Moscow assassination, Canada crisis, RFK and drone mystery
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Today, a bomb hidden in an electric scooter kills a senior Russian general in Moscow. Advocacy groups try to sway Republican senators into rejecting RFK's nomination. Justin Trudeau is facing a fresh crisis after his finance minister resigns. And what we know about the drone sightings that are plaguing the East Coast. It's Tuesday, December 17th.

This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Tara Oaks in Liverpool. And I'm Jonah Green in New York.

Ukraine says it was behind the assassination of a senior Russian general in Moscow. Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov was killed in a bomb blast earlier today, four miles from the Kremlin. The bomb had been hidden in an electric scooter.

A source in the security service of Ukraine has told Reuters Kirillov and his assistant were killed in a special operation. Kirillov was chief of Russia's nuclear, biological and chemical protection troops and was charged in absentia in Kyiv on Monday with the alleged use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine. Russia denies those accusations.

All student survivors have been reunified with their parents. Madison Police Chief Sean Barnes, after a 15-year-old girl fatally shot a fellow student and a teacher in a classroom at the Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin. She then killed herself with the handgun. The U.S. has asked Syrian militant rebel group Hayat Tahir al-Sham, also known as HTS, for help locating kidnapped American journalist Austin Tice.

Tice was captured in 2012 during a reporting trip. From Moscow, Syria's Bashar al-Assad has given his first statement since being toppled. Published on the Syrian presidency's Telegram channel, Assad details his final hours in Syria before being evacuated to Russia.

And the head of a US-based Syrian advocacy organization says a mass grave outside Damascus contains the bodies of at least 100,000 people killed by the former government of Assad. Reuters has not confirmed the allegations. A judge has ruled that Trump's conviction for falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal should stand.

Justice Juan Merchan rejecting the president-elect's argument that a recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity nullified the verdict. A 7.4 magnitude earthquake has hit the Pacific island of Vanuatu, killing at least one and injuring multiple people. The Democratic Republic of Congo has filed criminal complaints against Apple in Europe, accusing the company of using conflict minerals in its supply chain.

Some Congolese mines are run by armed groups involved in civilian massacres, mass rapes and looting, according to UN experts and human rights groups. Apple says it does not directly source primary materials and says it audits suppliers, publishes findings and funds bodies that seek to improve mineral traceability.

China is planning a record budget deficit next year as it prepares for a possible trade war with the United States. Kamal Crimmins is here with more. Sources have told Reuters that China is going to run a budget deficit of 4% of gross domestic product, up from 3% last year. The bigger deficit means the government will borrow more to fund more spending. It's a way of bolstering growth as Donald Trump returns to the White House promising hefty tariffs on Chinese goods.

Despite the strains, Beijing is going to maintain its growth target of around 5% next year. And speaking of trade tensions, we take a closer look at them in this week's Econ World podcast. We're diving into the transatlantic economy. That pod will be out tomorrow and you can catch it on Reuters.com, the Reuters app, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Canada's finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, has quit after clashing with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Freeland's resignation creates one of the biggest crises he has faced since taking power in 2015. It also leaves Trudeau without a key ally when he's on track to lose the next election to the official opposition Conservatives. Caroline Staffer is our Bureau Chief in Canada.

This is not good news for Trudeau. It looks chaotic and unplanned, especially on a day where his finance minister was due to present a budget to Parliament. The language and the way she resigned was very dramatic for Canada. Freeland posted a surprise letter on the ex-platform platform.

She said Trudeau no longer wanted her to be finance minister and had offered her a lesser position, and she thought it was in her best interest to resign.

And of course, the backdrop of this is that Trump is coming into office while threatening to tax Canadian imports. So Freeland was around during the first Trump administration and was actually the lead negotiator for the North American trade deal that is now in place. So not having her around when Trump takes office in January is a disadvantage for Trudeau. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on Capitol Hill this week.

The anti-vaccine activist and environmental lawyer is seeking to win support from key senators, who will decide whether he'll get to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

Donald Trump singing the praises of his controversial pick at a press conference on Monday. — Bobby is much, he's a very rational guy. I found him to be very rational. Nothing, you're not going to lose the polio vaccine. — Advocacy groups opposed to RFK are trying to influence a small group of Republican senators they believe could block Kennedy's nomination.

Michael Ehrman covers Big Pharma and has been speaking with these groups. A lot of these folks are healthcare advocacy groups. Some of them formed to try to preserve Obamacare during the Trump administration.

Their concern around vaccines is if the administration were to work to discourage people from getting their kids these vaccines, there could be a resurgence of a lot of infectious diseases that could cost lives in the country. How are they working to influence these senators? They're trying to influence the senators through...

advertising and also media events in those states where those senators are, particularly Republican senators who are up for election in 2026 and those that are in swing states that may be more convincible on these issues like vaccines and fluoride. RFK is a controversial figure, but he does have an interesting coalition of supporters on the left and right. For those PACs or groups backing him,

What's their sale? Well, RFK has said that he's not anti-vaccine, that he's not planning on taking people's vaccines away. He is interested in building around issues like nutrition, food safety. There's a lot of support from even people on the left who are interested in those issues, who are more interested in

in chronic disease than infectious disease, who are interested in reducing obesity in the country and who think that Kennedy's ideas can help with that. Kennedy's spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. His advocates have said opposition to his nomination stems from corporate interests.

Can you comment on the drones that are flying around? Okay, so we have a policy of not covering conspiracy theories. But when you have the next leader of the free world weighing in... The government knows what is happening. It's time to talk about the drones. And for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense. Drone sightings have plagued the East Coast over the last few weeks. Something strange is going on. For some reason, they don't want to tell the people, and they should. When asked if he had been briefed on the matter, Trump refused to say.

So what's the deal? Reporter Joseph Axe is here to fill us in on what we do know at this point. The Biden administration has said, on the one hand, that they're investigating these reports. On the other hand, they've said there's no evidence that there's any threat to public safety. There's no threat to national security. And they have spent some time trying to bat down some of the more far-fetched conspiracy theories that have been floating around out there.

One thing they've said is that they've looked already into more than 5,000 of these reports as of the weekend, and they said just about 100 of them were actually worth investigating. So they've concluded that the vast majority of these sightings are people simply mistaking manned aircraft, like either regular planes or small planes flying at night,

for something else. And they say a lot of the sightings follow regular flight paths. So they've actually tried pretty hard to kind of push back on, I think what they view as a bit of an overreaction. But there has been a lot of frustration from state and local officials who feel at the very least that the federal government needs to do more.

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For today's recommended read, a story from Nigeria. The country's anti-graft agency says it's arrested almost 800 suspects in a scheme of luring victims with offers of romance and then pressing them to hand over cash for phony crypto investments. There's a link to the story in the pod description. 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.