Russian President Vladimir Putin paid a high-profile visit Thursday to Serbia, Moscow's closest ally in the Balkans. Serbia's leadership has long touted cooperation with Russia, but the alliance has frayed as Belgrade has come to see it as the main obstacle on the way to EU membership.
Why it matters: The EU insists that Serbia must peacefully resolve its longstanding differences with Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008, before it can join. Serbia has indicated that it’s ready to do so in exchange for an accession deal, but Russia, eager to keep Serbia from joining the EU, is trying to leverage strongly pro-Russian popular sentiment to gum up, and perhaps ruin, the fledgling compromise.
James Dyson, a vocal Brexiteer, will move the headquarters of his vacuum cleaner company, Dyson, from the U.K. to Singapore as the company thinks about "future-proofing" the business, The Guardian reports.
Between the lines: Dyson CEO Jim Rowan said the move has "nothing to do with Brexit," as the company has already moved most of its production to Singapore. But many companies are leaving the U.K. because of Brexit. Airbus announced it might be leaving Britain, and BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup are redirecting thousands of employees to continental Europe.
China's year-end economic data dump presented an ambiguous picture of the world's second-largest economy that analysts chose to paint in various ways by cherry picking data points.
The big picture: When taken as a whole, the data reflects an economy that could be slowing or could be slowly turning from one driven by high-flying export growth to one sustained by a consumer-focused, service sector that Chinese government officials have declared they want.
It's easy to lose sight of what truly matters in this Russia investigation. And, to be fair, only Robert Mueller truly knows. But lost in the buzz around the BuzzFeed story was a bombshell floated by Trump’s own lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
What he said: In remarks he yesterday tried to walk back as "hypothetical," Giuliani admitted that Trump's team may have been working on — and updating him on — a potential Trump Tower in Moscow all the way up to Election Day.
Chinese investigators accused scientist He Jiankui, who claimed to have created the world’s first gene-edited babies, of violating national laws and falsifying documents to carry out the procedure, reports the WSJ.
The details: It's the first time China has confirmed the controversial births and the first indication that it will punish He for the experiment. State media Xinhua News Agency reports that He "will be transferred to public security authorities" and the individuals involved in the experiment will be "severely dealt with according to the law," per the WSJ.
Researchers from Beyond Parallel, a project sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have discovered a secret ballistic missile base in North Korea ahead of a likely new U.S.-North Korea summit, NBC News reports.
Why it matters: The group estimates North Korea could have as many as 20 undisclosed missile sites. President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un agreed to hold another nuclear summit sometime in February, even though Pyongyang and Washington have not made any substantial progress on denuclearization since the first summit last summer.
Trump isn't the only senior White House official rooting for Brexit.National security adviser John Bolton talks regularly by phone with his Brexiteer friends inside Theresa May's imploding government — Cabinet ministers Liam Fox and Chris Grayling — according to a May government source.
What they're saying: "John is a strong believer in Brexit and has been encouraging the Brexiteers to keep it up," the source told me.
