North America

FORT DODGE, Iowa (Reuters) - Democratic presidential contender Amy Klobuchar is banking on a strong showing in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest on Feb. 3 to jump-start her path to the party’s nomination.

The moderate U.S. senator from Minnesota, who is polling in fifth place with Iowa voters, squeezed three town halls and a 10-hour side trip to early voting state Nevada into 32 hours over the weekend as she raced to raise her profile.

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.

LA MORA (Mexico), Jan 13 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Mexico’s president pledged that those behind a massacre that killed nine members of a U.S.-Mexican family of Mormon origin will be punished and that the truth surrounding the crime will eventually come out.

In a speech before extended family members near the U.S. border, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also promised to keep relatives appraised of the investigation into the ambush carried out by cartel gunmen two months ago.

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.

TORONTO (AP) — People throughout the Canadian province of Ontario awoke Sunday to a cellphone alert warning them of an “incident” at a nuclear plant just east of Toronto — only to later be told the message was a mistake.

The message, which was transmitted throughout the nation’s most populous province, was accompanied by a shrill emergency broadcast noise. It said an unspecified event had occurred at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station. There was no abnormal release of radioactivity, it added, and people did not need to take protective action.

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.