USA

MASON CITY, Iowa/DAVENPORT, Iowa (Reuters) - Kristen Marttila braved sub-freezing temperatures on Saturday to knock on doors in Mason City, Iowa, trying to convince voters to cast their lot with Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren in the state’s nominating contest on Feb. 3.

Time after time, Marttila said, she heard the same message: People loved the senator from Massachusetts but were concerned her liberal stances would not draw enough broad support to defeat U.S. President Donald Trump in November.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - John Bolton meet Monica Lewinsky.

Twenty-one years ago former White House intern Lewinsky was at the center of a tug-of-war over whether she would testify in the U.S. Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 12 (Xinhua) -- At the just-concluded 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, many U.S. tech companies have expressed their hopes for closer exchanges and cooperation with China despite bilateral trade tensions.

Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon told Xinhua he is "super excited" about Qualcomm's business in China, and applauded the win-win cooperation between Qualcomm and its Chinese partners, such as Xiaomi, OPPO, OnePlus and vivo.

South Carolina, USA (AP) --- Icy roads, deadly tornadoes, punishing waves — severe weekend weather has been blamed for 11 deaths and major damage in parts of the Midwest, South and Northeast.

Tens of thousands remained without electrical power Sunday as a result of the storms a day earlier. Officials in far-flung locations were assessing the damages while utility crews worked to restore power.

BALTIMORE (AP) — Authorities say 12 people were shot, five of them fatally, in eight separate weekend shootings in Baltimore.

The first of Saturday’s shootings was reported at about 2:30 a.m. and involved three female victims, all found with apparent gunshot wounds in a car in a northeastern section of the city. One victim, a 28-year-old woman, died shortly after arriving at a hospital.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Mark Esper explicitly said Sunday that he had seen no hard evidence that four American embassies had been under possible threat when President Donald Trump authorized the targeting of Iran’s top commander, raising questions about the scale of the threat described by Trump last week.

As the administration struggled with its justification for the drone strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Esper and other officials tried to refocus attention on voices of dissent in Iran.

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Presidential candidates have swarmed Iowa’s rolling landscape for more than a year, making their pitch to potential supporters on campuses, county fairgrounds and in high school gymnasiums. But three weeks before the caucuses usher in the Democratic contest, the battle for the state is wide open.

DOVER, N.H. (AP) — The Democrats standing in a cold New Hampshire parking lot are desperate for change after years of Donald Trump’s turbulent presidency.

But like Democratic voters across the country, they’re grappling with a core question as they size up their party’s leading candidates just three weeks before primary voting begins: How much change is too much in 2020?

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says the Senate should simply dismiss the impeachment case against him, an extraordinary suggestion as the House prepares to transmit the charges to the chamber for the historic trial.

The president is giving mixed messages ahead of the House’s landmark vote that will launch the Senate proceedings in a matter of days, only the third presidential impeachment trial in American history. Trump faces charges that he abused power by pushing Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden and then obstructed Congress.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other administration officials joined President Donald Trump in trying to draw attention to dissent in Iran instead of lingering questions about the scale of the threat used to justify a drone strike on Iran’s top military leader.

Esper added to the uncertainty over the intelligence behind last week’s killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani when he said Sunday that he had seen no hard evidence that four American embassies had been under possible threat. Trump said last Friday that Soleimani had been planning such an attack.