May, 2019

• 19 May

  Austria’s Kurz seeks to rule solo after dumping nationalists

  

  Bloomberg Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz ended his controversial coalition with the nationalist Freedom Party after a video compromised his junior partner, seeking an early election in a gamble he can govern alone. Twenty-six hours after Austrian politics was turned upside down by the publication of secretly filmed footage showing his deputy promising government contracts in return for campaign funding, Kurz ...

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• 19 May

  Merkel steps up contest for EU’s future

  

  Bloomberg German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Europeans against falling sway to populists, evoking the continent’s wars in a proxy showdown with Italy’s deputy premier before voters have their say next week. On a day when far-right politics brought down a government in Austria, Merkel stepped up her message that only the EU’s established parties could protect liberal values and seven ...

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• 19 May

  ‘Duterte signing papers, not confined in hospital’

  

  Bloomberg President Rodrigo Duterte is in his residence at the presidential palace in Manila signing papers, his spokesman said, denying that the Philippine leader was confined in a hospital. “I just talked to him,” spokesman Salvador Panelo said in a statement. “He’s neither confirming nor denying that he went to the hospital,” the spokesman said. ABS-CBN News said in a ...

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• 19 May

  Trump’s disruptive style has diminishing returns

  

  President Trump has styled himself in foreign policy as the Great Disrupter. And for a time, this unpredictable approach served him reasonably well. Leaders from China, North Korea and Iran found themselves off balance, and they sometimes made what looked like concessions. Trump’s problem is that, after two years, foreign nations seem to have figured him out. Rather than crafting ...

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• 19 May

  Macron takes a closer look at Facebook

  

  Social networks such as YouTube and Facebook have the power to make content go “viral,” spreading it at an unprecedented and uncontrollable pace. That seems innocent enough when you’re looking at a cat video, but if it’s murder, for example, the lack of a way of stopping the virus becomes glaring. After the New Zealand mosque shootings were streamed live ...

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• 19 May

  Yes, bank on things being worse than they look

  It’s no secret that India’s banking regulator hates having its officials sit on the boards of state-run lenders. The practice exposes the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to all kinds of potential conflicts it would rather avoid. So when the RBI used its special powers to appoint a former deputy governor as a director of Yes Bank Ltd., a non-state ...

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• 19 May

  How the European Union can succeed on migration

  Start with the good news: Some 150,000 migrants sought to enter Europe illegally last year. That represents a 92% drop since 2015. The number of people seeking asylum in 2018 was 646,000, less than half of what it was three years ago. In numerical terms, Europe’s migration crisis is over. Politically, the issue remains as divisive as ever. Ahead of ...

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• 19 May

  The world’s last coal plant will soon be built

  

  Fossil-fuel advocates have a favorite rejoinder to those who predict a global shift to renewable energy: Coal has never been more popular. It’s a decent argument because it happens to be true. While coal-fired power has declined by nearly a quarter in Europe and almost 40 percent in North America over the past decade, the change has been overwhelmed by ...

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• 19 May

  WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption gimmick

  

  The discovery that hackers could snoop on WhatsApp should alert users of supposedly secure messaging apps to an uncomfortable truth: “End-to-end encryption” sounds nice — but if anyone can get into your phone’s operating system, they will be able to read your messages without having to decrypt them. According to a report in the Financial Times, the spyware that exploited ...

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• 19 May

  Boeing’s 737 Max woes make it trade-war pawn

  

  Boeing Co.’s 737 Max woes make it a prime target for China’s trade-war retaliations. China, responding to increased tariffs imposed by the US, said that it will boost levies on nearly 2,500 American products to 25%, while several thousand other items will be subject to taxes ranging from 5% to 20%. Soon after, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of China’s Global ...

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