Bloomberg Allies of President Rodrigo Duterte are set to dominate the Philippine senate after a midterm election marred by technical glitches including a stalled vote count. Nine of Duterte’s favoured politicians are among leading senatorial candidates, based on ABS-CBN data with 93.6 percent of the votes reporting. The likely winners of the 12 Senate seats include his former aide Bong ...
Read More »Explosion near Somalia presidential palace kills 4
Bloomberg At least four people were killed and scores of others were injured in a bomb explosion at the Warta-Nabada district headquarters in the Somalia capital, Mogadishu, the Horn of Africa nation’s police said. The car bomb that was set off inside the headquarters also destroyed nearby houses, Abdi Shino, a Somali police officer, said. The al-Shabaab militant group, which ...
Read More »Putin’s still waiting for Trump invite to meet
Bloomberg Donald Trump says he wants to meet with Vladimir Putin but Russia’s still waiting for an invitation, according to the Kremlin. While the US president announced that he’ll meet the Russian leader at the Group of 20 summit in Japan next month, that’s not Russia’s understanding, said Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. “So far, there are no agreements on starting ...
Read More »Trump praises Orban, ignoring Hungary’s ‘illiberal’ moves
Bloomberg President Donald Trump praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in the Oval Office, disregarding bipartisan objections from Congress that the nationalist leader has taken steps to limit freedoms in his central European nation. “People have a lot of respect for this prime minister,†Trump said. “He’s a respected man. I know he’s a tough man, but he’s a respected ...
Read More »May seeks support for Brexit as ‘talks’ stall
Bloomberg Prime Minister Theresa May was expected to meet with her cabinet on Tuesday as she comes under increasing pressure to pull out of Brexit talks with the opposition Labour Party and set a date for her departure. The latest in a series of cross-party meetings aimed at ending the parliamentary deadlock over leaving the European Union (EU) broke up ...
Read More »â€˜N Korea missile tests broke UN resolutions’
Bloomberg Japanese PM Shinzo Abe said North Korea violated UN resolutions with its missile launches this month, putting pressure on the US to raise the issue with the Security Council. Abe, who has long favoured a harder line against Kim Jong-un’s weapon programme, told a meeting of ruling coalition UN resolutions must be better enforced. That contrasted with US President ...
Read More »Economists’ ignorance gap looks pretty huge
The most intriguing and indisputable thing we have learned about economists in recent decades is that they don’t know nearly as much as they thought they knew. We see evidence of this all the time. Just recently, the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the economy had created 263,000 payroll jobs in April. This was almost 40% more than the ...
Read More »Thomas Cook should book a solution
Thomas Cook Plc is on a trip it would rather forget. The company is battling a crisis of investor confidence. A rough 2018 for bookings hammered the share price and leverage has soared. At the latest seasonal peak, net debt of 1.6 billion pounds dwarfed its market capitalisation of 330 million pounds. Sentiment worsened after reports on May 2 that ...
Read More »Power plants cannot escape the eyes in sky
The technology nonprofit WattTime announced that, thanks to a $1.7 million grant from Google.org, it will use satellite technology to measure air pollution from every large power plant in the world. This effort, which will combine data “from a variety of sensors operating at different wavelengths,†will also use artificial intelligence to analyse and calculate carbon emissions, according to David ...
Read More »America should be smart about Venezuela’s future
Democracy’s return to Venezuela has once again been deferred. Juan Guaido, the leader of the National Assembly recognised as interim president by more than 50 countries, failed last week to persuade the military to unseat Nicolas Maduro. Few officers rallied to Guaido’s side, and the regime beat back his followers’ street protests. Whatever the reason — overconfidence on Guaido’s part, ...
Read More »