threw petrol bombs and set fire to barricades, according to the statement. Police used pepper spray ...

Believe it or not, I was all ready to praise Donald Trump this time. I really thought when he announced a press conference that he would manage to stick to a reasonable script, and there were very promising rumors that he was prepared to make an excellent choice for a new coronavirus czar. Why? Because so much was on the ...

Standard Chartered Plc may have many failings. At least it has a leader. The London-based emerging markets bank run by Bill Winters hasn’t had the best of years, and the outlook, with so much exposure to virus-affected Hong Kong, is looking grim. It does, though, have a stable team, led by a CEO about to complete five years in the ...

Carl Icahn looks increasingly likely to get his way, even if it’s not on his own terms. The activist investor’s fingerprints appear all over Xerox Holdings Corp.’s $35 billion attempt to acquire HP Inc. But it always looked as if he might prefer the deal to happen the other way around. Indeed, he pitched an acquisition of Xerox to HP ...

The Olympic torch will arrive in Japan on March 20 for a four-month relay to launch the opening ceremonies for the Tokyo summer games. But rather than anticipating the sight of Olympic torchbearers, much of Japan is fixated on a different relay: hundreds of masked passengers grimly walking off the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in Yokohama. The ship has ...

India has more than a sixth of the world’s population. It’s also still a poor country. So what happens there is incredibly important for the welfare of the human race. For a long time, good things were happening in India. Cautious pro-business reforms in 1980s were followed by the dismantling of much of the country’s overbearing regulatory state in the ...