Bedugul Coffee: Monday Morning Briefing: Talks collapse on border deal as U.S. government shutdown looms

Top News

“The talks are stalled right now,” Republican Senator Richard Shelby told Fox News Sunday. Efforts to resolve the dispute over border security funding collapsed after Democratic and Republican lawmakers clashed over immigrant detention policy as they worked to avert another U.S. government shutdown, the Republican senator said. This long view shows illegal apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border are down from peaks in the early 2000s.

It has been difficult for many to come to terms with the trauma of Feb. 14, 2018, when a former Stoneman student with an assault gun massacred 17 people at the Parkland, Florida campus. A year after the deadliest high-school shooting in U.S. history, students from Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School look back with pride on the network they have built to stem the country’s epidemic of gun violence through the ballot box.

A draft resolution calling for the impeachment of Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, a Democrat, has been circulating among Virginia Democrats over allegations of sexual assault, and might be introduced as soon as Monday.

When news emerged that Qatar may have unwittingly helped bail out a New York skyscraper owned by the family of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, eyebrows were raised in Doha. This is because Kushner was a close ally of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - a key architect of a regional boycott against Qatar, which Riyadh accuses of sponsoring terrorism. Doha denies the charge.

Saudi Arabia had “absolutely nothing to do” with the National Enquirer’s reporting on an extramarital relationship involving Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, the kingdom’s minister of state for foreign affairs said. “This is something between the two parties, we have nothing to do with it,” Adel al-Jubeir told CBS’ “Face the Nation”

President Donald Trump will sign an executive order asking federal government agencies to dedicate more resources and investment into research, promotion and training on artificial intelligence (AI), a senior administration official said. Under the American AI Initiative, the administration will direct agencies to prioritize AI investments in research and development, increase access to federal data and models for that research and prepare workers to adapt to the era of AI.

World

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians marched and some burned U.S. flags to mark the 40th anniversary of the triumph of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shi’ite cleric who toppled the Shah in an Islamic Revolution that rattles the West to this day.

Venezuela’s most successful financial operations in recent years have not taken place on Wall Street, but in primitive gold-mining camps in the nation’s southern reaches. With the country’s economy in meltdown, an estimated 300,000 fortune hunters have descended on this mineral-rich jungle area to earn a living pulling gold-flecked earth from makeshift mines.

The 2016 Brexit vote spurred British companies into increasing investment in European Union countries sharply, likely at the expense of spending at home, an academic study showed. According to researchers from the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance, the referendum result led to a 12 percent increase in foreign direct investment transactions from Britain into the EU between mid-2016 and September 2018.

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@Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have been imprisoned in Myanmar for 427 days. Follow updates on the case: https://reut.rs/2E3qDzt

6:45 AM - 11 Feb 2019

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