Trudeau, a divided House, Ukraine and the Golden Globes
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Today, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appears to be on the way out. Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries looks to play an outsized role in a divided house. Ukraine launches a fresh attack in Russia's Kursk, while Baltic Sea nations guard against suspected underwater sabotage. And the Brutalist and Emilia Perez win top honors at the Golden Globes. ♪

It's Monday, January 6th. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Carmel Crimmins in Dublin. Carla only has the best tech. Can't connect to network. But she didn't have the best internet. So she got Cox Multigig Spades to power all her...

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The Prime Minister has lost the confidence of Canadians, lost the confidence of many of his MPs. So will the Prime Minister acknowledge he has failed? He has to quit. Angry exchanges in Canada's Parliament just before Christmas, after Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned. Now a source has told Reuters that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is increasingly likely to step down. But they said he has not yet made a final decision.

The source spoke to Reuters after the Globe and Mail newspaper reported that Trudeau was expected to announce as early as today that he would quit. The Prime Minister's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Polls show Trudeau's Liberal Party would lose heavily to the official opposition Conservatives in an election that must be held by late October.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Seoul.

His visit comes as impeached President Yoon Suk-yool faces arrest. South Korean investigators will seek an extension of the arrest warrant after they failed to serve it last week when security service guards formed a human chain to prevent access to Yoon. Austria could be close to getting a government led by the far-right Freedom Party after efforts to form a centrist government collapsed. Far-right leader Herbert Kickl is set to meet the Austrian president today to discuss forming a government.

A fierce winter storm has brought snow, ice and freezing temperatures to a broad swathe of the US, with some 60 million people across more than a dozen states under weather warnings. The storm is now barrelling towards the mid-Atlantic states, where Washington DC is bracing for heavy snow and bitter cold. And staying in the capital, Congress is set to meet today to formally certify Donald Trump's election as president.

It comes four years to the day when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in a failed attempt to block the certification of his 2020 loss. And to the Golden Globes, where The Brutalist, a story of a Holocaust survivor who chases the American dream, landed the Best Movie Drama Award. And musical thriller Amelia Perez took home the Best Drama Film Actor and Best Director prizes. Hacks and Shogun won the top TV honors.

You can check out all the Hollywood glam of the globes on Reuters.com. And for more on the work of Reuters photographers, listen to our weekend episode. We take a look at some of the top Reuters images from last year and the stories behind them. A link to that show is in the description of today's pod. US stocks face their first major test of the year this week with the December jobs report out on Friday. Investors are counting on the numbers showing a steady economy.

Anything that suggests things are weakening could damage prospects for a third straight standout year for stocks. The benchmark S&P closed up last year with a 23% rise. But you know what did even better? Gold. Bullion prices rose 27% last year. A rally we'll be examining in closer detail in an upcoming episode of Reuters Econ World. Stay tuned for details on that.

Republican Mike Johnson was re-elected House Speaker on Friday, but it was a squeaker. He won only after two Republican opponents switched their votes to support him. It illustrates just how fragile the new Republican majority is. The party controls the chamber by 219 seats to 215. That means the top Democrat in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, could wield more power than your average minority leader.

Richard Callen covers Congress. Rich, what gives Jeffries leverage here? What gives Hakeem Jeffries leverage going into this brand new Congress is not so much his own rank-and-file members, but the chaos and divisions among House Republicans. Any defections by House Republicans, any revolts—and there were plenty of those over the last two years—

means that Jeffries has some power to make up the difference so that the House Republican leadership, led by Speaker Johnson, can carry through and win some legislation. But it takes some bipartisan cooperation. So in that scenario, a few Republicans could revolt and Johnson comes to Jeffries asking for Democrats' support for legislation, which opens up room for negotiations. That's happened a few times in the past few years, right?

It's happened more than a dozen times over the last few years. It happened on multiple occasions on bills to fund the government. And so if a couple, even just two or three of those right-wing House Republicans peel off and don't support leadership, that's Jeffrey's sweet spot. That's where he can step in, maybe negotiate some changes to a bill and provide the votes that are needed

Ukraine has launched a fresh attack in the Kursk region, in western Russia, where its forces made a surprise incursion last August. Since then, Russia has been trying to push Ukrainian forces out. Mike Collett-White is our editor-at-large for The Ukraine War and has the latest.

So in the last few days, Ukrainian forces have launched what Russian military bloggers are calling quite major attacks against Russian forces in this pocket of the Kursk region, where Ukraine has been making some sort of territorial gains since last August. The narrative over the previous few months had been that Russia was retaking some of that lost territory. And now Ukraine has gone back on the offensive.

Is the objective here to send a signal to Washington? Yes, we think that there's no coincidence in what's happening here. So the overall situation in the war in recent months has been that Russian forces have been making steady but slow gains across the Eastern Front. And this obviously is putting Ukraine on the back foot. What President Volodymyr Zelensky desperately wants to do is to change the narrative in order to

have a bargaining chip if and when any peace negotiations do happen, with an eye on the inauguration of President Donald Trump in the United States, who has promised to end this war quickly, although we still don't know how.

Is Ukraine likely to achieve that aim? Well, I think Kursk is going to help it. It gives it something, although the bigger picture is less positive for Kiev. And actually, today, the Russians claimed quite a large town in the east of Ukraine called Kurokhovo, which they've been trying to take for several months, which really underlines how Kiev is not winning this war. In fact, you could argue is losing the war.

And sticking with Europe, a court in Finland has denied the release of an oil tanker suspected of damaging an undersea power line and four data cables in the Baltic Sea. The vessel, carrying Russian oil, was seized on Christmas Day. It's one of several incidents of power cables, telecom lines and gas pipelines being damaged in the Baltic Sea since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. NATO says it will boost its presence in the region as a result.

Essie Lato is in Helsinki and has been covering the story.

This was the first time that the authorities were able to actually go in, stop the ship. Usually the ships sail on international waters, but when Finland stopped it and the authorities were able to determine that the ship was dragging its anchor and eventually they saw that one of the anchors were missing, they asked the ship to move to Finnish regional waters. And when that was done, the authorities actually went on board and took off the ship and took over the command bridge.

And does this indicate a change of approach to these incidents? This is quite unusual. In the previous cases, this hasn't happened. So to me, where the discussion is in Finland and elsewhere in the region, in the Baltic

Baltic Sea countries is how to stop these kinds of incidents. And the lawyer who represents the shipping company that owns the oil tanker has said that it was hijacked on international waters and it was forced to finish waters. So clearly there's some kind of discussion going on about what can be done if these incidents keep happening. And the Baltic Sea nations have been very alert and

prepared for subsea power links or telecommunications cables being broken and trying to kind of catch whoever might be behind the breakage.

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And today's recommended read: When the deadly Grenfell Tower blaze in London led to revelations that high-rise public housing across the UK was wrapped in flammable cladding, the government vowed the building contractors responsible would pay. Seven years on, contractors who fitted those cladding panels that didn't meet fire safety standards have largely escaped financial liability. A link to the story is in the pod description.

And for more on any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show.