Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a speech to the National Governors Association Saturday that governors should be vigilant in their business interactions with China, warning that they're each being methodically analyzed and lobbied by the Communist Party, Politico reports.
Why it matters: Pompeo, who has helped shape the Trump administration's hawkish stance toward China, was seeking to highlight how competition with Beijing is not just a federal issue.
Two American service members were killed and six others wounded in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday in a firefight, the U.S. military said in a statement to news outlets including Axios.
The latest: The two soldiers killed were named by the Defense Department Sunday as Sgt. Javier Jaguar Gutierrez, 28, and Sgt. Antonio Rey Rodriguez, 28. They were both posthumously promoted.
Ireland's three most popular parties — Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin — each received around 22% of the vote in Saturday's parliamentary elections, according to exit polling reported by AP.
Why it matters: Since no party is projected to win enough seats to govern, someone will likely have to form a coalition.
A soldier killed at least 26 people and wounded 52 others in a shooting at a popular shopping mall in northeastern Thailand before being killed inside the building, the country's prime minister told a news conference Sunday, per Channel News Asia.
What else we know: Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha told reporters the soldier's 17-hour shooting spree began Saturday over a "debt dispute," AFP reports.
China's plan to dominate the 21st century hangs in the balance as the deadly coronavirus outbreak spreads.
The big picture: Coronavirus is stress-testing Chinese President Xi Jinping's industrial and economic vision for the future as factories, supply chains and companies navigate the crisis.
As Syrian troops push into opposition-held towns and villages in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, roughly 600,000 civilians have evacuated their homes, fleeing to the Turkish border, The Washington Post reports.
Why it matters: This latest emigration could quickly become one of the "worst humanitarian crisis" since the war started in 2011, the Post writes. Already, it is among the biggest single population dislocations throughout the nine-year war, a United Nations spokesperson told the Post.
A 60-year-old U.S. citizen died from the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China on Thursday — making it the first known American death from the illness, according to a State Department spokesperson.
The state of play: The U.S. government has been proactively trying to evacuateU.S. citizens from China, as the coronavirus death toll has grown to more than 720. As of Friday evening, 34,546 cases of the respiratory illness have been confirmed in mainland China.
