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Bloomberg The government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison has lost a crucial vote on a bill that allowed doctors greater say on the medical evacuation of sick asylum seekers from detention centers on Manus Island and Nauru. During a heated debate in the parliament, Morrison warned the changes would weaken Australia’s borders and raise national security concerns. Despite the defeat, ...

Bloomberg The Catalonia drama unfolded on a new stage with the start of a historic trial of separatist leaders in Madrid — and it threatens to claim the scalp of a second Spanish prime minister in less than a year. Twelve separatists leaders — led by former Catalan vice-president Oriol Junqueras who is facing up to 25 years in jail ...

Bloomberg The US will fight to regain influence in NATO’s eastern flank, particularly in countries such as Hungary where the government’s spotty record on democracy led to a freeze in relations that allowed Russia and China to extend their sway, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said. Pompeo, in the first visit to Hungary by a US secretary of state since ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denounced a top South Korean lawmaker’s comments about the Japanese emperor as “extremely inappropriate,” ratcheting up already-high tensions between the two neighbours. Abe told parliament that Japan asked South Korea to apologize for National Assembly Speaker Moon Hee-sang’s remarks last week describing Emperor Akihito as “the son of the main culprit of war crimes.” Moon ...

Bloomberg Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is advocating to change the nation’s name one day to “Maharlika” to move away from the country’s colonial links. Duterte’s call echoes a push by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos to call the nation “Maharlika,” which in the local language means nobility. The country, which was under Spanish rule for more than 300 years, derived ...

Beijing is selling its relaxation of inward foreign investment limits as a natural opening of financial markets. The reality is that China needs the capital to keep the economy going, and the question is whether investors will buy the hype. Authorities doubled to $300 billion the quota for stocks, bonds and other financial products under the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor ...

Just how anti-European Union (EU) will the next European parliament be? Latest polls suggest that that populist, often euroskeptic parties, could do well enough in May’s vote to get a disruptive blocking minority – but that would require an improbable degree of cooperation on their part. Given the difficulty of placing dozens of parties in 27 countries on a single ...

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address had been trailed as an appeal for unity — and, by the president’s standards, it almost was. Despite some jarring moments, he made a passable attempt at a presidential tone, calling for governing “not as two parties but as one nation,” and speaking of a “new opportunity” in US politics for those ...

Many of Europe’s politicians are far from impressed with the European Commission’s recent ruling against the proposed rail merger of Alstom SA and Siemens AG. Some are now calling for the EU to change its whole approach to competition policy. What they want instead is “industrial policy” — a strategy that dethrones competition as a goal and promotes European economic ...

It was with a sense of déjà vu that I read that US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has asked the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee to cobble some together ideas on new sorts of debt securities the government could create and sell to finance the rapidly expanding budget deficit. The implication is clear: The US needs to attract new investors to ...