A look ahead at the key events leading the news agenda next week, from the team at Foresight News. Delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
LEADING THE WEEK
Fresh from his first visit to the southern border in El Paso on Sunday (January 8), President Joe Biden pays a two-day visit to Mexico City for the North American Leaders’ Summit with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday (January 10). While the summit’s official agenda includes climate change, competitiveness, health, and diversity and inclusion, the main focus is likely to be on talks between Biden and AMLO on migration following yesterday’s announcement on new immigration pathways. The new rules will allow tens of thousands of humanitarian refugees from Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela, while those who enter illegally can be sent back to Mexico under the still-live and now expanded Title 42 restrictions, which the Supreme Court has kept in place amid concerns from border states about their preparedness for an expected flood of migrants when the Trump/pandemic-era policy is lifted.
While Biden tries to counter the consistent criticism over his handling of the border and nudge the congressional GOP to work on a bipartisan policy to do more, House Republicans may still find themselves too distracted with the first job on their to-do list to mount much of a counter-narrative. Representatives have now failed to elect a Speaker in 11 ballots. Voting continues today, but if the stalemate isn’t resolved then we’ll see more of the same next week as the GOP factions try to push their way through – they’ve still got a long way to go to surpass the 133-round record set in 1855, which took two months. If negotiations succeed and we do get a Speaker by the end of the day, lawmakers can finally be sworn in (spare a thought for those who’ve already worn their carefully-selected swearing-in outfit) and next week will be a matter of dealing with the fallout, with the MAGA wing of the party anxious to get started on promised investigations into Biden and his family.
Harvey Weinstein is sentenced in a Los Angeles court room on Monday (January 9) after being convicted on December 19 of one count of rape and two counts relating to sexual assault. This is the second trial to end with a guilty verdict for the disgraced Hollywood executive, who is already serving a 23-year-sentence in New York for rape and sexual assault. Weinstein’s fall from grace stemmed from the #MeToo movement, with over 80 women coming out with sexual assault claims against him since the New York Times first published its article in 2017.
LOOKING ABROAD
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida kicks off a tour that will see him meet nearly all of the G7 leaders to mark Japan’s presidency of the grouping this year. Kishida starts in Paris on Monday (January 9), holding talks with French President Emmanuel Macron, before meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome (Tuesday), UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London (Wednesday), and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa (Thursday). The trip ends with a White House summit with Joe Biden on Friday (January 13), which will include discussions on North Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, and a ‘free and open’ Indo-Pacific. Kishida’s visit coincides with the end of a regional trip by Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi, who caps a Latin American tour with a stop in New York to chair a UN Security Council ministerial meeting on the rule of law on Thursday (January 12).
Though Prince Harry is firmly on this side of the pond, the media coverage of his sensational new memoir, Spare, has driven the British press into a frenzy which will continue well into next week, starting with the fallout from two prime-time interviews on Sunday night, when the Duke sits down with 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper and ITV’s Tom Bradby. While the biggest bombshells from the book have already been covered thanks to a Guardian leak and an early on-sale in Spain, media will be parsing the prince’s interview responses for new angles ahead of the actual publication on Tuesday (January 10) – teasers from CBS have already seen Harry accuse the royal family of briefing against him and muse on whether he was bigoted before meeting Meghan Markle. And while the English version won’t provide any new material, expect the story to stay in the headlines as more people get their hands on a copy and the clamor for a hint of a reaction from Buckingham Palace continues.