Highlights

Exclusive: The United States and China have started to outline commitments in principle on the stickiest issues in their trade dispute, marking the most significant progress yet toward ending a seven-month trade war, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. U.S. and Chinese negotiators are also discussing a 10-item list of shorter-term measures, largely purchases of commodities and other goods. See the areas and issues that they are expected to cover here.

SpaceX and Boeing design risks threaten new delays for U.S. space program. NASA has warned SpaceX and Boeing of design and safety concerns for their competing astronaut launch systems, according to industry sources and a new government report, threatening the U.S. bid to revive its human spaceflight program later this year.

Actor Jussie Smollett has been arrested after he was charged with lying to police when he claimed he was attacked and beaten by two masked men shouting racist and homophobic slurs, Chicago police said on Thursday on Twitter.

Russia

Putin to the United States: I'm ready for another Cuban Missile crisis if you want one. The Cuban Missile Crisis erupted in 1962 when Moscow responded to a U.S. missile deployment in Turkey by sending ballistic missiles to Cuba, sparking a standoff that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. More than five decades on, tensions are rising again over Russian fears that the United States might deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe as a landmark Cold war-era arms control treaty unravels.

Despite Putin's swagger, Russia struggles to modernize its navy. Putin calls improving the Russian navy’s combat capabilities a priority but the unfinished husks of three guided-missile frigates that have languished for three years at a Baltic shipyard show that is easier said than done.
Earmarked for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the frigates fell victim to sanctions imposed by Ukraine in 2014 after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, prompting Kiev to ban the sale of the Ukrainian-made engines needed to propel them.

World

Pope Francis opens child sex abuse conference with a promise that concrete actions against child sexual abuse by priests would come from it, countering scepticism from some survivors who said the meeting looked like a public relations exercise. “Faced with the scourge of sexual abuse committed by men of the Church against minors, I wanted to reach out to you,” Francis told the assembled bishops and heads of religious orders, asking them to “listen to the cry of the little ones who are seeking justice.”

“Muammar needed to go but democracy hasn’t worked out in Libya,” says Miftah Atluba, sitting in his cafe near the spot where the protests against Muammar Gaddafi touched off the Libyan revolution eight years ago. Atluba is not sorry the dictator has gone. Yet like many in Benghazi, who are tired after three years of street fighting that flattened whole districts, the 45-year-old thinks it’s time to return to the old way of running things.

Unless Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May can get a Brexit deal approved by the UK parliament, then she will have to decide whether to delay Brexit or thrust the world’s fifth largest economy into chaos by leaving without a deal on March 29. When asked what would happen next week, finance minister Philip Hammond said: “There may be an opportunity to bring a vote back to the House of Commons - there may be an opportunity, but that will depend on the progress that is made in the next few days.”

Two @Reuters journalists have been imprisoned in Myanmar for 437 days. See full coverage: https://reut.rs/2E32VSN

3:17 AM - 21 Feb 2019