Bhinneka News Online: Wednesday Morning Briefing: Can Canada pull off an anti-U.S. consumer boycott?

Wednesday 13 June 2018

Wednesday Morning Briefing: Can Canada pull off an anti-U.S. consumer boycott?

Highlights

Canadians outraged by U.S. President Donald Trump’s attack on their prime minister have called for a consumer boycott targeting the United States, but indignation may be hard to sustain in a nation enamored by U.S. popular culture and larded with American goods.

Representative Mark Sanford, a vocal critic of Trump, lost a Republican congressional primary in South Carolina, after Trump urged voters to punish Sanford’s disloyalty by tossing him from office.

Exclusive: The top U.S. counterintelligence official is advising Americans traveling to Russia for soccer’s World Cup beginning this week that they should not take electronic devices because they are likely to be hacked by criminals or the Russian government.

World

Backstory: At the end of the second night of living in the same ritzy Singapore hotel as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a member of his security staff sat beside a Reuters reporter in the lobby and smiled. It was a fleeting moment of warmth from the throngs of Kim’s bodyguards, who stalked the St. Regis hotel day and night with an intense gaze, declining to make eye contact with hundreds of journalists, guests and bar patrons gathered to snap a quick peek of the reclusive leader.

A Saudi-led alliance of Arab states launched the largest assault of Yemen’s war with an attack on the country’s main port, aiming to bring the ruling Houthi movement to its knees at the risk of worsening the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

Commentary: The U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore "signals it is time to abandon now-disproven tropes," writes State Department veteran Peter Van Buren. "Trump and Kim are not madmen and their at times bellicose rhetoric is just that."

Breakingviews: The marriage of politics and finance in Italy regularly produces strange offspring. But a suggestion, floated over the weekend in the country’s most-respected newspaper, of a James Bond-style plot by some big investors to sink Italian financial markets added a new twist.

Sponsored by Barclays: Automation’s delayed economic impact Workplace automation is increasing, yet key economic indicators seem unaffected. Why aren’t unemployment, wages and productivity responding? Find out.

Reuters Top News

@Reuters

Two @Reuters journalists have been detained in Myanmar for 184 days. Read more on the case: https://reut.rs/2JxgsYm

3:25 AM - JUN 13, 2018

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