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

Tech

Investors wipe $3 billion off China's ZTE as U.S. settlement sinks in

Investors wiped about $3 billion off embattled Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE’s market value as it resumed trade on Wednesday after agreeing to pay up to $1.4 billion in penalties to the U.S. government.

4 Min Read

M&A gates open with judge's blessing on AT&T-Time Warner merger

A federal judge on Tuesday gave a ringing endorsement to AT&T Inc’s planned acquisition of Time Warner without any conditions, opening the door for companies such as Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc to pursue deals to buy creators of media content.

5 min read

Bitcoin sinks to two-month low as downtrend persists

Bitcoin fell to a two-month low on Tuesday, sliding in three of the last four sessions on nagging regulatory and security concerns after the weekend hacking of South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail. Find your way around the Future of Money.

3 min read

Top Stories on Reuters TV

Greece and Macedonia end 27-year name dispute

World   1:52

America's Asian allies react to Trump-Kim deal

United States   1:44
 

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