Bloomberg Sri Lanka’s prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has decided to resign, state-run Daily News reported, days after his party’s candidate lost the country’s bitterly contested presidential poll and allowing newly-elected president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to choose a replacement. The Daily News didn’t say whether Wickremesinghe, who leads the United National Party and the ruling coalition, took the decision in order to ...

Bloomberg Ethiopia’s ethnic Sidama began voting in a referendum on whether to create a new regional state, the first of what’s expected to be a series of demands for more autonomy. The plebiscite will test whether the Horn of Africa nation can hold a general election scheduled for next year peacefully. The outcome will provide an indication of whether the ...

Bloomberg A court in Thailand disqualified from parliament a key opposition leader who had criticised the royalist establishment’s grip on power. The Constitutional Court found Future Forward leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit guilty of breaking rules meant to prevent politicians from owning shares in media firms. The court also barred him from being a member of parliament. He’d been suspended pending the ...

Bloomberg French president Emmanuel Macron’s government unveiled an emergency funding plan for ailing hospitals in an effort to calm protests from doctors and healthcare workers as the country braces for strikes over pension reform. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said the government will raise the budget for hospitals by 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) over the next three years, starting with ...

Bloomberg For the longest time, Angela Merkel was Germany and under her the center-right Christian Democrats were the dominant political force in the European Union. Today the party is a shambles and its new leader, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK), can’t seem to straighten it out. Just last month, the CDU suffered a historic beating in the eastern region of Thuringia. Mike ...

“Everyone seems to agree … that these companies are fundamentally different … [and] the old rules of capitalism simply do not apply to them” —Economist Thomas Philippon, author of “The Great Reversal:How America Gave Up on Free Markets” The public face of American capitalism is Big Tech. Its constituent firms — Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, to name a few ...

The Trump administration has developed a way to make pollution sound appealing. President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a plan to relax regulations to allow Americans to be exposed to more dirty air. But the agency has dressed it up to look like it’s just advocating the use of stronger, more transparent science. The policy, sometimes called the ...

As US political opposition hardens to TikTok, the globally popular video app from Beijing-based ByteDance Inc., some inside the company want to find ways to make the business appear to be less Chinese. That’s a smart move, aimed less at critics in Congress and more at two other East Coast power centers: Madison Avenue and Wall Street. TikTok delivers short, ...

Earlier this week, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Chris Bryant examined the ongoing troubles for advanced jet engines used on today’s commercial airliners. These engines now seem to be reaching their technical limits, and as Bryant says, we may be asking too much of the technology. That’s not great news for the companies making those turbines, or for those flying the aircraft. ...

The French government has made it clear what President Emmanuel Macron meant by a reform of the European Union (EU) accession process, which he sees as a prerequisite to the bloc’s further enlargement. The proposed process wouldn’t be much of an improvement on the current one; rather, Macron appears to be trying to drown the issue of further EU enlargement ...