Wednesday Morning Briefing: Putin gives his toughest remarks yet on a potential new arms race with the U.S.
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February 20, 2019
Reuters News Now
Highlights
In his toughest remarks yet on a potential new arms race,Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow will match any U.S. move to deploy new nuclear missiles closer to Russia. He said Russia was not seeking confrontation and would not take the first step to deploy missiles in response to Washington’s decision this month to quit a landmark Cold War-era arms control treaty. But he said that Russia’s reaction to any deployment would be resolute.
Bernie Sanders' second White House run promises to be far different than his campaign 2016.Sanders will have to fight to stand out in a crowded field of progressives touting issues he brought into the Democratic Party mainstream four years ago. At 77, he will also face questions about his age and relevance in a party increasingly embracing more diverse and fresh voices. Who are the other Democratic contenders jumping into the 2020 fray? Find out here.
Veteran North Korean diplomats are being sidelined from nuclear talksahead of a second summit with the United States as recent defections and allegations of spying undermine the trust of leader Kim Jong Un, South Korean officials and experts say. Kim has purged and replaced many top diplomats and officials who served his father and grandfather with new, younger advisors as he gears up to meet U.S. President Donald Trump in Vietnam next week.
Three MPs have quit Theresa May’s Conservative partyin protest over the government’s “disastrous handling" of Brexit. The pro-EU lawmakers will join a new grouping in parliament that consists of eight independent MPs who broke away from the main opposition party earlier this week. Several politicians have said they expected more to follow from both sides of parliament. With only 37 days until Britain leaves the EU, divisions over Brexit are redrawing the political landscape, with the resignations threatening a decades-old two-party system.
Senegal’s modernizing presidentis leading the field as the country prepares to head to the polls on Sunday. President Macky Sall’s popularity is partly the result of a modernizing first term that boosted economic growth to over six percent - one of the highest rates in Africa last year. Although, critics accuse him of jailing his rivals for political gain.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo,two Reuters journalists imprisoned in Myanmar, have won the prestigious George Polk Award in the Foreign Reporting category. They were honored for ‘Massacre in Myanmar,’ an investigation of a massacre of ten Rohingya men and boys in a village in Rakhine state. They were working on the story at the time of their arrest. In what has become a landmark press freedom case, the court in Yangon charged Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo under the colonial-era Official Secrets Act and in September 2018, sentenced them to seven years in prison. See our full coverage here.
A French court on Wednesday found Swiss bank UBS guilty of illegally soliciting clients in France and laundering the proceeds of tax evasion, and ordered it to pay 4.5 billion euros ($5.10 billion) in penalties. Shares in UBS fell 2 percent. A lawyer for UBS said the bank would appeal the ruling.
Carlos Ghosn’s new lawyer took aim at Nissan, prosecutors and courts on Wednesday, dismissing the charges against the ousted chairman as an internal company matter and saying Japan was out of step with international norms by keeping his client in jail.
The United States should respect China’s right to develop and become prosperous, the Chinese government’s top diplomat told a visiting U.S. delegation, reiterating that the country’s doors to the outside world would open wider. The world’s two largest economies began their latest round of trade talks this week to resolve a bitter dispute in which each has levied tariffs on imports from the other.
