Tuesday Morning Briefing

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India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugs U.S. President Donald Trump as they give joint statements in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, U.S., June 26, 2017. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque


Washington

 

Republican leaders are in a frenzied push to shore up support for a healthcare bill in the U.S. Senate after a non-partisan congressional office said it would cause 22 million Americans to lose insurance over the next decade.

The image of the United States has deteriorated sharply across the globe under President Donald Trump and an overwhelming majority of people in other countries have no confidence in his ability to lead, a survey from the Pew Research Center showed. Five months into Trump's presidency, the survey spanning 37 nations showed U.S. favorability ratings in the rest of the world slumping to 49 percent from 64 percent at the end of Barack Obama's eight years in the White House.

 

In less than three months, President Trump's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch, is already staking out ground on the court's right, adding his voice to the biggest controversies including Trump's travel ban targeted at six Muslim-majority countries, gun control, religious rights and gay rights.

 


Immigration

 

Late last night, a federal judge halted the deportation of all Iraqi nationals detained during immigration sweeps across the United States this month until at least July 10, expanding a stay he imposed last week. The stay had initially only protected 114 detainees from the Detroit area. U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith sided with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union who argued those being deported could face persecution, torture, or death because many were Chaldean Catholics, Sunni Muslims, or Iraqi Kurds and that the groups were recognized as targets of ill-treatment in Iraq.

 


Syria

 

The White House warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that he and his military would "pay a heavy price" if it conducted a chemical weapons attack and said the United States had reason to believe such preparations were underway.


Venezuela’s symphony of protests 

An opposition supporter plays the violin during clashes with riot police, during a rally against President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela, May 8, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

 


Business

 

EU antitrust regulators hit Alphabet’s Google with a record 2.42-billion-euro ($2.7 billion) fine for systematically favoring its own shopping service over others in search results. The European Commission said Google has 90 days to stop or face a further penalty of up to 5 percent of Alphabet's average daily global turnover.

 

Glyphosate, an herbicide and the active ingredient in Monsanto’ popular Roundup weed killer, will be added to California's list of chemicals known to cause cancer effective July 7, the state's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) said. Monsanto vowed to continue its legal fight against the designation and called the decision "unwarranted on the basis of science and the law."

U.S. wireless carrier Sprint is in talks with Charter Communications and Comcast about a partnership to boost the two U.S. cable companies' wireless offerings, according to sources familiar with the matter. A deal with Sprint would build on a partnership that Charter and Comcast announced last month. The two cable operators agreed that they would not do deals in the wireless space for a year without each other's consent.

 

Volvo Cars and Swedish car safety supplier Autoliv have signed a deal with U.S. firm Nvidia Corp, best known for its graphics technology in computer games, to develop software systems for self-driving cars.

 

Seven years after its Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, BP is betting tens of billions of dollars on the prospect that it can slash the costs of offshore drilling by half or more - just as shale oil producers have done onshore. The firm says it can do that while it continues to pay an estimated $61 billion in total costs and damages from the worst spill in history - and without compromising safety.

 


Philippines

 

Civilians held hostage by Islamist militants occupying a southern Philippine city have been forced by their captors to loot homes, take up arms against government troops and serve as sex slaves for rebel fighters, the army said. Citing accounts of seven residents of Marawi City who either escaped or were rescued, the military said some hostages were forced to convert to Islam, carry wounded fighters to mosques, and marry militants of the Maute group loyal to Islamic State.

 


Canada

 

British Columbia's New Democrats introduced a non-confidence motion in the Western Canadian province's government, setting the stage for the ruling Liberals to be toppled on Thursday after 16 years in power.

 

U.S. slaps dumping duties on Canadian wood, Ottawa vows to fight

 


Entertainment

 

Twenty years to the day after the first book in the Harry Potter series was published, fans gathered online and in the real world to express their enduring love for J.K. Rowling's magical creation.