Friday Morning Briefing: U.S. lawmakers gift-wrap an impeachment impasse ahead of holiday break
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December 20, 2019
Reuters News Now
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U.S. lawmakers who control the fate of President Donald Trumpleft Washington for a holiday break with no agreement over how they will handle the Senate trial to consider his impeachment charges in January. Democrats want to call top Trump aides as witnesses, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not yet sent the impeachment package over to the Senate in a bid to ramp up the pressure.
The United States said new evidenceand analysis of weapons debris recovered from an attack on Saudi oil facilities on Sept. 14 indicates the strike likely came from the north, reinforcing its earlier assessment that Iran was behind the offensive. In an interim report of its investigation - seen by Reuters - Washington assessed that before hitting its targets, one of the drones traversed a location approximately 124 miles to the northwest of the attack site.
A last minute flurry of diplomacyaimed at engaging with North Korea ahead of its declared year-end deadline for talks has been met with stony silence from Pyongyang so far, with the looming crisis expected to top the agenda at summits in China next week.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrisonissued a rare public apology and cut short a Hawaiian vacation in response to mounting public anger after two volunteer firefighters were killed battling bushfires sweeping the country’s east coast. Some areas of Sydney are set for “catastrophic” conditions on Saturday, and the deadly fires are now engulfing other parts of the country.
The U.S. military plans to stockpile rare earth magnets used in Javelin missiles and F-35 fighter jets, according to a government document seen by Reuters, a step that critics say does little to help create a domestic industry to build specialized magnets now made almost exclusively in Asia.
The general counsel of a U.S. labor agency has accused Chipotle Mexican Grill of violating U.S. labor law by allegedly firing an employee in New York in retaliation for complaining about workplace problems and trying to organize with a union.
French telecoms group Orange and its former CEO Didier Lombard were guilty of “moral harassment” that prompted a spate of suicides during a restructuring at the company in the late 2000s, a court ruled. The traumatic episode of workers’ deaths at the company, then known as France Telecom, in the late 2000s, led to deep soul-searching over corporate culture in France.
