Reuters News Now

Highlights

President Donald Trump embarked on his trip to Vietnam with a political cloud hanging over his head and keen to show progress on a thorny foreign policy issue that has befuddled many of his predecessors.

On Capitol Hill, the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen was “fully cooperative” during closed-door testimony before a congressional committee investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S election, the panel’s chairman said.

Senators propose bill to let thousands of Venezuelans remain in the United States. Republican and Democratic senators proposed legislation that would let an estimated 72,000 Venezuelans remain in the United States after fleeing chaos in their country.

Sustainability

Wine and shine: As harvesting gets into full swing in Australia, forecasts show winemakers are the latest to succumb to a catastrophic drought that has already wilted the winter wheat crop and is expected to drag the wool clip to a record low. Australia’s hottest summer on record is hitting its $4.4 billion wine industry hard, with grape yields set to drop to the lowest in years, and hopes the heat could produce tastier tipples starting to shrivel like the fruit on some of the nation’s vines.

Top U.S. pension funds are asking electric utilities to accelerate efforts to cut carbon emissions but will not force the issue with proxy resolutions this spring, hoping market shifts and falling prices for renewable energy have already made executives and directors receptive to the goal.

China’s capital city Beijing issued second-level smog alert ahead of a wave of air pollution expected to blanket the northern part of the country, the government-backed Beijing Youth Daily reported. Several cities in northern China, including top steel-making city Tangshan, have issued first-level smog alerts, the highest in the country’s four-tier pollution warning system.

India-Pakistan

Pakistan prepared to release a captured Indian pilot as the nuclear powers scaled back their confrontation, at least temporarily, while Indian opposition politicians raised doubts over whether an initial airstrike had destroyed a militant camp in Pakistan.

About 2,000 travelers were still stranded in the Thai capital Bangkok and it will take a few more days to get them home after flights were disrupted by the latest conflict between Pakistan and India, airline officials said.

World

Israel’s Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit announced that he intends to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on corruption charges, a decision coming just six weeks before a closely contested national election. Netanyahu dismissed the three criminal cases as a political “witch-hunt” designed to oust him. Here’s a guide to Netanyahu’s political and legal prospects.

Heavy gunfire rang out across central Mogadishu as Somali troops battled to dislodge Islamist insurgents holed up next to a hotel they bombed the previous evening, and as the death toll stemming from that attack neared 30.

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Two @Reuters journalists have been imprisoned in Myanmar for 445 days. See full coverage: reut.rs/2TqVJJG

2:20 AM - 1 Mar 2019