Bloomberg Angela Merkel installed an ally at the head of Germany’s governing party, notching a victory at the end of a tumultuous political year and boosting her chances of serving out her fourth and final term. Christian Democratic Union (CDU) delegates chose Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a moderate party insider largely aligned with Merkel’s world view, over BlackRock Inc.’s Friedrich Merz in ...

Bloomberg Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity is in doubt as exit polls for elections that ended Friday in five states showed inconclusive projections before the federal vote next year. Six major exit polls showed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and the opposition Congress party neck-and-neck in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Three polls showed BJP ahead, while the ...

Bloomberg Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad faced his biggest rally since taking power in May, as opposition parties led thousands of ethnic Malays in Kuala Lumpur to protest a United Nations convention against racial discrimination. The capital was flooded with protesters dressed in white, who were bused in from around the country to assemble. Police estimate about 55,000 people had ...

Bloomberg A Tanzanian opposition leader has criticised proposed amendments to the country’s Political Parties Act, warning it could destroy democracy in the East African nation. The bill, which was introduced to lawmakers in November, will enable the Registrar of Political Parties to halt government grants to parties for up to six months and the authority to deregister them and supervise ...

Bloomberg More than three months after Secretary of State Michael Pompeo picked Stephen Biegun to lead negotiations with North Korea, the former Ford Motor Co. executive has barely met officials from Pyongyang face-to-face. The standstill is a sign of how negotiations between the US and North Korea have faltered, forcing a lowering of expectations, since President Donald Trump met with ...

Just because the US and China have agreed to call a truce in their trade war doesn’t mean that it’s over: This was a classic exercise in can-kicking. Nonetheless, most cans have quite a few kicks in them, and overall this is good news for the global economy. Instead of sweeping everything under the rug, as was the case before ...

At an Aldi grocery store overlooking the rugged Kent coast in southeast England, customers are loading up their shopping carts. It’s the same situation at a Lidl outpost in scenic Oban, Scotland. The British love affair with the German no-frills supermarkets started about a decade ago, and shows no signs of abating. And that will be crucial in determining whether ...

France and Germany have now reached a consensus on how to tax some of the Silicon Valley giants. America, the ball’s in your court. The two countries released a statement declaring their support for a 3 percent tax on digital ads, providing a breakthrough in European Union wrangling on how to deal with big tech. It’s essentially a levy on ...

Faced with increasingly violent protests, French President Emmanuel Macron has suspended his plan to raise fuel taxes. The climbdown is a concession to political necessity, but it shouldn’t be confused with smart policy, and it shouldn’t deflect Macron from his larger goals. Even in a country with a fabled tradition of riotous dissent, the intensity of the protests in France ...

The uncertainty of the ongoing Brexit drama is taking an emotional toll on the British public. Since the original vote in 2016, there has been a 13.7 percent increase in prescriptions for antidepressants relative to other drugs. Political chaos has consequences for public health. Indeed, the results of a new study suggest that people subjected to long periods of intense ...