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LONDON (Reuters) – Prime Minister Theresa May said on Monday she would bring her Brexit deal back to parliament for a mid-January vote, pledging to get assurances from the European Union before then to break a deadlock over Britain’s fraught efforts to quit the bloc.

With just over 100 days until Britain is due to leave the EU, May faced accusations from some lawmakers that she was trying to force a deeply divided parliament into backing her deal by running the clock down to exit day.

A mid-January vote could oblige lawmakers to make a decision between her deal or leaving without one on March 29, a nightmare scenario for many businesses.

May is pressing on with her deal to leave the EU, rejecting calls for a second referendum or to test support for different Brexit options in parliament, despite hardening opposition to the agreement to maintain close ties.

May said parliament would debate the deal in January, before a vote in the week beginning Jan. 14 – more than a month after an original Dec. 11 vote which she canceled after admitting she faced a significant defeat.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Johnson & Johnson on Monday scrambled to contain fallout from a Reuters report that the healthcare conglomerate knew for decades that cancer-causing asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder, taking out full-page newspaper ads defending its product and practices, and readying its chief executive for his first television interview since investors erased tens of billions of dollars from the company’s market value.

J&J shares fell nearly 3 percent Monday, closing at $129.14 in New York Stock Exchange trading. That drop was on top of the 10 percent plunge that wiped out about $40 billion of the company’s market capitalization following the Reuters report Friday. J&J also announced Monday that it would be repurchasing up to $5 billion of its common stock.

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Theresa May is pressing on with her deal to leave the European Union, her spokesman said on Monday, rejecting calls for a second referendum or to test support for different Brexit options in parliament.

After a tumultuous week in which she survived a confidence vote and sought last-minute changes to a Brexit agreement reached with Brussels last month, May faces deadlock over her deal in the British parliament.

With the EU offering little in the way of concessions to win over lawmakers, an increasing number of politicians are calling for a second referendum – something some of her ministers say could be avoided if the government tested Brexit scenarios in parliamentary votes.

Parliament is deeply divided, with factions pressing for different options for future ties, exiting without a deal or remaining in the EU.

May and her ministers have repeatedly ruled out a replay of the referendum, saying it would deepen rifts and betray voters who backed Brexit by 52 percent to 48 percent in 2016.

That increases the risk of Britain leaving without a deal on March 29, a scenario some businesses fear would be catastrophic for the world’s fifth largest economy.

May will use a statement in parliament on Monday to reject the idea of a second referendum and to again set out that her agreement to keep close economic ties with the EU after Brexit is the only one on offer.

May’s spokesman said on Monday parliament’s vote on the Brexit deal will be in January.

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey may start a new military operation in Syria at any moment, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday, adding that U.S. President Donald Trump had given a positive response to Turkey’s plans for an operation east of the Euphrates.

Erdogan made the comments during a speech in the central province of Konya. Last week he said Turkish forces would launch a new cross-border operation against the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, considered a terrorist organization by Ankara, to the east of the Euphrates river in northern Syria.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has welcomed Chinese concessions since the two declared a trade war truce in early December, but trade experts and people familiar with negotiations say Beijing needs to do far more to meet U.S. demands for long-term change in how China does business.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, agreed on Dec. 1 in Buenos Aires to stop escalating tit-for-tat tariffs that have disrupted the flow of hundreds of billions of dollars of goods between the world’s two biggest economies.

Since then, Beijing has resumed buying U.S. soybeans, the single largest agricultural export between the two countries. China has also cut tariffs on imports of cars from the United States, dialed back on an industrial development plan known as “Made in China 2025,” and told its state refiners to buy more U.S. oil.

Trump took those as signs that “China wants to make a big and very comprehensive deal.”

But they only start to bring Beijing and Washington back to their pre-trade-war status quo, experts said, and do little to resolve core U.S. demands for structural changes in China to end policies that subsidize large state-owned enterprises and effectively force the transfer of American technology to Chinese firms.

“I think these are goodwill gestures, but they don’t go beyond offers that were on the table before Trump launched his trade war,” said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow and trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“Much more will have to be offered by China to reach an interim agreement in March 2019,” Hufbauer said, adding that structural changes would be far harder to agree on, much less achieve, by then.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The lead attorney for the group of Apple Inc device assemblers seeking at least $9 billion in damages from Qualcomm Inc said on Sunday the contract manufacturers are not in settlement talks with the mobile chip supplier and are “gearing up and heading toward the trial” in April.
The group of contract manufacturers – which includes Foxconn parent Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, Pegatron Corp, Wistron Corp and Compal Electronics Inc – became embroiled in the dispute between Apple and Qualcomm last year.

In the supply chain for electronics, contract manufacturers buy Qualcomm chips and pay royalties when they build phones, and are in turn reimbursed by companies like Apple. Qualcomm sued the group last year, alleging they had stopped paying royalties related to Apple products, and Apple joined their defense.

The contract manufacturers have since filed claims of their own against Qualcomm, alleging the San Diego company’s practice of charging money for chips but then also asking for a cut of the adjusted selling price of a mobile phone as a patent royalty payment constitutes an anticompetitive business practice.

They are seeking $9 billion in damages from Qualcomm for royalties they allege were illegal. That figure could triple if the manufacturers succeed on their antitrust claims.

Ted Boutrous, a high-profile partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP who is representing the contract manufacturers, told Reuters that statements from Qualcomm executives suggesting there were meaningful settlement talks with the contract manufacturers were “false.”

BEIJING (Reuters) – China will suspend additional tariffs on U.S.-made vehicles and auto parts for three months starting Jan. 1, 2019, the country’s finance ministry said on Friday, following a truce in a trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

The Ministry of Finance, in a statement on its website, also said it hopes China and the United States can speed up negotiations to remove all additional tariffs on each other’s goods.

SHANGHAI/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc, facing a court ban in China on some of its iPhone models over alleged infringement of Qualcomm Inc patents, said on Friday it will push software updates to users in a bid to resolve potential issues.

Apple will carry out the software updates at the start of next week “to address any possible concern about our compliance with the order”, the firm said in a statement sent to Reuters.

Earlier this week, Qualcomm said a Chinese court had ordered a ban on sales of some older iPhone models for violating two of its patents, though intellectual property lawyers said the ban would likely take time to enforce.

“Based on the iPhone models we offer today in China, we believe we are in compliance,” Apple said.“Early next week we will deliver a software update for iPhone users in China addressing the minor functionality of the two patents at issue in the case.”

The case, brought by Qualcomm, is part of a global patent dispute between the two U.S. companies that includes dozens of lawsuits. It creates uncertainty over Apple’s business in one of its biggest markets at a time when concerns over waning demand for new iPhones are battering its shares.

LONDON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Theresa May’s attempt to win assurances from the European Union on her Brexit deal was cast by opponents on Friday as a humiliating failure that did nothing to ease the parliamentary deadlock over Britain’s departure from the bloc.

With British politics in crisis, the ultimate outcome of Brexit remains unclear, with possible outcomes ranging from a disorderly Brexit with no deal to another referendum on EU membership.

May, who on Wednesday survived a plot in her party to oust her, asked EU leaders at a summit in Brussels for political and legal assurances that she said could convince the British parliament to approve her deal.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron ruled out any reopening of last month’s treaty aimed at ensuring a smooth exit on March 29, though leaders assured her that it should not bind Britain forever to EU rules.

“It seems that the prime minister has failed in her bid to deliver meaningful changes to her Brexit deal,” the opposition Labour Party’s Brexit spokesman, Keir Starmer, said.

“We cannot go on like this. The prime minister should reinstate the vote on her deal next week and let Parliament take back control,” he said.