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(Bloomberg) -- Robert Kyagulanyi, the Ugandan pop star turned politician who goes by the stage name Bobi Wine, said he is in advanced talks with opposition parties to field a single presidential candidate in 2021 elections against Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled the east African country since 1986.Wine, the 37-year-old reggae singer who says at least 157 of his concerts have been canceled by the government, said he hopes to be the candidate as Uganda has a young population. He is in talks with Kizza Besigye, Museveni’s one-time physician who has run for president unsuccessfully four times.“If we as opposition come together it will be more or less game over” for Museveni, Wine said on the sidelines of a press conference in Johannesburg where he was receiving an award from Germany’s Friedrich Naumann Foundation. “We hope to agree on a single candidate,” he said, adding that young Ugandans are urging him to run.Youth AppealKyagulanyi has garnered significant support among Uganda’s urban youth and, like Besigye, has been arrested repeatedly. Through his politics and music he’s been critical of the lack of political freedom under Museveni and has called for a generational change in leadership.Wine said he expects Museveni, 75, to use the military and bribery to win, citing the findings by observers and the supreme court in previous elections. Wine has been a lawmaker since 2017.“We believe he is going to make every effort to rig the election, but we, like never before, have massively sensitized our people,” he said. “We are going to have a record number of voters and we believe we are going to win massively.”If that doesn’t happen, there could be instability, Wine said. “My own prediction is if President Museveni rigs the election right now the people of Uganda will rise up against him.”(Adds award in third paragraph)To contact the reporters on this story: Pauline Bax in Johannesburg at pbax@bloomberg.net;Antony Sguazzin in Johannesburg at asguazzin@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: John McCorry at jmccorry@bloomberg.net, Hilton Shone, Antony SguazzinFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 02:40:41 -0500

(Bloomberg) -- Sign up to our Brexit Bulletin, follow us @Brexit and subscribe to our podcast.Towns in northern England share a history of mining, faded industry and neglect. For generations they also had another thing in common: staunch support for the Labour Party.From Workington on the west coast to Bishop Auckland and Blyth on the east, the dominoes fell as the results from the U.K. election rolled in through the small hours of Friday morning. The U.K.’s tortured efforts to leave the European Union redefined political tribes as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives took seats his party has never held before.Johnson declared the victory as “historic.” That will be even more apparent in places where most voters have never known a Conservative lawmaker.Workington, where mines and steelworks shut years ago, last voted Conservative in 1976. Back then Britain was in the grip of an economic crisis. It turned back to the red of Labour three years later. On Thursday it voted Conservative by a margin of 10 percentage points.Bishop Auckland, in the mining area south of Newcastle, had never turned Tory blue in more than a century. Elsewhere, Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire elected a Conservative for the first time since the 1930s, as did swathes of the Midlands and Yorkshire. Labour’s so-called “Red Wall” had fallen.Many of these former mining and steel towns endured mass unemployment under the Conservative governments of the 1980s. They then voted for Brexit in the 2016 referendum amid a wave of anger at austerity, frustration over immigration and dismay at joblessness and lack of opportunity. Today, they are embracing the Tories in their determination to finally quit the EU. Backing for Brexit also comes with a rejection of the socialist promises of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who now says he will step down.In Scotland, Labour’s vote had already collapsed in the wake of the independence referendum in 2014. This time around the pro-independence Scottish National Party took the vast majority of districts again, even in some of the post-industrial regions that Labour had won back in 2017.In that election, the Conservatives planted a giant poster on a dilapidated building near the seafront in Redcar, a town in England’s northeast haunted by steelworks that finally collapsed a few years ago. The Tories had never won in Redcar, and failed in 2017 as well. But as people demanded their voice be heard over Brexit, the voters of Redcar did in 2019 as so many did across the north of England: They abandoned Labour -- and embraced Boris Johnson.To contact the reporter on this story: Rodney Jefferson in Edinburgh at r.jefferson@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Heather Harris at hharris5@bloomberg.net, Adam Blenford, Alan CrawfordFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 02:24:07 -0500

The volcano's continued venting previously delayed plans by authorities to recover the bodies. Scientists believe another eruption is possible.

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 01:06:51 -0500

(Bloomberg) -- Sign up to our Brexit Bulletin, follow us @Brexit and subscribe to our podcast.Jeremy Corbyn said he will stand down as leader of the U.K.’s opposition Labour Party after a comprehensive rejection of his bid to lead the country.Early results confirmed the exit poll forecast, which suggested Labour would lose 61 seats since the 2017 election, finishing on just 201 MPs, as Boris Johnson’s Conservatives head for a big majority. If correct, it would be Labour’s worst result since 1935.Defeated MPs and senior officials said the leader should go immediately, but Corbyn used a speech at his constituency count to say he wants to stay as leader to oversee a debate about the left-wing party’s future.“I will not lead the party in any future general election campaign,” Corbyn said before adding that there needs to be “a process of reflection” about Labour’s direction. “I will lead the party during that period to ensure that discussion takes place, and we can move on into the future.”That’s a sign that Corbyn and those around him want to try to control Labour’s direction and ensure that his allies have a firm grip on its organization. But anger is so great among critics in the party after Thursday’s result that they may try to force him out sooner.“Corbyn was a disaster on the doorstep. Everyone knew that he couldn’t lead the working class out of a paper bag,” Former Labour cabinet minister Alan Johnson told ITV.For the early part of the night, the Labour leader’s allies stuck to the line that the problem had been Brexit, not Corbyn. “It looks as though all other debate on other issues has been squeezed out by this one issue, Brexit,” Corbyn’s closest ally, Treasury spokesman John McDonnell told Sky News. “People just wanted it over and done with. It put Labour in a very difficult position.”But other MPs said there was a problem with the leader. Ian Murray, who was standing for the party in Edinburgh, said Corbyn’s leadership had come up repeatedly on the doorstep, while Gareth Snell, who said he expected to lose his seat in the former Labour stronghold of Stoke-on-Trent, said it’s time for Corbyn and McDonnell to go.The question among those around the Labour leader will now shift to whether their project, to make the party into an authentically socialist one, can be saved under a new standard bearer.That will depend partly on who is around to stand as Corbyn’s heir. But it will also depend on how Labour’s mass membership, who elect the leader, respond to the defeat.They put Corbyn in the job and defended him from Labour members of parliament who wanted him gone three years ago. Will the shock prompt them to go in a different direction, or will they accept the argument that the ideas were right, they were simply drowned out by Brexit?(Updates with Corbyn in third paragraph.)To contact the reporters on this story: Tim Ross in London at tross54@bloomberg.net;Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Thomas PennyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 22:40:29 -0500

Senior Chinese diplomat Wang Yi said on Friday that the United States had seriously damaged the hard-won mutual trust between the countries by criticizing Beijing over issues such as Hong Kong and the treatment of Muslim Uighurs. "Such behavior is almost paranoid, and is indeed rare in international exchanges, seriously damaging the hard-won foundation of mutual trust between China and the United States, and seriously weakening the United States' international credibility," said State Councillor Wang.

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 21:11:37 -0500