DUBAI / Reuters Iran’s parliament gave initial approval on Sunday to a bill to boost spending on Tehran’s missile programme and the elite Revolutionary Guards in retaliation for new sanctions imposed by the United States. Lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the outlines of the bill to “counter America’s terrorist and adventurist actions” as some chanted “Death to America”, the state broadcaster IRIB ...

Bloomberg German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief rival, Social Democrat Martin Schulz, slammed US President Donald Trump and said he still stands a chance to win the election despite polls showing him trailing six weeks ahead of the contest. Schulz said he wouldn’t criticize Merkel’s approach to a possible nuclear conflict over North Korea, saying German political parties should stand together. ...

Bloomberg The US’s top general plans to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Monday, just days after his counterpart Trump said military options against North Korea were “locked and loaded.” General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, will meet with senior military officials along with Moon, according to an official with South Korea’s Blue ...

Bloomberg South African President Jacob Zuma indicated that ruling party lawmakers who backed an opposition attempt to oust him should face disciplinary action and said he may consider firing his higher education minister, who has criticized his leadership. More than two dozen members of the ruling African National Congress backed a motion of no confidence in the president on August ...

Bloomberg Kenya’s main opposition said state security forces killed more than 100 people in clashes related to last week’s disputed elections. The authorities said they had no knowledge of any deaths and that the country remains largely peaceful. Displaying a handful of spent cartridges at a briefing on Saturday in the capital, Nairobi, Senator Johnstone Muthama of the National Super ...

Bloomberg Argentine voters will give President Mauricio Macri a good indication of the risks to his reform program in primaries on Sunday as ex-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner returns from the political shadows to the mainstage. Argentines are voting to select candidates to stand in legislative elections of October 22. Candidates from all parties are on the same ballot in ...

Southern Gothic is a literary genre and, occasionally, a political style that, like the genre, blends strangeness and irony. Consider the current primary campaign to pick the Republican nominee for the US Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions. It illuminates, however, not a regional peculiarity but a national perversity, that of the Republican Party. In 1985, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III—the ...

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is worried about a bond bubble. “By any measure, real long-term interest rates are much too low and therefore unsustainable,” Greenspan said in a recent interview. “When they move higher they are likely to move reasonably fast. We are experiencing a bubble, not in stock prices but in bond prices. This is not discounted ...

The prevailing view of earnings estimates is, to be blunt, dim. Many investors believe that companies and analysts conspire to keep estimates low to produce a “surprise” that drives the stock price higher. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice is widespread. The 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average met or beat the so-called consensus earnings estimate an average ...

There’s a nice Annette Idler item at the Monkey Cage on what’s at stake in Venezuela that answered some questions I’ve been thinking about as a non-specialist. Call me naive or a foolish optimist, but I suspect that the most likely end to the North Korea “crisis” is that it will fizzle out. Yes, Donald Trump is capable of irrational ...