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Bloomberg Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari presented an 8.8 trillion-naira ($24.2 billion) budget for next year to lawmakers after the cabinet agreed to reduce spending plans as the nation struggles to meet revenue targets. Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer and most populous nation, has “recovered from recession” after a slump in 2016, Buhari told a joint session of the Senate and ...

Bloomberg Prime Minister Theresa May, who has just 28 days to convince rebellious lawmakers to back her Brexit deal, put the UK on high alert over the dangers of crashing out of the European Union without an agreement. Her cabinet ministers agreed to implement “in full” plans for a no-deal break from the European Union, including 3,500 troops put on ...

Bloomberg After three months of gridlock, Sweden still doesn’t have a government. Now, party leaders will get a three-week respite in the hope that they can come back with a solution. Parliament speaker Andreas Norlen said that he will meet again with party leaders on January 14 and called for a prime minister vote two days later. If that fails, ...

Bloomberg France’s Yellow Vests may have peaked as a protest movement, but they are contemplating a next step: presenting candidates in next May’s European elections to provide another outlet for voters angry at President Emmanuel Macron. The limited amount of polling so far suggests a Yellow Vests campaign wouldn’t impact Macron’s party in selecting legislators for the European Parliament. Instead, ...

Bloomberg South African authorities issued a warrant of arrest for Grace Mugabe, the wife of former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, civil rights organisation AfriForum said. A charge of assault was laid against Grace Mugabe in South Africa last year, after local media including the Star newspaper reported that she assaulted a woman at a hotel in Johannesburg. While she agreed ...

The Trump administration has pulled out all the stops to attack the European Union (EU). Realising its relative weakness, the EU hasn’t tried a muscular response. Instead, it has used the same tactic as it did with Britain’s Brexiters. On December 11, the US ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, accused Europe of disregarding all the goodwill built up since ...

Cracking down on immigration is how Theresa May has chosen to interpret the Brexit campaign’s promise to “take back control.” As a result, the UK prime minister has ruled out one of the more plausible alternatives to her own EU withdrawal deal: The so-called “Norway-Plus” idea, which would keep Britain in the European single market and force it to accept ...

President Trump really dislikes the 2015 Clean Water Rule. Barely a month after taking office he directed the Environmental Protection Agency to take steps towards killing it. The “horrible, horrible” rule, he said, was a “massive power grab” that burdens farmers and developers with restrictions on “every puddle” and “every ditch.” In fact, the rule simply clarifies the scope of ...

As far as ideas go, the notion that Beijing has bargaining power over Washington by virtue of being America’s largest creditor is an old chestnut. However, the current US-China trade conflict has revived interest in the drop in Chinese holdings of US Treasuries to their lowest level in a year and a half. The fifth straight decline took the stock ...

Nobody can know if, when Deng Xiaoping launched his strategy of “Reform and Opening Up” 40 years ago, even he could have predicted the near-miraculous transformation of the Chinese economy that would follow. In the years since then, hundreds of millions have been lifted out of abject poverty and into the ranks of the global middle class; China’s industrial heartland ...